4/26 • The Philosophy of Dirt

Readings for this class:
1. Guidelines for Composting
2. "Soil - Our Financial Institution" by Craig Mackintosh
3. Vandana Shiva, Lecture "Soil Not Oil" (below)

Wed 4/20 • Food, Sustainability & Health

For this class we will be discussion food and health. So bring your questions and thoughts about how to eat in ways which are healthy and sustainable. We're gonna share recipes and tips on how to eat a low-carbon, cheap, healthy meal. I'll bring my partner's famous coconut lentil soup.

7 Words & 7 Rules for Eating

Michael Pollan says everything he's learned about food and health can be summed up in seven words: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

Probably the first two words are most important. "Eat food" means to eat real food -- vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and, yes, fish and meat -- and to avoid what Pollan calls "edible food-like substances."

Here's how:

1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says.
2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.
3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.
4. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says.
5. It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says. "Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'"
6. Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love. "Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?" Pollan asks.
7. Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.

SOME RESOURCES TO HELP YOU THINK ABOUT FOOD

1. Michael Pollen, "How Change is going to Come in the Food System"
2. And his interesting answers to some basic questions
2. Some recommended documentaries

4/19 • Theory and Practice of Sustainable Architecture

Readings for class on Tues 4/19

1. Justin Good, "What is Beauty? Or, On the Aesthetics of Wind Farms"
2. Transition Culture Interview with Christopher Alexander

Other recommended resources

3. Alexander's website: patternlanguage.com
4. A Conversation with Christopher Alexander
5. A New co-housing project in CT
6. Hans' Lohse's Unfolding Wholeness Haus
7. Website for WWOOF
8. An article about One way of Living off the Grid
9. Tiny 'Bioarchitecture'
10. Blue Forest Tree Houses
11. 450 sq. ft. houses
12. 250 sq. ft. house on top of a mountain

13. Auroville, a famous sustainable community in India
14. Michael Reynolds' earthships
15. Earthship tour
16. Portraits of some eco-villages

16. The Theory of Wholeness for Beginners, By J. Good (below)

§1. WHAT DISAGREEMENTS ABOUT WIND FARM AESTHETICS ARE ABOUT. 

Despite the beauty of their ecological rationality, large-scale wind farms still jar many visual sensibilities with their industrial look. The truth contained in that nimby response is that industrial infrastructure, and often modernist architectural icons, tends to have a fragmenting effect on the unity of natural landscapes and the systems which unfold that unity or wholeness in stable patterns following multiple patterns of least resistance through time. Everyone is in perceptual agreement: fragmentation is objectively ugly. Vice versa, wholeness is objectively beautiful. Life is objectively beautiful.

§2. A NEW CONCEPT OF BEAUTY: THE THEORY OF WHOLENESS. 

Construed ecologically, from the standpoint of the holistic science of natural, evolving systems, the perception of beauty is the perception of wholeness. Wholeness is an objective property of nature and natural systems. This is a very deep objective quality of a place, a work of art, an organism,that affects us deeply. For a place, it is a sense of belonging, a sense that everything feels right, natural, stable, alive – most especially a feeling of life, and a feeling of being yourself. The architect/complexity scientist Christopher Alexander has developed a comprehensive theory of wholeness in his revolutionary study, The Nature of Order. The following is an encapsulation of his theory as it pertains specifically to the Meaning of Beauty.

§3. OBJECTIVE MEASUREMENT OF BEAUTY AS WHOLENESS. 

The new scientific/mystical understanding of beauty, as the cognizing of wholeness, can be explained in three, related ways. 

To be beautiful is: 

1. To be a coherent system 

(to exhibit a high degree of relatedness.) 

2. To exhibit living structure. 

(to come to exist through a continuous process of unfolding.) 

3. To manifest the (transpersonal) Self, to be “personal”.

§4. FIRST ASPECT: WHOLENESS AS COHERENCE. 

In a system which is good: (a) any identifiable subsystems would be in good condition, and (b) any larger systems which the system is a part of would be in good condition. That is, a system is good if its activity helps both the systems around it and those which it contains. Reciprocally, a good system is helped by the systems it contains and the larger systems which contain it. Wholeness is about the harmonizing of beings within a region of space/time. Such patterns of interaction are perceived as beautiful by us. The beauty is not in our eye, it is in the pattern. An example of a coherent system: a healthy ecosystem.

"When we speak of "healthy" eco-systems, we mean stable eco-systems: that is, both tending toward diversity and not subject to cataclysmic drops in diversity. Such conditions, also called balanced, create relationships--ever more intricate relationships-- that increasingly locate the inorganic elements necessary to life in cycles that make those inorganic elements increasingly available to life. The more extensive these relationships, the more consistently available the nutrient-elements will be to the life forms within those relationships. Expanding diversity of life forms is, relatively speaking, a low entropy enterprise. The more diverse the forms of life, the more matter and energy are kept available for use, or "work," and the less they are lost to use or work through either irretrievable dissipation or unresolvable mixing." - Abby Rockefeller

§5. SECOND ASPECT: WHOLENESS AS LIVELINESS. To exhibit wholeness is to exhibit living structure. The wholeness of a structure is the degree of life it has. 

What determines degree of life? 

(a) The difference between living and non-living form has to do with the process through which the form came to be. What kind of process? To have a living geometry is to come to exist through a continuous process of unfolding. One can see, just by looking, that something with living form came to be by way of a process of unfolding, where each step of the growing grew out of the prior steps, and where each development enhanced the structure (the wholeness) that already existed. What lacks living form has the look of something that was put together. Its structure did not unfold out of itself. (e.g. Frankenstein) Because something that is beautiful is alive, it makes one feel alive – feel deeply human. Industrially-produced structure seldom has this quality of being alive, and so of creating a sense of wholeness. 

(b) Biological versus geometrical concept of Life. This theory implies a broad concept of life: The narrow biological concept of life is: To be alive is to be a kind of Mechanism (Reactive, constructed, reducible) - Life as mechanical structure explicable in terms of chemistry, physics and: either a) god, or b) natural selection –organized chance, and/or c) symbiosis. Machine behavior which is reactive (vs. active) and constructed (vs. self-generated). A broader systems theory concept of life is found in General Systems Theory - Life as any self-organizing structure. A still broader concept is the geometrical/spatial concept of life: To be alive is to exhibit a certain kind of geometrical structure. Life is a metaphysical process intrinsic to space/time, not something that begins with biology, but which reaches a new and higher level of intensity and harmonization with biological systems. 

(c) The specific geometry of Life. Degree of life in a structure has to do with the ways it embodies the geometrical properties of stable natural systems. 

There are fifteen properties universally found in stable, natural processes. In fact, they are actually geometrical properties of reality found in any complex system: 

1. LEVELS OF SCALE, 2. STRONG CENTERS, 3. BOUNDARIES, 4. ALTERNATING REPETITION, 5. POSITIVE SPACE, 6. GOOD SHAPE, 7. LOCAL SYMMETRIES, 8. DEEP INTERLOCK AND AMBIGUITY, 9. CONTRAST, 10. GRADIENTS, II. ROUGHNESS, 12. ECHOES, 13. THE VOID, 14. SIMPLICITY AND INNER CALM, 15. NON-SEPARATENESS.

§6. THIRD ASPECT: WHOLENESS AS BEING FILLED WITH SELF. 

To be beautiful is to manifest the (transpersonal) Self. Not ‘Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder’ but rather ‘The Eye of the Beholder is in (is an extension of) the Beauty’. Beauty does not exist because there is a consciousness there to perceive it. The consciousness is an extension of the Beauty which already exists. Consciousness is created by the Beauty in order for the geometry underlying the Beauty to be fully actualized. At the level of physical nature, every being (e.g. an electron, planet, cat, galaxy) is attracted to every other by the force of gravitation. This mysterious ability of two entities to exert an instantaneous force on each other, even if they are billions of light years away from each other, is still unexplained by cosmology and fundamental physics. At a different dimension of reality, every point of space/time embodies a degree of consciousness, of selfness as an intrinsic feature of the universe. And like the law of gravitation, there is a cosmological law of the integration of awareness: every point or ‘center’ of space/time has an instantaneous impulse to bond with every other center, to attain a more comprehensive, deeper level of cosmological awareness. Beauty is the perception of a moment of integration of awareness of centers of space/time.

"The environment is good, or bad, according to the degree that its thousands and thousands of centers are pictures of the self, what we might call ‘beings.” The practical matters of fire, cost, family structure, wall construction, structural efficiency, ecology, solar energy, wind, water, pedestrian traffic – all these have their place. Function must be at the core of everything. But what governs the life of the buildings is not to be found in these matters, alone, but in a single question, always built on the foundation of these matters, but elevating them to a different level of understanding: To what extent is every building, and the whole building, and every garden, and the whole street, all made of beings?... Every center in the matter of the universe starts this tunneling towards the I-stuff. And the stronger the center is, the bigger the tunnel, the stronger the connection to the I. That means, that every beautiful object, to the extent it has the structure which I have described, also begins to open the door towards the I-stuff or the self." 
                                     – Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order

Rethinking Property, Ownership and the Land

"We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." 
                          - Aldo Leopold

Concepts:

(A) Two kinds of property - 1) the Commons (air, water, land, electromagnetic spectrum, minerals, language, culture, etc.) and 2) Private Property (created by human labor)

(B) Social Dividend - Compensation for an individual's loss of her portion of the Commons. (related to Guaranteed Basic Income)

(C) Ownership vs Trusteeship of Land

"Whatever an individual creates as a result of labor applied to land-the harvest from a garden, the home built of wood from the forest, the sweater knitted from spun wool-is private property and may rightfully be traded as commodities. However, the land itself and its resources, which are Earth-given and of limited supply, should be held in trusteeship and their use allocated on a limited basis for present and future generations. When an individual is allowed private ownership of such a limited resource, that individual has an unfair economic advantage. The scarcity of arable land and a growing demand for it result in an increase in the value of the land through no effort on the part of the landowner. The potential for speculative gain inherent in the present system of private land ownership places tremendous pressure on the landowner to maximize the dollar value of the land by developing it." - Bob Swann

(D) Community Land Trust - 

"...A Community Land Trust is a not-for-profit organization with membership open to any resident of the geographical region or bioregion where it is located. The purpose of a CLT is to create a democratic institution to hold land and to retain the use-value of the land for the benefit of the community. The effect of a CLT is to provide affordable access to land for housing, farming, small businesses, and civic projects. This effect can be achieved when a significant portion of the land in an area is held by a CLT.

4/14 The Commons, Theory of Private Property and the Land Trust Model

Dear class, due to unforeseen circumstances, class will be cancelled tomorrow, Tues. April 12th. 

For Thursday the 14th, please read these two short papers 

and watch the film clip below

1. Peter Barnes, "A Brief History of How We Lost the Commons"

2. Bob Swan and Susan Witt, "Land: Challenge and Opportunity"

“Soil is ours. Water is ours. Ours are these forests. Our forefathers raised them. It’s we who must protect them.” A song from the Chipko Movement in India

Terra nullius (/ˈtɛrə nʌˈlaɪ.əs/, plural terrae nullius) is a Latin expression deriving from Roman law meaning "nobody's land",^[1] which is used in international law to describe territory which has never been subject to the sovereignty of any state, or over which any prior sovereign has expressly or implicitly relinquished sovereignty.

The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately.

4/6 • Water and Wasting Water

Readings for this class

1. John Stauber, Excerpt from "Toxic Sludge is Good for You"
2. The Sanctuary Eco-temple Composting Toilet
3. "California Drought Tests History of Endless Growth"

Additional recommended links

4. Good, Carmany and Ruiz, "Gently Down the Stream: To Sewer or Not to Sewer in Chester"
5. News from my bid for First Selectman in Chester in 2007.
6. Abby Rockefeller, "Sewers, Sewage Treatment, Sludge: Damage Without End"
7. Sandra Postel, "Water: Adapting to a New Normal"
8. Abby Rockefeller, "Civilization & Sludge: Notes on the History of the Management of Human Excreta"

9. Eco-temple Update

The 11th Round: A Parable of Usury (Interest) by Bernard Leitaer

Once upon a time, in a small village in the Outback, people used barter for all their transactions. On every market day, people walked around with chickens, eggs, hams, and breads, and engaged in prolonged negotiations among themselves to exchange what they needed. At key periods of the year, like harvests or whenever someone’s barn needed big repairs after a storm, people recalled the tradition of helping each other out that they had brought from the old country. They knew that if they had a problem someday, others would aid them in return.

One market day, a stranger with shiny black shoes and an elegant white hat came by and observed the whole process with a sardonic smile. When he saw one farmer running around to corral the six chickens he wanted to exchange for a big ham, he could not refrain from laughing. “Poor people,” he said, “so primitive.” The farmer’s wife overheard him and challenged the stranger, “Do you think you can do a better job handling chickens?” “Chickens, no,” responded the stranger, “But there is a much better way to eliminate all that hassle.” “Oh yes, how so?” asked the woman. “See that tree there?” the stranger replied. ” Well, I will go wait there for one of you to bring me one large cowhide. Then have every family visit me. I’ll explain the better way.”

And so it happened. He took the cowhide, and cut perfect leather rounds in it, and put an elaborate and graceful little stamp on each round. Then he gave to each family 10 rounds, and explained that each represented the value of one chicken. “Now you can trade and bargain with the rounds instead of the unwieldy chickens,” he explained.

It made sense. Everybody was impressed with the man with the shiny shoes and inspiring hat.

“Oh, by the way,” he added after every family had received their 10 rounds, “in a year’s time, I will come back and sit under that same tree. I want you to each bring me back 11 rounds. That 11th round is a token of appreciation for the technological improvement I just made possible in your lives.” “But where will the 11th round come from?” asked the farmer with the six chickens. “You’ll see,” said the man with a reassuring smile.

Assuming that the population and its annual production remain exactly the same during that next year, what do you think had to happen? Remember, that 11th round was never created. Therefore, bottom line, one of each 11 families will have to lose all its rounds, even if everybody managed their affairs well, in order to provide the 11th round to 10 others.

So when a storm threatened the crop of one of the families, people became less generous with their time to help bring it in before disaster struck. While it was much more convenient to exchange the rounds instead of the chickens on market days, the new game also had the unintended side effect of actively discouraging the spontaneous cooperation that was traditional in the village. Instead, the new money game was generating a systemic undertow of competition among all the participants.

There are really only three ways this story can end: inflation, bankruptcy, or growth. The same choices face any economy based on usury. The villagers could procure another cowhide and make more currency; or one of each 11 families could go bankrupt, as Lietaer observes; or they could increase the number of chickens so that new “rounds” would have the same value as before. In a real economy, all three pressures operate simultaneously. The bankruptcy pressure drives a built-in insecurity, which in turn drives people and institutions to “make” more money through inflationary or productive means. Of these two choices, inflation is only a temporary solution (as we are discovering today). It can only push the grow-or-die imperative slightly into the future.

In other words, because of the money system, competition, insecurity, and greed are an inseparable part of our economy. They can never be eliminated as long as the necessities of life are denominated in usury-money. But this is only one reason why money destroys community. The other is related to the third pressure: perpetual growth.

As Lietaer’s parable explains, because of interest, at any given time the amount of money owed is greater than the amount of money already existing. To make non-inflationary new money to keep the whole system going, we have to breed more chickens — in other words, we have to create more “goods and services.” The principal way of doing so is to begin selling something that was once free. It is to convert forests into timber, music into product, ideas into intellectual property, social reciprocity into paid services.

Would you like to get rich? Here is a business idea that, in one form or another, has worked spectacularly for thousands of years. Very simply, find anything that people do for themselves or each other for free. Then take it away from them: make it illegal, inconvenient, or otherwise unavailable. Then sell back to them what you have taken. Granted, usually no one does this consciously, but that has been the net effect of culture and technology over the last several thousand years.

Link to the Sanctuary's CT Sound Shares page