Eco-Israel offers English-speaking young adults, ages 18-30, the opportunity to embrace permaculture and sustainable living through intensive hands-on experience and coursework on an organic farm in Israel.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Talks | TEDx
Bjarke Ingels: Hedonistic sustainability
Permaculture on a larger scale, amazing stuff!
xkcd: Sustainable (thanks Jaclyn)
The Rap on Permaculture via fuckyeahpermaculture
“to grow your own food is to learn from the planet”
We don’t send anything to the landfill anymore; we’re completely free of any trash collection. This is less expensive than having regular trash pickup. I have four children, and I don’t want to leave them a mess. And we wanted to be a more environmentally friendly restaurant. If a restaurant of our size — about 250 seats — could do it, just about anybody could do it.
Harry Browne’s owner Rusty Romo from Annapolis Restaurant Sends Nothing to Landfill:
In 2009, the city began a free certification program for environmentally friendly businesses. This designation gives the businesses bragging rights, but also promotion through the Downtown Annapolis Partnership, which encourages people to shop at local businesses.
The list includes Rich Morton Lincoln Mercury of Annapolis, which uses a waste oil furnace to heat buildings in the winter; the Georgian House Bed and Breakfast for its use of biodegradable cleaning products and the Loews Hotel restaurant Breeze, which donates leftover food to soup kitchen. There are nearly 30 businesses on the list.
What is your city doing to care for the Earth?
Shit Birds Say
Eco7 students shares his experience: Hazon Blog
I’ve been living the lessons of permaculture here on this farm for the last four and a half months with some of the most out there characters I’ve ever met. Yet, in spite of our differences, we’ve found common ground in what we’ve been learning (small and slow solutions; cooperation, not competition; waste is a state of mind; problems are opportunities; everything is connected; act where it counts the most) and formed a tight knit tribe that’s stuck together through all the ups and downs of communal living. We’ve done this because permaculture goes beyond copying natural patterns to make a better garden, it’s also about building stable communities and improving our own lives despite this messed up modern world we live in.
“I am Jewish” by Andrew Lustig
Why I Love Paper
David Suissa of the JewishJournal found a newspaper on New Year’s Eve when he had kosher frozen yogurt with his kids:
It turns out the paper was the December issue of The Boiling Point, a monthly publication produced by the students of the Modern Orthodox Shalhevet High School.
Well, maybe I was desperate for intellectual stimulation (sorry, kids), but I ended up taking the paper home and reading it cover to cover.
There were at least 30 interesting stories inside: a new Sephardic minyan at the school; the “slippery slope” of marijuana; a symposium with three local rabbis discussing the evolution of the Los Angeles Orthodox community; a school visit by 1960s civil rights “Freedom Rider” activist Earnest “Rip” Patton Jr.; a dissection of the tradition of gift-giving at Chanukah; the national scandal of cheating on the SATs; the Friday afternoon school tradition of “song, spirit and a whiff of chulent”; an environmental program in Israel to create a sustainable world, called “eco Israel”; a visit to a retro-design exhibition at LACMA; a student’s report from Occupy L.A. and whether anti-Semitism played a role; the modern relevance for teenagers of the school production of “Pride and Prejudice”; a lively debate on the merits of the school’s new advanced Judaic studies program, and so on.
emphasis added - click here to read the story about Eco-Israel
Earth’s Natural Internet
Well, you’re really asking me to push the envelope here. I believe that nature is intelligent. I believe that we are born of nature and if we are intelligent then, by definition, nature must be because nature gave rise to us.
The structure of the mycelium mimics that of the computer Internet. I first proposed this in the mid-1990s that mycelium is Earth’s natural Internet. As you walk upon these membranes of cells, these are neurological landscapes that infuse all soils. They are sentient. They are aware that you’re there. As you leave your footsteps, the mycelium reaches up and responds by grabbing newly available broken twigs or sticks etc.
I think nature all around us is conscious of our presence. Whether we are conscious of nature’s presence of course, is a totally different matter. I proposed that mycelium is the Earth’s natural Internet and I got a lot of flack for this. But I am really happy that Dr. Nick Reid from Edinburgh and another group of scientists from Oxford came out with two papers this year looking at the mathematics of Internet and the structure of the nodes of crossing as mycelium grows. Lo and behold, using the same mathematical formula, they found that through evolution, mycelium has optimized its nodes of crossing and the design of its networks to the same optimum that the computer Internet theory also is seeking.
