Searching beneath our feet, working with our hands, and moving from the heart.

Do you ever wonder why lawns sit empty? Have you looked at your neighbors' yards or pieces of the park and thought, "What else could be there?"

I know I often think about what it would be like to see stands of maples, oaks, walnuts, and cherry trees where sprawling lawns sit. And other times I envision lawns surrounded by wildflower meadows where bees and butterflies dance. Or I see beds of rich loam with intermingled vegetables in rows arranged in beautiful arrangements with compost chambers, piles of leaves, and jumbled pile of hand tools.

Do you wonder what it would be like to be invited into that place if it isn't your property? Or what if the people who owned the garden asked you to eat some produce by just putting out there for you? Or what if you wanted to do it with your own lawn but weren't sure where to begin? Maybe all you want is a beautiful place that nurtures your spirit and gives you peace of mind and, you hope, a smile to others. A food commons. A beauty commons. A peaceful commons.

Today's guests are taking some of those ideas and feelings and bringing them to life. Dana Stuchul started something she calls Veggie Commons, "is to join together (as kids, teens, beginning farmers and gardeners, dwellers, and elders) in the cultivation, harvest, and enjoyment of wholesome, locally nurtured food. Utilyzing food, labor, land, and love, we endeavor to fortify our community, transforming lawnscapes into foodscapes." [Garden pictured at right.] Dana, like our previous guests Asher Miller of the Post Carbon Institute, Katherine Watt of Spring Creek Homesteading and formerly of the Transition Town Initiative, is something of radical re-localizer. There is great promise in meaningful work with the land, something our mechanized and digitized society has lost but can regain through work in the commons.

And maybe you want to take a crack at creating your beautiful space but aren't sure where to begin. Woody Wilson has started Home Grown Farms (Facebook page here), a company that designs, installs, and manages residential and company gardens in State College. Wilson says, "Home Grown Farms bridges the gap between where food is grown and where people consume it."

Both are grounded (pardon the pun) in a love of our place, love of the land, and the possibility of local resilience. Rather than fret and kvetch about sprawl, climate change, peak oil, and the destructive nature of our stuffing and starving food system, they have gotten their hands dirty. Quite literally, this is labor of love and labor for love.

Dana posted the words of Ivan Illich on the Veggie Commons blog a few days ago. He said,

As philosophers, we search below our feet because our generation has lost its grounding in both soil and virtue. By virtue, we mean that shape, order and direction of action informed by tradition, bounded by place, and qualified by choices made within the habitual reach of the actor; we mean practice mutually recognized as being good within a shared local culture that enhances the memories of a place.

What is happening here with Dana and Woody? What if more of us recognized and nurtured our relationship with the soil to which all terrestrial life owes its existence?

So join us today on the Lion 90.7 fm. As always, feel free to call in (814) 895-9577 with comments and questions. You can also find us on Facebook where you can post articles and interact with other SN listeners and readers or join us on Twitter at SustainNowRadio.

Post Carbon Institutue: Resilience and Hope in the Face of Ecocide and Greed

Is it possible to comprehensively rise to the sustainability and resilience challenges of the present day? Can we work as individuals, communities, businesses, and governments to tackle local, regional, and international economic, social, and environmental problems? Are there movements afoot looking these issues in the face and fostering social movements to change our directions? Yes. And this Friday

This Friday we'll be hosting Asher Miller, Executive Director of the Post Carbon Institute. Post Carbon brings together the people working on issues like climate change, energy, agriculture, education, economics, and more to foment creative action toward sustainable, resilient, and healthy societies and economies within a healthy environment. Their fellows include well-known leaders like David Orr, Richard Heinberg, and Bill McKibben, champions of sustainability themselves for at least three decades and emerging sustainability wizards like Majora Carter who has been fostering resilience in New York City with incredible results.

But it is Post Carbon which means the end of fossil fuel use. To get a sense of their take on the end of the carbon age, watch this video.

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We'll talk about these issues and people this Friday at 4 pm on The Lion 90.7 fm. Feel free to call in (814) 865-9577.

Veggie Commons in Central PA

Two of our former guests, Chris Uhl and Dana Stuchul*, have started an intitiative in Central Pennsylvania called Veggie Commons. Their yard is one of the most productive food spaces in the area and here you can see it:



Stuchul says, "We are increasingly interested in doing more for ourselves and learning in the doing and stretching the boundaries of what's possible. Just our notions of a lawn looks like grass. Well really? If it's receiving lots of sun and you like to eat and if you have just the tiniest bit of experimentation urge, plant something and harvest it and eat and enjoy it. You'll notice that it's beautiful in the doing as well."

Seems that in the New Year, many of us could do with more fresh vegetables, bread, and eggs instead of what we've been eating over the winter holiday. Maybe I'm just speaking for myself...but I doubt it.

Later this spring we hope to have at least Stuchul back on the show to talk about work in the commons and the work of Ivan Illich.
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*Dana Stuchul and Christopher Uhl are both on Peter Buckland's doctoral dissertation committee.

Want to learn some skills?

Sustainability requires resilience. Today, lots of us simply never learned or have forgotten some of the basic and necessary skills of our ancestors.

How do you cook lower on the foodchain? Want to learn to sew or do basic carpentry? Want to know how to keep bees? Spring Creek Homesteading is doing just this. Katherine Watt has set up a great series of workshops for people in the Centre Region to skill themselves and one another. Learn more about skilling workshops at this link.

Here is a calendar of upcoming events.

Will peak everything bring peak resilience?

A few years ago, author and activist Derrick Jensen wrote in Orion magazine, "The most common words I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, We’re f***ed." I'd say that assessment - that a lot of environmentalists say that anyway - is pretty accurate.

Face it. Current and coming generations of people and other organisms face a wicked problem of interconnected wicked problems. Here are six:

• Global human population will hit 7 billion this October and is projected to climb to 9 billion by ~2050.
• Global warming has already reduced sea ice in the Arctic Ocean and caused extensive ice cap and glacial melting from Greenland to Argentina to Antarctica. Projected warming from the IPCC and other scientific bodies will cause further melting which will raise sea levels over the coming century, flooding coastal cities and sinking islands.
• Deforestation, especially tropical deforestation, prevents carbon sinking and increases other greenhouse gas emissions while also changing the way equatorial weather patterns that regulate other weather patterns.
• Industrial production is increasingly toxifying air, water, and land in many different places across the Earth and the most educated societies in the world do not understand the interactive effects of tens of thousands of unregualated chemicals.
• Anti-biotics and vaccinations drive bacterial and viral virulence.
• The modern industrial and post-industrial economies have been built with fossil fuels, mostly oil for transportation. Coal and oil peak production has more or less been reached while natural gas from deep shale gas is on the rise.

These problems all feed one another. Peak everything is here or coming and the response to it by big government and big industries is, well, sorely lacking according to today's guest.

Janaia Donaldson hosts Peak Moment TV, "online television series featuring people creating resilient communities for a more sustainable, lower-energy future. Programs range from permaculture farms to electric bikes, ecovillages to car-sharing, emergency preparedness to careers for the coming times." Like other guests on our show working with the "transition" and "slow money" movements, Donaldson has focused on how the big wicked problems above can be tackled by resilient and skilled people working together. She has interviewed women who have worked to bring gardens to school, psychologists examining reactions to climate change, economists critiquing growth economics, and environmental activists rallying people to find strength within themselves.

If there is anything we can be sure of, Donaldson has witnessed and soaked up a lot of wisdom on sustainability and resilience.

Hear her on today's Sustainability Now on the Lion 90.7 from 4-5 pm.

The Logic of Transition and Resilience

Last year, we talked to Katherine Watt and Bill Sharp of the State College Transition Town movement. They discussed the intertwining problems of climate change and peak oil in an oil-dependent society and economy. For some people, this is frightening and paralyzing. For others, it opens up new possibilities.

Enter Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Towns movement who sees a new design to society and economy and culture based on moving past oil and living with climate change. Essentially, it's a new and positive vision that is transitional, adaptive, cooperative, and most importantly resilient. He does not think that high technology is going to save us. There is no techno-messiah. Essentially, he thinks that these are "solutions where they are" that is sensitive "to place, where they are" and "a process that is joyful."

Below is his TEDTalk.

Peak Oil Blues and Panglossian Disorder

On our show we've introduced you to the Transition Towns movement - a global positive community-level response to climate change and peak oil. Peak Moment TV deals peak oil, climate change, and institutional, community, and personal responses every week. We'll likely be talking to them on the air later this semester.

To whet your appetite, watch this episode. Janaia Donaldson interviews psychologist Kathy McMahon who wondered if she was "a whacko" when she had such a strong flight reaction to learning about peak oil. But she's also found other reactions, a Panglossian Disorder where people believe that some techno-magic fix will save existing civilization as it is. She thinks that people can find real comfort and real action and real meaning in moving toward locally resilient communities. You can learn more about her work at Peak Oil Blues.



What about you? What are you doing?