What They Found

http://newhomeeconomics.wordpress.com/
http://www.snarkmarket.com/
http://www.kottke.org/
http://www.amazon.com/Lifting-Depression-Neuroscientists-Hands-Activating/dp/0465037720/

My first link, NewHomeEconomics, is Jennifer Rensenbrink’s log of her experiments in …finding the intersection where saving money and reducing my carbon footprint meet. I originally found her site as a part of the “new liberal arts” education discussion on Snarkmarket and similar to Jason Kottke’s site about the Liberal Arts 2.0, my favorite and most frequently checked site by several orders of magnitude.

The final selling point that led me to post here came with her latest entry, where she experiments with preparing and roasting a whole chicken, using the bones to make broth, and experimenting with fermentation in the form of sourdough starters and gingerbeer (I just learned to quarter and prepare my first whole chicken, have the bones frozen to try making broth, and had saved the link to the same sourdough starter tutorial she used). I’ve been interested for a while in reviving some of the lost arts and skills that our grandparents and ancestors used as part of their daily lives, skills which we have lost to convenience and mass production and industrialization, and which, quite possibly, we might have to use in the semi-near future.  At the very least, I’m interested in skills that connect us more intimately with our own lives, food, communities, environment, etc.  Call me a child of the Globalization/Industrialization backlash, a supporter of local, sustainable food systems, an interested observer of  systems thinking/holistic thinking/ecological design/permaculture, and a supporter of re-skilling ourselves to take ownership of and responsibility for our existence on this planet.  Call me conflicted and more talk than action, but at least I’m trying.

Don’t take me for an overly nostalgic “life was so much better back then” type. It just seems that all that “hard work” we’ve been replacing with ingenuity and machines and technology was more beneficial to us than we thought.  I’ve been meaning to read Kelly Lambert’s Lifting Depression: A Neuroscientist’s Hands-On Approach to Activating Your Brain’s Healing Power.  The gist that I’ve picked up is that our brain’s pleasure center is wired closely with areas controlling motor skills and planning/anticipation/expectation, and that by using our brains and body to set up and plan for constructive motor skill tasks, and then complete them, we fire and strengthen the pleasure centers in our brain, kind of an intrinsic “job well done, here’s your cookie” scenario.  This could explain the correlation between the ever-rising rates of depression and our increasingly sedentary, computer/tv bound, convenience first lifestyles. Ergo,  mowing the yard or cleaning your room or any of the many dreaded tasks from Dad’s school of “It Builds Character” inflicted on a typical young adult actually do more to make them happy or mentally satisfied in the long run than the “I want my child to have all the things that I didn’t have when I was growing up” school.  Guess I should take that as my cue to get off my ass and go feed the compost bin.

Welcome to my blog, a protean receptacle for whatever interests me, likely related to topics mentioned above. Take it as you will, hope you enjoy.

The Strategy of Ecosystem Development

This paper by Howard T. Eugene P. Odum, an ecologist and founding father of ecosystem ecology (itself based on General Systems Theory), looks at the principles of succession in an ecosystem, comparing qualities of “young”, uncrowded, growth-selective ecosystems and “mature”, crowded, equilibrated, quality-selective ecosystems, and the shifting forces that maintain a balance between the two in an effort to resolve conflicts with nature.  The paper is a bit technical, but the last paragraph is surprisingly salient, especially given the date of publication (1969).

“It goes without saying that the tabular model for ecosystem development which I have presented here has many parallels in the development of human society itself. In the pioneer society, as in the pioneer ecosystem, high birth rates, rapid growth, high economic profits, and exploitation of accesible and unused resources are advantageous, but, as the saturation level is approached, these drives must be shifted to considerations of symbiosis (that is, civil rights, law and order, education, and culture), birth control, and the recycling of resources.  A balance between youth and maturity in the socio-environmental system is, therefore, the really basic goal that must be achieved if man as a species is to successfully pass through the present rapid-growth stage, to which he is clearly well adapted, to the ultimate equilibrium-density stage, of which he as yet shows little understanding and to which he now shows little tendency to adapt. “

Shame on me for forgetting my source (wikipedia, I believe).

Really cool wall clocks from bike parts and reclaimed fabric.  To the uninitiated, Etsy is a marketplace for people to sell their homemade crafts, jewelry, clothing, art, you name it.  Tons of really cool original stuff, most of it fairly inexpensive.  Stumbled on this site by way of greenupgrader, which has some pretty clever examples of green design and ideas for greener living.  The vertical garden built from reclaimed gutters is a particularly nifty idea, good for maximizing growing potential on that south-facing sun-exposed wall or balcony.