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Real Politic versus Satyagraha

The Climate Justice Movement: Standing Rock & EQAT

Essential Questions

• What non violent techniques and strategies were used by the organizers at Standing Rock?
• What non violent strategies are being used by the climate change justice movement?

Readings

• Bill McKibben: How the Many Can Overcome the Ruthless Few
• George Lakey: How a small Quaker group forced PNC Bank to stop financing mountaintop removal
• pages 21-23 of AFSC: We are our own Medicine

Speaker: Judy Winter, volunteer, Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT)

Video: Naomi Klein on the People's Climate March & the Global Grassroots Movement Fighting Fossil Fuels

On Backyard Composting and Where it Might Lead You...

Great compost generates great food

In yesterday's lifelong learning class on Climate Change, we were given an assignment to pick a new category of ways to possibly lighten our respective household ecological footprints.  My group decided that we would see what we could do to make better use of our yard waste, through the possible application of composting.  This effort could help us to reduce our trash volume, cutting down on solid waste going to a landfill; but it could also help to invigorate our backyard gardens, for food or for greenery.

There are lots of types of waste that all typically get thrown into the trash can, headed ultimately to the land fill.  If we make a little more effort to consider the composition of the stuff we bring INTO our households, we can minimize what portion of that stuff ultimately heads back out of our households, in the trash can, headed to a landfill.

Sure, most of us today have curbside recycling; but there are still many materials that can't be recycled through such programs.  Yard waste and other organic materials are usually not accepted by curbside recycling programs.  What to do with such items?  COMPOST them!  The really cool thing about compost is that it allows natural processes to break down materials that we no longer are using, returning these materials as fundamental nutrients for any number of living organisms, small and large. 

There are lots of kinds of compost, and lots of ways to make/manage/use it, once you start to work with it.  All you need to get started are a few things:  a place to make the compost, the materials to make the compost, and the dedication to putting whatever you can INTO that pile of compost.  Once started, a compost pile can work with little "management"; though some forms of management will help it along.  Although there are plenty of ways to make composting very high-tech, with fancy gadgets and gizmos, one of the most beautiful aspects of composting is that it can be super low tech, just letting nature take its course with materials that are meant to be broken down and returned to the earth's natural cycles.

You may be thinking, "But I'm not growing my own organic vegetables...".  The end result of a good compost pile is a fantastic soil enhancement that can be used virtually anywhere that green things are growing:  in your flower bed, on your vegetable garden (or your neighbor's), even spread over your lawn.

There are lots and lots of resources out there on the 'net for a beginner composter.  I would also imagine that most community libraries have resources for composting.  Just to get the ideas flowing, I'll include a couple of links here to consider.  The Do's and Don'ts of Backyard Composting : TreeHugger gives a basic overview of composting, and for a more thorough treatment of the management of food wastes, at the household level and beyond, take a look at CalRecycle's great website for all manners of recycling information.  Their page on Households: Backyard Composting
is excellent, and can serve as a base for further exploration into a number of related topics.  Because I'm a very graphical thinker, I've always found Pinterest to be a great place to explore ideas.  If you search such items as "DIY Backyard Compost", you'll get more info than you can examine in one sitting.

Gardening can involve the whole family

Personally, we started composting our kitchen waste many years ago by adding one of those plastic buckets with a good lid on it, to prevent the food waste from stinking up our kitchen before we got it out to the compost pile.  Although our outside compost pile was initially one of those expensive plastic and foam contraptions that you can buy from several gardening catalogs, we very quickly realized we needed a bigger compost pile. Back in the days before the web, I found a plan for a do-it-yourself three bay compost bin that I assembled in a couple of hours.  I never get tired of seeing how rapidly a pile of discarded yard waste, mixed with the nutritious kitchen scraps like coffee grounds and egg shells, etc., could be magically transformed into a perfect growing medium for any kind of plant (that top image is grown in NOTHING but composted materials from our property).

What started as a way to simply keep all of our organic wastes on our little city lot from adding to the streams of waste headed to the landfill became a full-time passion for composting and building great soil, which lead to an interest in organic gardening, which in due time, lead to organic farming.

Our own compost enriching our growing organic operation

Yes, we ultimately left the city lot, bought a small farm and I gardened on a grand scale for a number of years.  We ultimately added livestock (horses and chickens), as well as bees, to the mix.   Very quickly, our composting operation grew to a point where it was as big as our original city house.  No matter what scale I made compost, the process was the same and the end products were the same.

My first bee yard

But don't let my story of compost scare you.  We are now in the process of completing the cycle of small property to large property, back down to a manageable small property, as we get a little older and don't want to spend ALL of our time managing what goes in, and ultimately what comes out of, the various animals on our farm.  We're in the process of selling the farm and re-establishing ourselves on a city lot, no more than an 1/8 of an acre.  Does that mean that I left behind my organic gardening and my grand composting?

Our latest city garden with 100% compost from our farm

Two months later

Not at all.  But more on that another time.  As I said before, composting can happen at any scale, from a small bucket to many acres.  What really matters is that we all look for opportunities to return to nature all those materials that we borrowed for our own use, so that they may continue to nourish all creatures on earth, now and forever.  And as we look, we never know where those opportunities might lead us.