This article was first published in the May 2012 issue of the Mountain Chronicle
Hey folks, glad to be growing full steam ahead. After last years extended winter it is nice to be full swing into the growing season a little bit earlier than usual. While we are not passed the average last frost date it seems that we have passed that threshold. I could be wrong but I’m taking my chances by planting some frost sensitive plants a bit early. Tomatoes, peppers, beans, corn and potatoes just to name a few. It’s a joy to grow your own food and it’s hard to get anything better than what you pick out of your garden.
This month I would like to inspire you all to grow your own salad, or at least part of it. I recently purchased the book Salad Leaves for All Seasons by Charles Dowding to learn a little bit more about growing salad. I’ve grown my own salad mix for several years and over the years I’ve incorporated more and more into them. The beauty of salad is that there are a lot of things that can go into a salad. So this gives you the option of trialing a bunch of different things and growing what you like. Essentially customizing your salad. The flavors we use in salads come in many different forms from mild and sweet, bitter, mustard or spicy and everything in between. With all of the options available you can refine what you grow according to your palette.
Let’s start with some basics. Lettuce is a great place to start. It comes in many different shapes and colors. It is mostly mild and sweet but can become slightly bitter to really bitter depending on if it has started flowering or if the weather becomes too hot. Lettuce does well in milder seasons. When it is hotter out you can use shade cloth or plant it in shadier areas. You can grow whole heads of lettuce but you can also do a cut and come again harvest for younger leaves and an extended harvest. I prefer the latter method. Other good bases include mustard, Swiss chard, kale, spinach and Malabar spinach. While mustard greens can be spicy mustard greens such as mizuna are more sweet than spicy and have a nice succulent crunch in the stems. They can also be harvested as a cut and come again crop. You can keep cutting the flowering stems back as far as they are tender to prolong the harvest. The yellow flowers add nice color to a salad mix. Mustard greens thrive in cool seasons and will even grow well with intermittent frosts. Kale is a close relative to mustard, which has a sweet and sometimes spicy flavor. It prefers similar growing conditions to mustard, and some varieties do very well in the cold while others usually prefer milder seasons. Baby kale often makes it way into a mix, but you can also use full-grown kale. It’s great in a massaged salad. Spinach likes cooler seasons and will bolt, or flower, when it is hotter out. You can try a cut and come again harvest with it or harvest the whole plant when it is small or big. When the heat is too much for your spinach and lettuce Malabar spinach grows tender and deliciously when it is scorching out and is similar in flavor and texture to spinach. There is a lot more to the basics of a salad and you are just getting the basics here.
Briefly I will delve into other additions that can make a salad great. Herbs offer many different flavors to suite your palette. Basil, cilantro, lovage, mints, oregano, and thyme are just a brief mention of what the world of herbs has to offer your salad. Alliums (onion family) of all sorts are delicious in salads. Chop them back and watch them grow back. There are several flowers that will brighten up a mix and impress your guests. Various violets offer a plethora of colors and have a unique sweet flavor. Calendula petals are bright and glorious in the mix.
As the seasons change so will the flavor of your salad. Who gets spring mix in the fall anyways; I prefer to eat my own fall mix. Whether you’re planting some simple additions to a salad mix that you purchase or growing your whole salad mix you will be filled with a sense of accomplishment as you sit down to eat your fresh harvest.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Seasons of Abundance
This article was first published in the April 2012 issue of the Mountain Chronicle.
Spring has sprung and is in full swing. Oh wait just one or two more low elevation snowstorms to make sure we think we had winter. So just when you thought summer would be here early, winter decides to make a tardy appearance. Better late than never perhaps? Well it is better for the snow pack of the Sierra. We are up over 50% of annual snow pack and counting. Maybe there will be a rafting season after all. Morel mushrooms might have ample moisture for fruiting. There should be plenty of agricultural water for the central valley farmers. Fire danger won’t be extremely high all summer long. Whew, it was looking scary for a bit there. Are we back to normal? We’ll I’m not sure about that. At least there will be some familiarity and I plan to keep going like there won’t be much change in the seasonal patterns.
So what about seasonal patterns? There is a rhythm in nature that all life on earth has come accustomed to. Weather it be a moisture pattern, a fruiting pattern, a dry pattern or any other pattern you’ve recognized there is a certain frequency that the entities of nature depend upon. Take for instance our own human sustenance coming from the farms that raise them. There is a season for planting and a season for harvesting and then we are fed upon that seasonal pattern. But what if some of the patterns begin to change? If California summers are no longer dry what will that effect? If the winters are no longer cold what will that effect? Well I noticed this year that there was an unseasonable flush of Manzanitae Boletes (Leccinum manzanitae) that was very LARGE. I picked some in the fall and early winter this last year, which is the usual season, but was surprised that there was another major flush this spring. There is something to say about how the conditions were different this year to create such a flush. Exactly what they were is a mystery but change is evident here.
So what to plant now? If you haven’t started already, it's the season to start gardening with this change of seasons. One thing to note while planning your garden is that zones changed on the USDA Zone Hardiness map by about one zone. With a warming trend over the past several decades the hardiness map had to finally be revised this past year and zones are about one zone higher than they were previously. That means that we are seeing an annual average of low temperatures becoming warmer. So you may be able to plant that citrus tree you’ve always wanted or that fig tree or the avocado. This trend may continue so you may want to anticipate even milder winters and warmer summers by establishing perennials that will thrive if the warming trend continues. This may eventually effect our average last frost date too, so we can expect longer growing seasons on the horizon. As far as the annual garden goes you should start just about all of your summer seeds in greenhouses or cold-frames now if you want to have the wonderful experience of seed to harvest. Some can be started after the chance of frost directly in the ground, such as beans and squash, but others should be planted much sooner for a quality harvest. If you don’t have the option of starting seeds early indoors there are many places to purchase vegetable starts locally. There is still the possibility of a frost that would kill frost sensitive plants such as tomatoes, peppers, squash, melons and several others, they can be planted out but will need protection from the cold to do well or merely survive. However there are several plants that may be planted out sooner than the last frost date that are frost tolerant. I’ve been planting peas since February at 4000 feet in elevation and will continue for about 3 more weeks. All sorts of greens do well with occasional frost. My scallions have been growing profusely in the past couple of weeks even though we keep getting snowed upon at this elevation. Several types of kales and mustard greens are providing fresh mineral rich greens before they flower. Even the florets are edible and they can be continually chopped back to satisfy your appetite. Giving their last hurrah before younger plats get planted to take their place. Fruit trees are waking up to provide nectar for bees as we eagerly await the first fresh fruits of the season. Those of us fungophiles are beginning to see some delectable edible mushrooms pop up in our forests and at our favorite restaurants. A fresh spring mix salad offers an array of textures and flavors that is unique to the season.
We are beginning to see some of the fresh bounty of the coming growing season in our own gardens, at grocers and restaurants. Don’t miss the experience of partaking in this classic dance with seasonal food. When you eat these seasonal treats in their local season the experience is much more meaningful. When you reserve your fresh tomato eating to only those that are vine ripened locally it’s hard to go back. You also become more aware of the seasonal patterns that we are amongst every day. Won’t you take this dance with what this season has to offer?
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Winter Plant Profile and Greenhouse Growing
Winter plant profile and Greenhouse Growing
This article was first published in the March 2012 issue of the Mountain Chronicle
Greetings folks! Spring is just around the corner even though winter never really arrived. On the tail end of what they usually call winter I’ll bring you the winter plant profile and I’ll talk about a greenhouse project I recently finished.
Last summer I began offering seasonal plant profiles, highlighting edible perennials that are either planted, grown or are harvested during the current season. The summer plant profile was Sunchokes and the fall plant profile was artichokes. Now I’ll give you the rundown on rhubarb (Rheum x cultorum). Strawberry rhubarb pie is a classic that tastes better with fresh strawberries and rhubarb from your own garden. Rhubarb is also included in many savory dishes and adds a unique flavor. According to Dave Jacke, in his book Edible Forest Gardens vol. II, rhubarb has excellent leaf stalks and is an excellent medicinal which acts as a tonic and also holds antibacterial properties, acts as a purgative, stimulates bile and pancreas secretions and has several other benefits. It’s important to note that the leaves and roots are poisonous due to the high amounts of oxalic acid. Late winter and early spring is the time to plant bare root rhubarb, available at your local nursery. You can also start rhubarb from seed, but don’t expect it to be productive for several years. My rhubarb plants are beginning to emerge and are offering some of the first splashes of color on the landscape. Their beautiful young leaves emerge with yellows, greens and reds and signal the coming of spring and warmer weather. One great benefit to rhubarb is that it is deer resistant. The poisonous leaves won’t get browsed and the plants thrive where others get mowed to the ground. You can plant it in full sun or partial shade and they are happy in moist to somewhat dry soils. Rhubarb can come in variations of colors from green, yellow, red depending on the cultivar. Once rhubarb is established they are very productive. Plants should be divided, as they get older so the crowns don’t crowd each other.
I just recently finished putting a greenhouse together near Angels Camp. There are two purposes. The first is to raise vegetable starts to plant out this spring, summer, and fall. The other is to house about 100 shitake logs. The humidity in California is a little low for outdoor commercial mushroom cultivation. So we thought that if we grew the mushrooms inside of a greenhouse we could create a better environment for them. After looking at several prefabricated hoop frames and other greenhouse kits we decided to put together our own PVC hoop house. So two of us set out to put together this inexpensive and easy to construct greenhouse. With a quick search on the web we saw that there were a lot of people that described their process online. We checked out what we liked and didn’t like about each particular design and went full steam ahead. We squared out a 12’ x 28’ footprint.
Every 4 feet we pounded a 3’ piece of rebar halfway into the ground. For those that want to build one where there is a snow load 2’ spans will work. Once we got both sides finished we stuck 20’ x 1” PVC on the rebar, bending them to slide on the rebar at both ends. We put a purlin on each side to make it one unit and to attach the plastic to. The north side has a baseboard at the bottom to attach to the plastic to. Now we had a tunnel to put some greenhouse plastic on. We created some simple framing to put doors in on each end and the plastic was ready to go. Rather than staple right into the greenhouse plastic we screwed pieces of wood into the purlins, the baseboard, and the framed ends to pin the plastic in place. After all said and done the greenhouse cost less than $500 in parts. A smaller one for a backyard gardener would cost significantly less. A 28-foot long greenhouse is fairly large. There is plenty enough room for starting seedlings to plant out on a small farm. We’re hoping to be able to put the mushroom logs underneath seedling tray tables to save and utilize more space inside.
Greenhouse gardening is fun and productive. Cold and sunny winter days can be hot humid and tropical inside of a greenhouse. I know having three on site at Love Creek Permaculture is a blessing and we are able to accomplish a lot more with them. Without a greenhouse I wouldn’t have tomatoes both fruiting and seedlings just emerging. I wouldn’t be able to have pepper seedlings or giant pepper plants with ripening red fruit on them. I am getting hooked on greenhouse growing and wonder what I could do with a very large greenhouse…. I have some ideas.
This article was first published in the March 2012 issue of the Mountain Chronicle
Greetings folks! Spring is just around the corner even though winter never really arrived. On the tail end of what they usually call winter I’ll bring you the winter plant profile and I’ll talk about a greenhouse project I recently finished.
Last summer I began offering seasonal plant profiles, highlighting edible perennials that are either planted, grown or are harvested during the current season. The summer plant profile was Sunchokes and the fall plant profile was artichokes. Now I’ll give you the rundown on rhubarb (Rheum x cultorum). Strawberry rhubarb pie is a classic that tastes better with fresh strawberries and rhubarb from your own garden. Rhubarb is also included in many savory dishes and adds a unique flavor. According to Dave Jacke, in his book Edible Forest Gardens vol. II, rhubarb has excellent leaf stalks and is an excellent medicinal which acts as a tonic and also holds antibacterial properties, acts as a purgative, stimulates bile and pancreas secretions and has several other benefits. It’s important to note that the leaves and roots are poisonous due to the high amounts of oxalic acid. Late winter and early spring is the time to plant bare root rhubarb, available at your local nursery. You can also start rhubarb from seed, but don’t expect it to be productive for several years. My rhubarb plants are beginning to emerge and are offering some of the first splashes of color on the landscape. Their beautiful young leaves emerge with yellows, greens and reds and signal the coming of spring and warmer weather. One great benefit to rhubarb is that it is deer resistant. The poisonous leaves won’t get browsed and the plants thrive where others get mowed to the ground. You can plant it in full sun or partial shade and they are happy in moist to somewhat dry soils. Rhubarb can come in variations of colors from green, yellow, red depending on the cultivar. Once rhubarb is established they are very productive. Plants should be divided, as they get older so the crowns don’t crowd each other.
I just recently finished putting a greenhouse together near Angels Camp. There are two purposes. The first is to raise vegetable starts to plant out this spring, summer, and fall. The other is to house about 100 shitake logs. The humidity in California is a little low for outdoor commercial mushroom cultivation. So we thought that if we grew the mushrooms inside of a greenhouse we could create a better environment for them. After looking at several prefabricated hoop frames and other greenhouse kits we decided to put together our own PVC hoop house. So two of us set out to put together this inexpensive and easy to construct greenhouse. With a quick search on the web we saw that there were a lot of people that described their process online. We checked out what we liked and didn’t like about each particular design and went full steam ahead. We squared out a 12’ x 28’ footprint.
Every 4 feet we pounded a 3’ piece of rebar halfway into the ground. For those that want to build one where there is a snow load 2’ spans will work. Once we got both sides finished we stuck 20’ x 1” PVC on the rebar, bending them to slide on the rebar at both ends. We put a purlin on each side to make it one unit and to attach the plastic to. The north side has a baseboard at the bottom to attach to the plastic to. Now we had a tunnel to put some greenhouse plastic on. We created some simple framing to put doors in on each end and the plastic was ready to go. Rather than staple right into the greenhouse plastic we screwed pieces of wood into the purlins, the baseboard, and the framed ends to pin the plastic in place. After all said and done the greenhouse cost less than $500 in parts. A smaller one for a backyard gardener would cost significantly less. A 28-foot long greenhouse is fairly large. There is plenty enough room for starting seedlings to plant out on a small farm. We’re hoping to be able to put the mushroom logs underneath seedling tray tables to save and utilize more space inside.
Greenhouse gardening is fun and productive. Cold and sunny winter days can be hot humid and tropical inside of a greenhouse. I know having three on site at Love Creek Permaculture is a blessing and we are able to accomplish a lot more with them. Without a greenhouse I wouldn’t have tomatoes both fruiting and seedlings just emerging. I wouldn’t be able to have pepper seedlings or giant pepper plants with ripening red fruit on them. I am getting hooked on greenhouse growing and wonder what I could do with a very large greenhouse…. I have some ideas.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Going on a Mushroom Trip
Going on a Mushroom Trip!
What a winter we are having. It seemed as if we were in for another with the few storms we had in the fall. But alas, we are bone dry in January? At this time of year last year we had similar weather in January but we had much more rain and snow prior. When it’s raining and snowing like it did last year, I find myself outside in the foothills. With rain comes fungus. The early deluges last year primed the forest for plenty of gourmet edibles. Even though there are only a few choice edibles that grow locally I’ve learned to distinguish them from the diverse array of mushrooms that pop out of the ground during the cold and wet winter months. But this year is a different story. With the weather leaving the Sierra bone dry all the way up to the pass it’s been a slow season around here. When I hear the crackling of leaves and sticks when I’m walking through the forest I don’t expect to find much. No use sitting around waiting for the rain. I’m heading for the coast in Mendocino.
Even though they haven’t gotten much more rain than we have hear in the Mother Lode, they have been getting bits of rain and fog at least. I hear that the price for fresh picked mushrooms is low in the city and the mushroom buyer’s are paying rock bottom prices to the commercial pickers. That makes me wonder if there is a plethora of gourmet edibles out. Only one way to find out is to go see for myself. So I’m packing my truck and camping out for three days with a couple of friends. I’ve been there before at this time of year so I am somewhat familiar with the area. I’ll be going to Jackson State Forest in Mendocino County. Nestled in between Fort Bragg and Ukiah, Jackson State Forest is 50,000 acres of second growth redwood forests. This is also where you will find commercial pickers and the brokers that buy the mushrooms from the pickers.
To those of you who are freaking out from the thought of people picking wild mushrooms to eat, do not to fret. Commercial pickers or just some “Joe” trying to fill the cupboard with the years supply of black trumpets, candy caps, yellow foot chanterelles, golden chanterelles, hedgehogs and a few others know what they are doing. Many people, myself included, have spent some time to learn from others and research the subject to the point that they are extremely confident in their ability to identify mushrooms correctly. Mushroom pickers aren’t just randomly going out and picking everything they think is edible. They are targeting certain mushrooms. So they look for the conditions that specific mushrooms thrive in, which in turn leads to the mushrooms. They don’t just randomly start picking everything that grows in the same areas as the targeted mushroom they are closely looking for specific characteristics that are inherent to the mushrooms they are looking for. Once they hone in on those characteristics and the habitats that certain mushrooms thrive in it may be hard to stop going out to pick, especially if it happens to be a great year for mushrooms. There may be even too much for nature to handle them and they’ll go bad before anyone or anything can utilize them.
A very wise mushroom hunter will also have a good understanding of the most important mushrooms to avoid, such as the death cap, or the destroying angel. These are both Amanitas, which contain many different alkaloids known as amanitoxins. These mushrooms can destroy your liver and your kidney and live up to their name quite well. There are telltale characteristics of these mushrooms that should be learned from anyone thinking about picking and eating wild mushrooms. The best way to learn about mushrooms is directly from a person that knows a lot about them. Columbia College offers the class Mushrooms of the Mother Lode every year and is a great way to get acquainted with the mushroom life cycle, their biological role, cultural significance and so much more. There are also Mycological Societies that are great ways to bump elbows with wildlife biologists and ecologists.
If you’re still wondering why people might go pick wild mushrooms and eat them I’ll give you a few more reasons. The flavors of fresh mushrooms and their dried counterparts are very unique and impossible to replicate. Many choice edibles are difficult or impossible to grow, so to enjoy fresh chanterelles is only possible if you or someone else goes into the forest and picks them.
If you’re thinking you want to hunt wild mushrooms I recommend using extreme caution. Learn from someone that really knows what they are doing. It can take a while before you become well acquainted with being able to identify wild mushrooms. Be patient and don’t rush into eating a mushroom you picked yourself. There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.
I just hope we get some rain this year because I would like to pick some morels in the spring. If we don’t get anything in the next few months it will be a grim morel season and I’ll have to look into going somewhere else to get my mushroom tripping fix.
What a winter we are having. It seemed as if we were in for another with the few storms we had in the fall. But alas, we are bone dry in January? At this time of year last year we had similar weather in January but we had much more rain and snow prior. When it’s raining and snowing like it did last year, I find myself outside in the foothills. With rain comes fungus. The early deluges last year primed the forest for plenty of gourmet edibles. Even though there are only a few choice edibles that grow locally I’ve learned to distinguish them from the diverse array of mushrooms that pop out of the ground during the cold and wet winter months. But this year is a different story. With the weather leaving the Sierra bone dry all the way up to the pass it’s been a slow season around here. When I hear the crackling of leaves and sticks when I’m walking through the forest I don’t expect to find much. No use sitting around waiting for the rain. I’m heading for the coast in Mendocino.
Even though they haven’t gotten much more rain than we have hear in the Mother Lode, they have been getting bits of rain and fog at least. I hear that the price for fresh picked mushrooms is low in the city and the mushroom buyer’s are paying rock bottom prices to the commercial pickers. That makes me wonder if there is a plethora of gourmet edibles out. Only one way to find out is to go see for myself. So I’m packing my truck and camping out for three days with a couple of friends. I’ve been there before at this time of year so I am somewhat familiar with the area. I’ll be going to Jackson State Forest in Mendocino County. Nestled in between Fort Bragg and Ukiah, Jackson State Forest is 50,000 acres of second growth redwood forests. This is also where you will find commercial pickers and the brokers that buy the mushrooms from the pickers.
To those of you who are freaking out from the thought of people picking wild mushrooms to eat, do not to fret. Commercial pickers or just some “Joe” trying to fill the cupboard with the years supply of black trumpets, candy caps, yellow foot chanterelles, golden chanterelles, hedgehogs and a few others know what they are doing. Many people, myself included, have spent some time to learn from others and research the subject to the point that they are extremely confident in their ability to identify mushrooms correctly. Mushroom pickers aren’t just randomly going out and picking everything they think is edible. They are targeting certain mushrooms. So they look for the conditions that specific mushrooms thrive in, which in turn leads to the mushrooms. They don’t just randomly start picking everything that grows in the same areas as the targeted mushroom they are closely looking for specific characteristics that are inherent to the mushrooms they are looking for. Once they hone in on those characteristics and the habitats that certain mushrooms thrive in it may be hard to stop going out to pick, especially if it happens to be a great year for mushrooms. There may be even too much for nature to handle them and they’ll go bad before anyone or anything can utilize them.
A very wise mushroom hunter will also have a good understanding of the most important mushrooms to avoid, such as the death cap, or the destroying angel. These are both Amanitas, which contain many different alkaloids known as amanitoxins. These mushrooms can destroy your liver and your kidney and live up to their name quite well. There are telltale characteristics of these mushrooms that should be learned from anyone thinking about picking and eating wild mushrooms. The best way to learn about mushrooms is directly from a person that knows a lot about them. Columbia College offers the class Mushrooms of the Mother Lode every year and is a great way to get acquainted with the mushroom life cycle, their biological role, cultural significance and so much more. There are also Mycological Societies that are great ways to bump elbows with wildlife biologists and ecologists.
If you’re still wondering why people might go pick wild mushrooms and eat them I’ll give you a few more reasons. The flavors of fresh mushrooms and their dried counterparts are very unique and impossible to replicate. Many choice edibles are difficult or impossible to grow, so to enjoy fresh chanterelles is only possible if you or someone else goes into the forest and picks them.
If you’re thinking you want to hunt wild mushrooms I recommend using extreme caution. Learn from someone that really knows what they are doing. It can take a while before you become well acquainted with being able to identify wild mushrooms. Be patient and don’t rush into eating a mushroom you picked yourself. There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.
I just hope we get some rain this year because I would like to pick some morels in the spring. If we don’t get anything in the next few months it will be a grim morel season and I’ll have to look into going somewhere else to get my mushroom tripping fix.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Occupy Climate Change or Occupy a Living Earth
What a way to end November this year. The serious windstorm that kept me up all night, not because of the noise it made but because of how far the trees above my bedroom seemed to sway back and forth. I awoke to flickering power after hearing a couple of trees fall during the night, I wondered how much longer until it was out completely. I thought about the possibility of the power lines starting a forest fire. Within 20 minutes a friend burst into my house and frantically described a slash pile that was now burning the forest. With the worst of the windstorm not over we gathered our troops and the 7 of us headed up with our shovels and McLeod tools to see what we could do. We arrived to see lots of smoke and could hear the crackling of flames in the thick smoke. The fire was about 100 yards away from a house on Love Creek Road and maybe a quarter mile away from the top of Blue Lake Springs. Chopping a fire line we slowly made our way around the acre or so that had been burning. Finally, as we encircled the whole fire we narrowly missed keeping it from spreading to a brush thicket that was close to a more wooded section of the forest. And then Cal Fire and Ebbetts Pass Fire showed up with water and con crews. Our job was done here.
Now back to the windstorm. It was scary to drive back as several trees that had been standing on our way to the fire were now fallen on our way home. Since the fire crew arrived several trees and some power lines had fallen on Love Creek Road. For the rest of the day we listened to and watched trees get uprooted, broken and whipped around in the wind as if they were child’s toys. And when the wind settled there was a whole lot of destruction. Houses crushed, outbuildings crushed, whole canopies in the forest were altered, the power was out, the phone was out. How did this happen? How had some of the largest trees in the forest get uprooted completely?
It is a direct consequence of climate change. As our planet warms and creates less stable conditions we see more and more expressions of that instability with windstorms, floods and the like. Unfortunately we as humans have been occupying climate change for quite some time and we are beginning to see the effects of that more and more throughout the world. Climate scientist Jim Hansen has claimed that if Canada’s Tar Sands are exploited fully then it is essentially game over for climate change. Occupy climate change? Or Occupy Earth? The topic is under serious discussion in Durban, South Africa at the COP (Conference of Parties)17. “Organized by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the conference brings together United Nations delegates with representatives from the world's biggest polluters, including many corporations involved in Canada's tar sands.”-contributor, The Boundary Sentinel. Why, I ask, is the most destructive endeavor ever undertaken represented at the global climate summit? It seems obvious to me the tar sands has no place in a future without runaway climate change. Many have said that we are close to a tipping point in climate change if we haven’t reached it already. Some say this conference is the most important conference in the history of the world. For if we don’t do something about climate change now, our actions in the future may prove to be futile.
So can we just sit back and hope that the conference goes well and they figure it out for us? I don’t thinks so, and I’m not very convinced that the players involved with the climate summit really represent our best interest. Can we wait for the government to make the changes necessary? Can we wait for so-called “green” businesses and technologies to solve our problems for us? I think not. When the bottom line of green businesses and technologies are about making profit for investors, I find it hard to believe that the best interest of the planet is incorporated. Granted there are several technologies that can help us curb emissions and decentralize our power systems. I’ve recently heard about free energy devices, which has been hidden from the eyes of the public by the powers that be. But we can no longer wait for the economy or governments to help us make the change. It is now or never. The solutions to climate change exist today and are real. It is up to us to make this change, we can’t wait for a president, an invention, or a savior anymore. We are still the one’s we’ve been waiting for. So simplify, collaborate, co-create, just keep your vision of a life that can be great. Yes, we are the one’s we’ve been waiting for so let’s all step though that door.
Now back to the windstorm. It was scary to drive back as several trees that had been standing on our way to the fire were now fallen on our way home. Since the fire crew arrived several trees and some power lines had fallen on Love Creek Road. For the rest of the day we listened to and watched trees get uprooted, broken and whipped around in the wind as if they were child’s toys. And when the wind settled there was a whole lot of destruction. Houses crushed, outbuildings crushed, whole canopies in the forest were altered, the power was out, the phone was out. How did this happen? How had some of the largest trees in the forest get uprooted completely?
It is a direct consequence of climate change. As our planet warms and creates less stable conditions we see more and more expressions of that instability with windstorms, floods and the like. Unfortunately we as humans have been occupying climate change for quite some time and we are beginning to see the effects of that more and more throughout the world. Climate scientist Jim Hansen has claimed that if Canada’s Tar Sands are exploited fully then it is essentially game over for climate change. Occupy climate change? Or Occupy Earth? The topic is under serious discussion in Durban, South Africa at the COP (Conference of Parties)17. “Organized by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the conference brings together United Nations delegates with representatives from the world's biggest polluters, including many corporations involved in Canada's tar sands.”-contributor, The Boundary Sentinel. Why, I ask, is the most destructive endeavor ever undertaken represented at the global climate summit? It seems obvious to me the tar sands has no place in a future without runaway climate change. Many have said that we are close to a tipping point in climate change if we haven’t reached it already. Some say this conference is the most important conference in the history of the world. For if we don’t do something about climate change now, our actions in the future may prove to be futile.
So can we just sit back and hope that the conference goes well and they figure it out for us? I don’t thinks so, and I’m not very convinced that the players involved with the climate summit really represent our best interest. Can we wait for the government to make the changes necessary? Can we wait for so-called “green” businesses and technologies to solve our problems for us? I think not. When the bottom line of green businesses and technologies are about making profit for investors, I find it hard to believe that the best interest of the planet is incorporated. Granted there are several technologies that can help us curb emissions and decentralize our power systems. I’ve recently heard about free energy devices, which has been hidden from the eyes of the public by the powers that be. But we can no longer wait for the economy or governments to help us make the change. It is now or never. The solutions to climate change exist today and are real. It is up to us to make this change, we can’t wait for a president, an invention, or a savior anymore. We are still the one’s we’ve been waiting for. So simplify, collaborate, co-create, just keep your vision of a life that can be great. Yes, we are the one’s we’ve been waiting for so let’s all step though that door.
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