Argh! Touch my sorest points with this question, why don't cha! Hi. I'm new here and very pleased to meet you all who remember each other in this forum. This year one of my most fun toys was drying fruit in the greenhouse. It was too hot for any plants to be in there (my current greenhouse consists of a bunch of sliding glass doors slung together and has one swinging door but no opening window options) so it was plenty warm for drying fruit. I was lucky enough to freebox some stainless steel racks and used those with window mesh both supporting the fruit across the grid of the rack and surrounding it. On top of that I wrapped it with thin cotton. With clothes pins and folded seams I made sure to get a good seal, because the wasps thought it should be theirs. One friend tells me that even so, I should have put all the fruit into the freezer for a while anyway to kill any gnat eggs that might have been laid. It felt good to preserve fruit without using electricity, and even that precaution didn't require any extra use of electricity because I could rotate the fruit through the ice box in the house fridge for the required period of time. If I went vegan, it would be so much easier to wean myself of the refridgerator as well. This year I have allowed myself indulgences. At Shanti Knoll I came to live where there was already a mature diverse orchard, of trees that were producing and trees that were dying as well as trees that were young. Trees in fragile little fencing rings with deer who knew how to lean into those and break them down. Trees that hadn't been watered or tended in a couple of years. A tree in six inches of soil on top of sandstone in one place. The first year, I didn't do anything in the garden. There was too much to comprehend. I learned to watch the seasons. I have grown to love apples. But that was my indulgence. I did not plant an easy and productive apple or plum. Oh no. I used the last of the open spaces within the deer fence for cherry trees. Call me a sweet tooth. Last year I also put on a metal roof on in order to not have to fuss with it again and also in order to collect a good quality water off the roof. Does anyone know about solar water pumps? Long term, I am wanting to fill the tank at the top of the hill from a pond a little ways up from the house using a solar or wind pump. The pond would help with that because then the water wouldn't necessarily have to be pumped at the same time as the rain was falling. It could go into the pond, and over flow from there if necessary, but go up to the tank when the weather or wind provided propulsion. In the meantime, my latest fantasy has a sump pump in a fifty five gallon drum under the down spout, with a float switch so it turns itself on when there is water to pump, and, importantly, off when there isn't! The flaw in this picture is that the pump is submerged in the water and thereby may degrade the quality of the water with petrochemicals. I am watching the last of this year's rain - during which we have obtained only sixty some percent of our usual snowpac. I haven't got this system in place and I am already worried about how the well will hold out. And I've got an electric well-pump. And the house is a three bedroom ranch. And I haven't built any cob structures yet. But last year I did have a three sisters patch going (corn with a few weeks' start, beans climbing them and squash providing shade at their feet), a tomato row that included all heirloom varieties, most from seeds of plants I'd grown here the year before, good beet and chard production, and a nice row of sunflowers. It was actually my best year in that garden and the orchard since I've been here. In the DDT-enriched area, I grew ornamental gourds, to collect the toxin and not be eaten, along with lots of flowers just for pretty and to encourage biotic activity in the soil. Toxins have variable half lives, and the more that's going on in the soil, the faster it will happen. That's my theory anyway. So, yes and no. I have all kinds of potential for living a sustainable lifestyle, but I am using a car to make it possible and only providing a small percentage of my own food. There is work to be done and the tools are at hand. I also made the concession someone else mentioned above - here I think? I read a lot this morning, about having a hand saw but using a circular saw for building raised beds. In the roofing project, power tools have been employed, but more shockingly, chemicals I was ashamed to buy. Sealant city. Okay, that's more than enough info on the state of permaculturalism here on Shanti Knoll. Sorry this got so long-winded. I look foreward to reading stories of current permaculture status form other folks. Happy Late Winter! Jib

Just a few quick remarks for now... Althea, at the moment I don't have an easy online reference for you. I haven't gotten to read the full article and so am waiting before deeper conversations. KT, I agree that sustainability in reference to natural communities or human ones is not particularly new. What is unique is the focus on sustainability within organisms, a newish field of molecular ecology. Dr. Ho and most colleagues at ISSI are geneticists and other molecular scientists and biochemists. Other writings by her and others have criticized biotechnological research as both excessively reductive and simplistic in that the structure and function of genes and their byproducts have large ecological components. In other words, genes operate within an ecosystem. The biotech promoters would rather have us believe that a single gene inserted in a host organisms will generate a single protein product faithfully. In reality there is much uncertainty as geneticists discover insertion of rDNA is neither precise, so predictable, or stable. The ecology of cells tend to rearrange components is ways and for reasons not yet fully understood.

Hi Gary Being spelling challenged myself, I can't really take offense :) We went to the MREA fair 2 years ago -- its was really good. I attended 5 of the free workshops in the tents, and every one was excellent with very good presenters -- tops in their fields. Gary

Hi Moccasinlanding, couldn't agree with this more! Both of my sons live in Mcmansions, and I could live easily on just what they pay for air conditioning in Texas in summer. We have updated our little 70's house with better windows, that has helped a bunch, probably should do something about the insulation but haven't gotten to that yet. Did you get the email I sent you a few weeks ago? How is your kitchen coming along?