Homesteading the ocean
http://www.thespectrum.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080501/OPINION/805010334&template=printart
| Normally, we only hear about spoiled Hollywood types threatening to withdraw their illuminating presence from America’s shores if U.S. policies aren’t amended to their liking. (By the way, has Alec Baldwin left yet?) But there’s also another category of people, a bit more serious, thinking about leaving their homeland behind.Earlier this month, a California non-profit called The Seasteading Institute announced its intent to create “autonomous ocean communities,” where people of a certain mind-set can settle, sustain their own needs and govern themselves. At first blush these “seasteaders” sound a bit wacky, like a cult trying to start a maritime commune. Phrases like “the world needs a new model of politic,” and “the nature of government is about to change at a very fundamental level” smack of utopianism.
The idea of oceanic communities, even city-states, beyond the reach of governments isn’t new. The Principality of Sealand was founded in 1967 by a pirate radio operator on an old World War II anti-aircraft tower off the coast of England. Today, near Costa Rica, Celestopea is trying to build an eco-friendly floating community. Then there’s the Freedom Ship, a plan (still mostly on paper) for a huge ocean-going vessel housing 40,000 people. Lack of money is usually the downfall of such projects. The Freedom Ship, for example, would cost billions, and funding has been hard to find. Another snag such projects typically run into is their motivations to either save the planet or foster an ideology. Often they have a decidedly new-age outlook. On close inspection, however, the seasteaders seem to be cut from a different cloth.Instead of preaching any particular ideology, they’re interested in technologically enabling a new era of “micro-countries,” free to experiment with various political systems. That gives the institute a pragmatism other efforts have lacked. These are incrementalists, not wild-eyed revolutionaries. The technologies and construction techniques they propose are practical and affordable today. Moreover, they’re willing to start small and build from there. Visit www.seastead ing.org. Most importantly, they’re apparently getting jump-started with some big bucks. According to their press release, venture capitalist Peter Thiel is backing the institute with a half-million-dollar investment. Thiel is the guy who helped found Pay-Pal and backed the booming social networking portal FaceBook. He and his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, have a reputation for backing winners. According to Reason magazine, one of the reasons Thiel became so interested is the background of the institute’s founder and executive director, Patri Friedman. Patri, a software engineer, is a passionate advocate for free trade and libertarian ideals. His father, economist David Friedman, wrote “Machinery of Freedom,” the bible of so-called anarcho-capitalism. His grandfather (you guessed it) is Milton Friedman, champion of free-market economics and author of the classic “Capitalism and Freedom.” While I have trouble with the whole concept of abandoning society (and couldn’t stand being cooped up on a man-made island), a project with this kind of pedigree, practical ideas, workable technology and financial backing bears close watching. See more at www.thiscouldgetinterest ing.com. Tad Trueblood has more than 20 years in the U.S. Air Force and the national security community. He blogs at www.thiscouldget interesting.com.
|
Homesteading in the City
May 2, 2008
_______
Author: Laura Thomas, Chronicle Staff Writer
Original Title: Urban back-to-the-land movement
Gardening, animal husbandry find devotees in backyards, lots
Original Publication Date: Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Originally Publishing Website: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/22/HOA81082E2.DTL
After years as a sculptor, ceramicist, puppeteer and teacher, her newest venture is to teach the lost arts of gardening, beekeeping, canning and making such things as wine, cheese, lotions and medicines to people like herself, who desire to be more self-sufficient.
The daughter of Berkeley activists, Ruby is a leader in a movement that recalls the back-to-the-land idealism of the 1960s and ’70s. But this time, the land is in the city and may be as minimal as pots on a windowsill.
“I am conserving my personal resources and the world’s resources by staying home and tending to my garden,” Ruby said. “We can all benefit from slowing down and spending time doing something that’s right in front of us.”
Her North Oakland backyard, wedged between stark apartment buildings and old houses divided into rental units, is only 3 1/2 years old, but it’s a testament to her efforts.
Starting with a single apple tree, she improved the soil using sheet mulching, and now she has a lush, productive vegetable garden that includes nine kinds of heirloom garlic, artichoke plants that grow over her head and a beehive.
This month she began the Institute of Urban Homesteading to teach what she has learned to other city dwellers.
“I’m from New York City, where food always came from the grocery store,” said Marc Shulman, a student in one of the institute’s first classes on herbal tinctures. “I am interested in the concept. It can’t hurt to know a few things, even if it’s just raising a few tomatoes or sprouts.”
Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” has tipped the bucket and caused a flood of interest in local solutions to global environmental issues, Ruby said.
The new homesteading
Thus, her notion of homesteading, minus its pioneer references to taking land in newly acquired territories, means “resourcefulness, and taking whatever space you have and using it as sustainably as possible,” she said.
“You can be in an apartment and create a graywater system on a small scale by collecting bathwater and pouring it down your toilet.”
Across town in the San Antonio neighborhood, another experiment in urban sustainability has been going on for five years. Sustaining Ourselves Locally (SOL) is a collective of nine young people who maintain a 5,000-square-foot garden behind a commercial building a stone’s throw from the BART tracks.
In 2003, four teachers at the Slide Ranch environmental agriculture project in Marin County moved to the spot after deciding it would be more beneficial for city children to learn about farming, nature and the environment if they saw “how it could happen in their neighborhood,” said Andrea Parker, who joined the group in 2004, adding that they also saw it “as a demonstration project for other people who want to live sustainably in the city.”
Every type of greens, more
SOL rents three upstairs apartments and one storefront space on the street. Luckily, the soil had minimal amounts of lead and no arsenic, but it did require hours of sifting for glass and debris. Now it yields greens, tomatoes, garlic, beets and carrots as well as berries and a small orchard, including citrus trees. Beehives are tended by an on-call beekeeper.
“This whole area used to be fruit orchards, and when you get out the trash, it’s really good soil,” Parker said.
A languishing plum and a peach tree sprang back to life immediately. A loquat – ubiquitous in East Oakland backyards – that the collective planted in one corner now bears fruit and serves as a yardstick for the garden’s progress.
Collective members take things in stride. The chickens they were raising were eaten by raccoons eight months ago, and a new wired-in pen is just being completed. A pond has mosquito fish and tadpoles, but they aren’t sure whether the fish, which should be killing mosquitoes, won’t also eat the tadpoles.
Raising animals is not high on SOL’s agenda because “we want to keep everything here for food and education,” said Kevin Fingerman, a graduate student in environmental resources at UC Berkeley and member of the collective.
SOL has worked with nearby organizations to bring students into the garden, including offering paid summer internships and a regular cooking and gardening class for Southeast Asian girls.
Along with scheduled school trips, SOL welcomes visitors to the garden on its volunteer work day the second Sunday of the month. It will also be open this Sunday on the Bay-Friendly Garden Tour, which showcases sustainable gardens across Alameda County.
A veteran of the first tour in 2004 and a model for others is the Berkeley backyard farm of Jim Montgomery and Mateo Rutherford, who bought their place on Bancroft Way in 1995.
“We knew we wanted to raise food,” said Montgomery, a math teacher who grew up in a family of seven in El Cerrito that raised chickens, ducks and rabbits in the backyard.
Assisted by Rutherford’s partner, Roy Rojas, and various roommates over the years, they have developed a farm that would be called small scale, but, in many ways, is comparable to those of the past, productive enough to support a family, with a vegetable patch, fruit trees, a goat pen and milking station, a chicken coop and a rabbit hutch.
“We have been building up the topsoil,” Rutherford said. “It’s 2 feet deeper than when we got here. It was heavy with clay.”
On a double lot that encompasses about 6,000 square feet, its bounty includes vegetables and fruit, which are canned and frozen, but also milk, cheese, eggs and meat, because the animals are slaughtered when it’s their time.
Montgomery kills the chickens and rabbits himself, saying it’s not alienating nor inhumane if the animals “have the pleasure of having families, raising their babies,” he said.
The goats even take walks in the neighborhood, which, he said, is good for their mental and physical health.
Convinced of the future of urban farming, Montgomery said the sagging economy and rising food prices will push more urbanites to farm and relearn many skills “we don’t have in our heads like our grandparents did.”
People want to learn
“People come to us and want to learn all the time,” he said. “We have several goat apprentices.”
Montgomery and Rutherford’s farm, as well as SOL, will be among 30 gardens on the Bay Friendly Garden Tour that seeks to show the many ways to use one’s patch of dirt in a dynamic, fruitful manner while conserving the region’s resources.
It’s part of an effort by Alameda County’s Stopwaste.org program to reduce the amount of waste that ends up in the landfill 75 percent by 2010.
Jeanne Nader, manager of the residential aspect of the Bay-friendly program, said that since 2004, the push has gone beyond merely composting kitchen scraps to include teaching the public how to garden and grow food.
“For us it’s the triangle of waste, water and food shed, and they are all inextricably linked,” she said.
“Protecting the water and waste shed of San Francisco Bay means reducing the amount of garbage, and fossil fuel it takes to haul it away. It means growing your own food to reduce the miles your food travels.”
She noted that the most recent biointensive-gardening class attracted 70 people, and there’s a long waiting list for the class, which offers certification for Bay-friendly landscapers.
“We have started seeing a lot of excitement around the issue of food security,” she said, and a big thrust from couples in their 30s who have left San Francisco to start families all over the East Bay and want to grow their own food and even raise farm animals.
“Chickens,” she said. “They are really huge right now.”
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/22/HOA81082E2.DTL
