Control What You Spend

A great quote from my interview with Holistic Management practitioner Walt Davis.   Another interview with Walt is in the pipeline, so stay tuned. Thanks to the blog dig this / dig that for the transcription:

“I was putting more money at risk every year than the potential for profit justified. Any time that you have to come out of pocket with cash in an agricultural situation–almost any situation I can think of but in agriculture it’s particularly true because we have control of such a small portion of the factors that affect us–we can’t control the market, we can’t control the weather, we can’t control the political situation–the one thing that we can control is what we spend.”

“Modern agriculture is maybe 60 years old–I saw the first nitrogen fertilizer I remember in 1950, maybe 1951… modern agriculture all goes back to nitrogen fertilizer. During that time of modern agriculture we have degraded our soils, we have degraded our food chain, or our people, and we have degraded the financial and mental health of our producers.”

“The better job I did of conforming to what the prevaling wisdom said was good management the worse shape I got in financially. I didn’t get back into good shape financially until I realized that it’s all out there. All you have to do is tailor your management to your environment, and substite management for money.”

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Fukuoka sensei, is this Zen farming?

English: Masanobu Fukuoka throwing the first s...

Image via Wikipedia

A wonderful excerpt from the series about Masanobu Fukuoka on the Agroinnovations Podcast.  Thanks to the Astromen blog for the transcription.

People would ask: So tell us, Fukuoka sensei…is this Zen farming? He would say, No, no, no, it’s got nothing to do with religion, it’s just farming. It’s just farming. It’s a timeless understanding, and if I were to call it Zen farming, then right away you would take my farming and put it into your Zen file, and then that would be a way you could say, Oh I understand it because I can compartmentalize this whole thing and call it Zen. That would be playing into the need of our human intellect to try to understand things, and by doing that, gain control somehow.

[Fukuoka] didn’t want to do that, so he said: No, no, all I’m doing here is farming. But when you’re a farmer then you’re out in nature, and you see all of these wonderful dramas and these things of beauty, and you hear the wind blowing through the trees and so forth, and the farmer has many opportunites to break through and see God directly.

To him, the religions were an unnecessary structure that people have created to try to understand. And understanding is not part of this at all. If you really wanted to set him off, you would just say, Don’t you think people can understand nature? And he would say, People can’t really, truly understand anything.

Related articles

Check out this article from the Huffington Post on the Zen of Pruning.

Posted in Permaculture, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

More Law Suits for Monsanto

MONSANTO CHEMICAL COMPANY SMOKESTACKS SEEN FRO...

The legal pressure continues to mount on Monsanto as two significant court cases move through the judicial system in the United States.

First is a group of organic farmers bringing suit against Monsanto in a district court in Manhattan.  See this article:

Will organic farmers see their day in court?

The article states:

The eighty-three family farmers, small and family owned seed businesses, and agricultural organizations comprising the organic plaintiff group represent over 300,000 individuals. The landmark lawsuit, filed in March 2011, challenges the validity of Monsanto’s transgenic/GMO patents and seeks court protection for innocent family farmers who may become contaminated by Monsanto seed.

Next is a law suit dating back to 2004 in Putnam County, West Virginia, where jurors are just now being selected for the trial.

Monsanto jurors must decide if Nitro residents should be tested for disease

In this suit, the plantiffs are asking “that Monsanto bear the cost of periodic medical testing to determine whether their exposure to the harmful chemicals caused any one or more of 12 different diseases, which they say are caused by exposure to dioxin.”

Apparently, the people in the law suit live in close proximity to Monsanto’s Nitro chemical plant, where Agent Orange (dioxin) has been manufactured for over 30 years.

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Bush Sr.: Monsanto’s Transgenetic Engineer

Watch this footage of then Vice-President George H. W. Bush inserting Roundup Ready transgenes into crop DNA in Monsanto’s laboratory.  Then watch as Monsanto execs encourage Bush to accelerate the regulatory approval process for one of the first transgenic crops.  Bush responds by saying: “Call me, we’re in the dereg business, maybe we can help…” 

Both shocking and predictable.  This shit storm has been brewing for a while. This clip is an excerpt from the excellent documentary movie The World According to Monsanto.

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Viralized Transgenics

Get ready for the upcoming episode #129 of the Agroinnovations Podcast (Merry Christmas, Monsanto) by listening to me denounce the biotech industry’s viralized transgenetic engineering.

Play
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Socialist or Entrepreneur?

The plain red flag is often used at socialist ...

Image via Wikipedia

A reviewer on iTunes had this to say about the Agroinnovations Podcast:

Unfortunately, it seems almost every episode is tainted with devotion to the man-made global warming myth and often socialistic economic theory. There is a lot of self-defeating philosophy in that if the government control the host and guests espouse were implemented then they wouldn’t be allowed to do the agricultural innovations they promote.  This is the kind of podcast you’ll get when the host is a socialist trying to be entrepreneurial.

What do you think?  Is the Agroinnovations Podcast socialist propaganda posing as entrepreneurship?

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Shipping Containers as Farms? (Updated)

Intermodal shipping containers on a railway fl...After reading an article on Treehugger, I just learned about a Kickstarter Project that is attempting to modify “recycled shipping containers with the tools to grow fruits and vegetables in an urban environment.”  These shipping containers are to be fitted with hydroponic technologies and, presumably, electric lighting to provide plants with “solar” energy.

Shipping containers have several advantages that make them well suited to agricultural modification:

  • Containers are standard in their measurements, making them well suited to small scale manufacturing for modification
  • Containers can be moved fairly easily using existing water, rail, and road networks.  Even as fossil fuels become scarce, moving containers over fairly short distances will probably be feasible.
  • Containers can be fitted with a number of renewable, regenerative technologies that can move through a community as required

So while I agree with the basic premise of this project, I’m not sure I agree with the tactical implementation.  Why fit shipping containers with relatively expensive lighting technologies for producing vegetables?  The sun does a much better job for much cheaper; the energy yield for the vegetables is probably a thermodynamic loss.

Instead, why not modify the container to act as a mobile agro-industrial unit?  Dorn Cox of Greenstart has the jump on this, as he is currently installing open source biodiesel generators into an old Coca-Cola trailer.  The biodiesel generators are designed to process sunflower oil produced from his no-till organic sunflower crop.  Since Dorn doesn’t use the equipment year round, there’s plenty of machine down-time to warrant a technology share with neighboring farms.  The shipping container could also be fitted with additional regenerative open source technologies, like the open source Rodale crop roller.

The permacultural concept of guilds becomes useful here, as shipping containers could be dedicated modules (or guilds) for ecosystem regeneration: an aquaponics module for producing breeding fish; a mushroom lab for producing mycelium spawn; an apiculture module for building and deploying hives; and as mentioned above, a liquid fuel/no-till module for producing energy.

Centralizing shipping container modifications into an semi-industrial process will allow for rapid deployment of “seed” technologies that can be moved across the globe with the urgency that is commensurate with our current human crisis.

And check out this article, again via Treehuger, about growing shrimp in the desert.  Feeding the voracious 24-7 shrimp appetite of Las Vegas is probably not a good use for this tech, but overall the idea may make more sense than vegetable production, as the protein conversion efficiency of aquaculture is many times greater than a feedlot.

Update:

I found some good additional information after publishing this.  Apparently, lead paint is a problem in shipping containers…which may be very difficult and/or expensive to remediate.

Additionally, these things are hot and difficult to ventilate, which probably isn’t a huge problem in New Hampshire, but more problematic in Haiti or New Mexico.

Treehugger has really covered this issue over the years.  See the link below for a summary of this coverage:

http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/the-shipping-container-scene-in-2010.html

And the National Young Farmer’s Coalition has a report back from a FarmHack event on Dorn Cox’s farm in New Hampshire.

Posted in Agriculture, Alternative Energy, Appropriate Technology, Engineering & Design, Permaculture | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Epigenetics, Allergies, and Microbiology

Image courtesy ddpavumba

New research is transforming our understanding of the relationships between micro-organisms, epigenetics, the human gut, and allergies. An excerpt from a new article on the website of the scientific journal Nature sums up the crux of this dynamic:

“These [micro-organisms] are flipping switches,” says Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. If these beneficial microbes fail to colonize our guts early in life, or if they succumb to a course of antibiotics, then switches don’t get flipped and the immune system can become hypersensitive, attacking harmless microbes and other substances such as pollen, pet dander or shellfish.

The greatest frontier in science is biological.  We must proceed with enthusiasm and with ethics.  A great article by my friend Cassandra Willyard.  Nice work.  Read it below.

Microbiome: Gut reaction

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Turkey Tractors

© Mr.Bojangles from BackyardChickens.com

Happy Thanksgiving. Hope everyone is taking the time to be thankful for family, friends, and food.

Chickens aren’t the only poultry species suitable for rotational grazing via enclosed “tractors”.  Turkeys seem to do just fine as well.  So, in the spirit of Turkey day, I thought I’d share some innovative things that other agriculturalists are doing with turkey tractors.

Have a look at the YouTube video below, courtesy of bean444444. Also, check out the forum post below to learn more about people’s experiences with turkey tractors via the Backyard Chickens Form.

Turkey Tractors

Posted in Agriculture, Video | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Monsanto Sued by Indian Government for Biopiracy

According to France 24, the Indian Government has filed suit against the biotech company Monsanto, “accusing the company of stealing India’s indigenous plants in order to re-engineer them into patented varieties.”  Years of grassroots organizing by an organized social movement (see Vandana Shiva), have started to pay off.

Monsanto will now have its hands full dealing with the legal firepower of a sovereign state the size of India.  Sell your Monsanto stock.

Indian Government Files Biopiracy Lawsuit Against Monsanto

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Pesticide Use Breeds Aphids

According to research comparing conventional triticale production to organic production, “…the preventative application of insecticides against aphids does not produce any advantages even though it consumes a lot of time and money.”  This is because:

  1. “insecticides indiscriminately kill off beneficial animals that feed on the aphids”
  2. “[researchers] detected three times as many natural enemies of aphids and five times fewer aphids in the organic fields than in the conventional fields”

Fewer aphids in organic crop fields

Posted in Agriculture, Organic | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

New Agroinnovations.com Site

Welcome to the new, redesigned site Agroinnovations.com.  Several months after having a server crash, which caused many of the original urls for the podcast page to break, I’ve finally gotten around to fixing the site.  You’ll notice that all of the podcast urls are now working.  Not all have been given redirects that will allow old links to bring users to content, but that will be coming soon.

The site is now simplified, with two main sections: blog and podcast.  The blog contains a few hundred posts that I’ve written over the past 5 years or so, while the podcast has all 128 episodes that have been created to date.

With the launch of the new site, I’ll be blogging more frequently, and will get back to podcasting in the very near future.  I doubt I will be able to release a new episode once a week.  Look to the blog for information and opinions on permaculture and organic/sustainable agriculture.  I plan to update it frequently, so check back soon.

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Dan Dagget: An Audio-Visual Presentation

Below is a series of videos featuring author, environmentalist, journalist, and ecosystem restorer Dan Dagget. In this series Dan shares with us a series of slides showing the on the ground techniques of active ecosystem restorers. Featured is a discussion of goals vs. issues, cattle as a tool to restore mine tailing sites, the damage to land caused by rest and preservation, strategies for conserving endangered species, and a critique of environmentalism as driven by politics instead of results on the ground.

A follow-up audio interview is available on in Episode #109 of the Agroinnovations Podcast.

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Episode #106 Follow-up

This post is a follow-up to Episode #106 of the Agroinnovations Podcast.  Below are video tutorials on the making of seedballs in the style of Masanobu Fukuoka.

Also, be sure to visit the website OneStrawRevolution.Net

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Holistic Weed Management

Here is a two part video series on a decision model for managing weeds and invasive species.  Enjoy.

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Episode #100 Follow-up

This blog post is a follow-up to the 100th episode of the Agroinnovations Podcast.  It includes a set of links and some videos that supplement many of the themes discussed in Episode #100.

Links:

There used to be links here for the Keyline Superplow, but I can no longer find any good info for this on the web.  (FA)

The Spanish Dehesa (via Wikipedia)

Australia Felix Permaculture (Darren’s Website)

P.A. Yeoman’s Keyline Farm (via Google Maps)

Rodale Cover Crop Roller

Keyline at the Beach Video Series

Posted in Engineering & Design, Permaculture, Video | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Albuquerque Local Food Festival 2010

Volunteer

The annual Local Food Festival in Albuquerque was held at the historic Hubble House on Sunday June 6th 2010. The heat was bordering 100 degrees F by mid-day, but the food, friends, and music made it worthwhile. Click on the Read More link below to see a photo gallery of the festival. Enjoy!

Continue reading

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Presentation: Holistic Management and Soil Carbon

This is a Powerpoint Presentation presented to the First Annual Forum of the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve in Queretaro, Mexico.  This was presented by Frank Aragona on May 21st, 2010.  The presentation deals with the technical and market aspects of carbon trading for farmers and ranchers, with a focus on the Chicago Climate Exchange.  This presentation is in Spanish.

Esto es una presentación Powerpoint presentado al Primer Foro Anual de la Reserva Natural Sierra Gorda en Querétaro, México.  Esto fue presentado por Frank Aragona el día de 21 de Mayo, 2010.  La presentación trata de los aspectos técnicos y financieros sobre el Mercado de carbono para rancheros y agricultores con un enfoque en el Chicago Climate Exchange.  La presentación es en Español.

Download the Presentation by clicking here.  Bajar la presentación aquí.

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Mycoremediation in the Gulf

oil spill in gulf

Paul Stamets has written a brief article summarizing the potential and the obstacles to mycoremediation in the Gulf of Mexico.  Obviously, based on Paul’s own research and efforts, the approach is viable and doable, but there remain a lot of unknowns.

First and foremost is our poor understanding of how mycelium will react to the salt water of a coastal environment.  This is going to be key.  This has been on my mind a lot when I think about the possibility of using mushroom mycelium to help heal the damage.  I was surprised that even Stamets himself doesn’t know what the potential effects of salt water will be.  I can only assume that the mushrooms won’t respond all that well.  However, I also wonder if there aren’t species that have evolved in this type of environment, and perhaps have a natural resistance to certain levels of salt water.

Our knowledge and understanding are the biggest obstacles.  The few trials that have been run have been done on a small scale, using a single species in a fairly controlled environment.  We need to start running more trials on a massive scale RIGHT NOW.  We need to identify species that may do well in the high saline environment, and start producing the mycelium.

And this, of course, is another big obstacle: having the equipment and the personnel to produce the quantities of mycelium that we need.  Producing mushroom mycelium is a fairly specialized affair.  Any detail-minded person with the desire and work-ethic can learn the sterile culture techniques necessary to produce large amounts of mycelium.  It is unknown the overall availability of well-trained lab techs ready to work on this problem.  My guess is availability is limited.

The scale of this disaster is impossible to comprehend.  Typically, and tragically, our response seems underwhelming at best.  Looks like we’re knee-deep in the Long Emergency now.

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The Story of a Bolivian Farmer

Episode #71 of the Agroinnovations Podcast is reproduced here in the video section of the Agroinnovations Blog.

This video interview/photo montage is a talk between Frank Aragona and Moises Jimenez. Topics of discussion include an introduction to Bolivian agriculture, the life of a Bolivian farmer, the importance of crop rotation and agricultural biodiversity.

This video views best in full screen mode.

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CREAR Image Gallery

dsc01920As a follow-up to Episode #77 of the Agroinnovations Podcast, an interview with Mark Feedman of CREAR, I have put together this image gallery from my visit to CREAR in 2004.  Also, you can learn more about CREAR by having a look at this article.  Click on the Read More link to access the slide show.

Continue reading

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A Vicious Hangover

On the eve of Obama’s first State of the Union address, the left is waking up from its mass psychological hysteria, only to find that too many hits on the Obamamania crack pipe have left the country penniless, warring, and demoralized.  A vicious hangover indeed.  In a recent article, Pscyhologist Bruce Levine disccuses the causes and consequences of a population that has been kicked in the teeth one time too many.

Michael Moore is the perfect poster boy for the crack addicted leftist wonk.  To make this point, first have a look at my pre-election blog post about Moore, written about 14 months ago.  And now, in a recent interview on DemocracyNow!, Moore says:

  “…the Democrats are essentially a bunch of wimps. They don’t have the guts. They don’t have the courage of their own convictions. They’re disgusting. I’m embarrassed. I want really nothing to do with them.”

Really?  Just 14 or so months after Moore implored us to vote for Obama, now he finds Obama and his party “disgusting”?  How is anybody supposed to take this guy seriously?

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

The Haitian Scramble

Less than 24 hours after the announcement of a 7.3 magnitude earthquake in Haiti, the global fundraising machine has begun turning it’s wheels.  Those companies and NGO’s in the business of disaster are licking their chops to make Haiti the next massive disaster-relief Ponzi scheme for the rich.

Haiti’s democratic revolution, inspired the by ideals of Republicanism in France and the United States, saw black slaves revolting against their French slavemasters; since then,  successive US governments have attacked, embargoed, sanctioned, sabotaged, and meddled in Haitian politics for over two centuries.  This international skullduggery was motivated partly by racism and partly by a desire to preserve the ideological fabric of a democratic slave society.

Even today, US policy towards Haiti is no different from the imperial mindset of the 19th century.  Naomi Klein’s book the Shock Doctrine could not be more relevant, and a fascinating discussion on the C-Realm Podcast this week touches on this theme as well.  But the question Klein’s book does not answer is this: How many times can a society be shocked and neo-liberally restructured before despairing helplessness and total genocide commence?  Perhaps with Haiti, we are about to find out.

That said, and notwithstanding the utter grimness of the situation, there is still much we can do.  Donate to good organizations that are small, on the ground, have local liasons, and represent your ethics.  I donated to Architecture for Humanity, a small open source architecture NGO that has been doing phenomenal work for many years now.  And pray for the families so that their suffering is eased.

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GIS Data: Municipal Boundaries of Bolivia

This is a shape file of the entire country of Bolivia, delineating municipal boundaries. Other information includes, per municipality, population of women, men, and total number of households. The data is current from the 2000 census.

Esto es un archivo shape para el pais entero de Bolivia, lo cual delinea limites municipales. Otra informacion incluye, por municipalidad, poblacion de mujeres, hombres, y total numero de viviendas.  Los datos son actuales desde el censo de 2000.

Download file here

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The Radical Permaculturalist

Permaculture is a design science. It can be studied, and thus internalized. When done so successfully, our thinking is transformed. The world is a garden, with potentially infinite yields. This is the basis for radical changes in human behavior.

Radicalism is distasteful to the thoughtful amongst us? It is because it now requires redefinition. Radical is now embodied in the most simple of gestures; in what appeals most forcefully to the Divine within us: our sense of justice, beauty, humility, intuition, aesthetics, and love. These are, and have always been, the tools of personal transformation.

And so, they are radical. In a world of mass production, rampant consumerism, crushing poverty and delusional ideology, the simplest of gestures are the most radical.

The seed is a fitting metaphor. Put it in soil, water it, give it light, nurture it, and it will grow. It is constrained by natural law, limited by the resources of sunlight, water, and soil nutrients; yet it yields measurable returns, producing more seeds, and the fruit in which they are encased. The human nurtures the seed, so that in turn the seed will nurture the human.

There is reciprocity, and there are limitations; in the care of a thoughtful gardener, the seed resists commodification. It is antithetical to the designs of the derivative traders, who require infinite growth, limitless profits, and endless commodification.

The permaculturalist does not reject the law of diminishing returns. Instead, this law is embraced, and then sidestepped. A tomato reaches its optimal rate of return, then drops off because of pressure from garden snails. The farmer reaches for his gun, the permacultarist reaches for his ducks. The ducks eat the snails, and the humans, the ducks, and the tomatoes thrive. Limitations are removed through synergy and imagination, not through the brute force of poisons and machines.

The measuring stick for all of this can be seen in the light of a child’s eyes. Thus it is void of ideology and fanaticism. That which strengthens the light is good. By definition, it is radical. That which dims the light threatens our existence.

Posted in Philosophy, Politics | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Permaculture the Schools

The clock is still ticking, and collapse continues unabated. Most are oblivious to the true nature of the progression, what it means, why it’s happening, and most importantly, what we should do about it.

But the answer is simple, and it’s right in front of us. It’s so simple, in fact, that most people will not accept it. The answer is this: we must turn our schools into organic farms; as many of them as we can, in the shortest possible time.

By doing so, we have the potential to address, if not outright solve, almost every pressing social issue of our age. In a short time, every community in the country will reduce its carbon footprint dramatically. Education will be reborn and reinvented, with children learning and applying hands-on skills that respond to their physical, emotional, and intellectual needs. Every discipline is welcome and included: woodworking, mathematics, chemistry, biology, engineering, art, and architecture. All of it is applied to real world problems that our communities must address in a responsible and proactive manner.

Issues of animal cruelty, environmental destruction, and good nutrition will be placed into a context of critical thinking and careful reflection. Standardized tests will be exposed as a fraud, the product of a cruel and twisted logic on the part of politicians and planners.

Children will become ambassadors for the cause of local food. They will take the seed that we plant, they will water and nurture it and make it grow. They will open the eyes of the ones they love, millions of people across the country, to the promise and the possibility of a national renewal. Our children will show us the way in a leaderless and silent revolution.

Our local economies will be rebuilt on a new model, as schools will require materials, expertise, and technological innovation to rapidly put in place a radical overhaul of the school’s curriculum and landscape. Open source technologies will be developed by the students themselves at breakneck speeds. These technologies will be deployed and converted into viable local business models.

This is not utopian. This is real, and it can happen now. The country is ready for it. This is apolitical and post-ideological. We need to organize and demand it. We need to visit our local schools, ask them if they’ve considered it. We need to put together petitions. We need to knock on doors: city councils, neighborhood associations, teacher’s unions, mayoral offices, school boards, PTA’s, county officials.

We need to get local resources interested in the idea, and apply the principles of slow money towards the development of a capital resource base for making the vision a reality. We need to network with other people who are already working on similar things, including CSA’s, the OSAT community, and the transition community. We need to search out past experiences and research initiatives, and conduct further research, to verify and promote the inherent value of this approach.

We need all of it, and we need it now. If I was a gambling man, I’d be ready to bet the farm that if this happens, it will work. The kids will show us the way.

Posted in Agriculture, Albuquerque, Appropriate Technology, Development, Environment, Global Warming, Organic, Philosophy, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

C-Realm Episode #174: Follow-Up

Stealth Bomber and Sacred Geometry

This blog post is a follow-up to Episode #174 of the C-Realm Podcast.  For listener’s who enjoyed this episode of the C-Realm and would like to find more information and resources on the web, I’ve included a variety of resources below.

Robert Lawlor

The interview with Robert Lawlor, an excerpt of which was read by KMO in the podcast, can be found at the link below:

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/05/art/robert-lawlor-with-christopher-bamford-and-dorothea-rockburne

Images

The images referred to in the podcast have been posted onto the web.  There are only two of them, and they can be found at the links below:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/agroblogger/3992934841/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/agroblogger/3993668206/

And, for ubiquitous mandalas from around the world, see this image gallery from the International Folk Art Market 09.

Also, a great website via twitter with sacred geometry discussed, with images and a lot of detail.

http://www.crystalinks.com/sg.html

Video

Neil Kramer has put together a video of some of his orb experiences, with some explanation within the body of the blog post at the link below:

http://thecleaver.blogspot.com/2009/09/lux-orbis.html

Agnihotra

Those interested in the practice of the Agnihotra should visit the following website:

http://www.agnihotra.org/

If you would like to practice on your own, you can find supplies at and information on how to practice at:

http://www.agnihotrasupplies.com/

Posted in Philosophy | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Non-Ordinary States and Social Revolution

Anger is an ineffective tool for social transformation. It is useful, but in a limited sense. Anger can rile a population up, and fear can open one’s eyes to a fragile reality. As they increase, anger and fear become counter-productive, destructive. And today American society is governed by anger and fear. And the anger-mongering is transparent, it is nauseating.

Blasting the airwaves and cyberspace with vitriol, half-truths, and shallow analysis, Glenn Beck is now mastering the art of populist demagoguery. And yet, the irony is that Beck, like all of the television ranters and talking heads, is a corporate shill, milking the corporate machine for personal gain. This quote from a recent article in Time magazine:

A microphone, a camera, and a polarizing host are all it takes to get the money moving… Extreme talk, especially as practiced by a genuine talent like Beck, squeezes maximum profit from a relatively small, deeply invested audience, selling essentially the same product in multiple forms.

The “deeply invested” audiences of television propaganda have invested too much, and gone too deep. What is required is a counter-action, a motion of equal and opposite force, one that is void of anger and fear. We too are a relatively small, deeply invested audience. As a counter-balance, our work is based on the silence of action.

In the life and work of Stanislov Grof, non-ordinary states shattered the edifice of psychoanalysis constructed by Freud in the early 20th century. It is the non-ordinary state, in the absence of community and civil society, in the absence of an attachment to and dependence on Nature to provide us with our daily needs, that can now pull away the veil of propaganda and half-truths.

Through the swirling vortex of the mandala, the simple and fundamental truths of the human experience can be apprehended, and subjected to irrefutable rules of evidence: experience, intuition, and natural law. Violence is rejected. Fear is abandoned. Ideology is rendered useless. We are connected, fragments of the imagination of a Single Being. Nature is alive.

Awareness flows from the experience of the non-ordinary state, and from awareness flows action. The tools for active social transformation are all around you. Permaculture. Gandhian Economics. Yoga. Use them wisely.

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HMI West Ranch Image Gallery

dsc01920In June of 2008, Frank Aragona and Noemi Castro of Agricultural Innovations traveled to Holistic Management International’s West Ranch learning site.  Again in 2009 I had a chance to visit the ranch.

Located just outside of Ozona, in the heart of West Texas, the West Ranch is a prime example of the difficulties and opportunities ranchers face in this magnificent but rugged landscape.

The image gallery that follows is a selection of photos from these two visits.  The imagery expresses many of the issues that land managers are confronted with in West Texas: oil and gas development, wildlife management, brush encroachment, and biological monitoring.  Read more to view the images. Continue reading

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International Folk Art Market 09

The International Folk Art Market is largest of its kind the in the United States.  Annually held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, artists from all over the world come out to create a small village of international culture, art, and cuisine.  This year we attended for the second in a row.  This initiative is a crucial way to use art as a mechanism of sustainable economic development and cultural exchange.  Click read more to view the gallery.

Continue reading

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