The core message in all of this is: We are at a point in time when even the best of good needs to be a little better. We owe it to ourselves and we owe it to future generations who will salute us for veering off the path of slow and creeping decline. They will laud us for digging deeply within ourselves to climb the hill of recovery and betterment. I look forward to working with my new neighbors in a pursuit of better.
[Bob Ferris is the new Executive Director of RE Sources for Sustainable Communites]

21st Century Homesteading: More Families Seek Simple, Sefl-Sufficient, Low Impact Lifestyles by Virginia Smith, The Bellingham Herald

Saturday, October 9th, 2010 from 10am - 5pm, plus the six (6) following Tuesday evenings, 6-9pm. Taught by Alan Seid, this is an in-depth learning series for the highly acclaimed process for preventing and resolving conflicts, creating rich and powerful relationships, and much more! One full-day Saturday plus six weekday evenings. Register here, or contact Angela MacLeod, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , phone 733-3541.

Where: Explorations Academy Library, 1701 Ellis St., between Ohio & State, Bellingham, WA, USA. Cost: $400 Full Tuition •$600 full tuition; $347 Early Bird Special if paid in full by Sept. 17, 2010  •Includes Snacks & Refreshments •Please Inquire if Needing Financial Assistance. Empowered Communication (also known as Compassionate Communication, Nonviolent CommunicationSM or NVC) is a way of speaking that facilitates the flow of communication needed to exchange information and resolve differences peacefully. It helps us identify our shared values & needs, encourages us to use language that increases goodwill, and avoid language that contributes to resentment or lowers self-esteem. Click here to learn more about NVC.  Download flyer here.

A New Problem with Commercial Compost by Walter Haugen, Transition Whatcom

For those of you who use Smits and Growsource compost, here is some pertinent info from the Whatcom Farmers Listserv. This kind of problem is one of the reasons I don't buy commercial compost anymore (besides the high relative cost). As with buying food, there are four levels of risk in soil amendments (from lowest to highest risk) - 1) make your own compost, 2) buy from a local producer that you trust, 3) use compost that has been tested by a 3rd-party regulatory agency, 4) just buy what's available and don't think about it.

Sent 6/25/10 to the Whatcom Farmers email list from Colleen Burrows:

"In 2009 and 2010, we have seen incidences of damage caused to tomato, pepper, sunflower, beans and other plants most likely caused by aminopyralid residues in dairy derived organic soil amendments. We
are trying to understand the extent of this complex issue and are working with involved parties to determine the best actions to move forward.

WSU Whatcom County Extension has developed a factsheet on this issue. It can be found at: http://whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/aminopyralid/. New information will be updated to this site as more is understood. If you have any questions, you can contact me or Craig MacConnell at 676-6736.

Sincerely,

Colleen Burrows
WSU Whatcom County Extension"

Many good comments posted in reply to Walter's article above, including the following from Laura Ridenour:
"The product, marketed as "Milestone Herbicide", introduced in 2006 by Dow AgroSciences, aminopyralid, and according to our extension agent, Craig MacConnell, the chemical is active down to parts per trillion. It is highly persistent for years and minute concentrations will have an effect on plants. They don't yet know how long but are guessing it could take up to 10 years to break down in the soil.

In Whatcom it is mostly applied on grass pasture for dairy cows, and applied to corn silage crops for cows via the slurry from manure lagoon. (Although similar broad leaf herbicides are used on barley, wheat, and places that grow a lot of grass, like golf courses). It is a bio-accumulator (plants, like grass and corn take it up and then wherever those plants go or are disposed of, they spread the chemical). It also persists in the ground water, and may have an environmental effect on water species."

Herbicide-Tainted Manure Wilts Organic Crops Across Whatcom County by John Stark, the Bellingham Herald

Whatcom County organic farmers and gardeners are reporting severe crop damage that appears to be linked to herbicide contamination in the manure and compost they obtain from non-organic farms and dairies for use as natural fertilizer... "It's killed off most of our potato crop, our salad crops," said Kirk Hayes, a Whatcom County grower who sells his crops to the Bellingham Community Food Co-op and four other co-ops in the region. "We've contaminated about seven and a half acres, it looks like."
He estimated he has lost about $40,000 worth of sales in the past two months because of the problems...


Organic Panic: Herbicides Damage County Crops, Crop Farmers, by Tim Johnson, Cascadia Weekly (page 8 of this large size pdf file)
..."We have to assume that all manure is tainted unless proven otherwise, whidh is a really unfortunate situation," [Clayton] Burrows said. "Organic growers already have very limited options in how they care for their crops, so if an option is lost, it backs the growers into a very serious corner. The loss of our organic label at the Food Co-op, the largest single buyer of our produce, is very serious."...
 

Please Remember to Vote! by David MacLeod, Transition Whatcom
Transition doesn't support any particular political parties or candidates, but it does recognize the important role government plays. Step 6 of the 12 Steps of Transition tells us to "Build a Bridge to Local Government: ... Whether it is planning issues, funding or networking, you need them on board." With that in mind, I'd like to encourage us all to vote in the WA state primary. I consider educated voting to be the minimum to be expected of an engaged citizen...

Did you know you can add events to our community calendar? We designed this calendar to be a convenient place for community members and organizations to post to and browse for events in Whatcom County related to sustainability and creating a healthy, vibrant community. And when you're planning an event, you can check the calendar to see what else might be happening on that date.

Note: If you don't see all the info you want or need in the email announcement, click on the Event title, which takes you to our online calendar. There you'll find contact info, etc. that doesn't show up in the newsletter.  By the same token, if you're entering an event into our calendar, put your contact info into the body of the announcement as well as the contact fields.  More details on how to enter events here.

Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further -- it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation. ...

UPDATE: It's probably also worth noting this Wall St. Journal article from last month -- with a subheadline warning: "Back to Stone Age" -- which describes how "paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue." Utah is seriously considering eliminating the 12th grade, or making it optional. And it was announced this week that "Camden [New Jersey] is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free."

Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights -- or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State -- that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability? Anyway, I just wanted to leave everyone with some light and cheerful thoughts as we head into the weekend.

A Friendly Greeting from the Annelids by John Michael Greer, the Archdruid Report
Over the last few weeks, this blog has sketched out the basic outline of a green wizardry rooted in the appropriate tech movement of the Seventies but reshaped to meet the needs of the deindustrial future now taking shape around us. So far that outline has been drawn on a relatively abstract level; that’s useful as a starting point, but the practical dimension has to be addressed if a project like this is to have any impact at all on the profoundly concrete predicament facing the industrial world.

Hardly anything is so common nowadays as abstract enthusiasms that never quite find their way down to the messy realm of action in the world. The peak oil blogosphere is a particularly good place to spot them; just look for the people who insist that fourth-generation fission reactors, or fusion power, or algal biodiesel, or ethanol, or – well, you can fill in the blanks yourself – is going to save us all and permit some version of business as usual to continue indefinitely. I’ve already discussed at some length the many reasons why that isn’t going to happen, but set that aside for a moment; even if one or more of these technologies did happen to be a viable response, what actual contribution to that response is made by posting enthusiastic comments about it on internet sites?