These days you don’t need to be stuck. Because there is so much material out there on the Internet, especially in the form of  lectures caught on video. You can search YouTube for just about any topic, and you will find some video where someone explains it.

Just think about the possibilities. Want to see the lecture again? Replay. Got lost in your own thoughts for a while? Stop and rewind. Don’t understand the angle of approach? Find another video where another person approaches the problem differently. Is background information that you are not so familiar with mentioned? Pause the video and look for one that explains the background information. Things that we could not do back in the nineties.

I believe that there is one university has taken this further than any other. And it really comes as no surprise that MIT is it. At the turn of the millennium MIT decided to put their teaching material out on the net free to the world. Yep, that is right, open source education. They named it MIT Open Courseware. You might not earn a university degree just digging into this material, but you sure can learn just as much as a person who holds a degree. And it offers a great opportunity to people in countries with not so strong economies as to have access to state of the art teaching material.

Eventually many other places of higher education around the globe have followed and form what is called the Open Courseware Consortium.

Here you have a video from MIT about the initiative

Links

MIT Open Courseware

The Open Courseware Consortium

Disclaimer

The sites mentioned in the website review category are sites ran by people that do things we find worth mentioning. That their sites are mentioned here, does not imply that the people behind these sites are associated with Green Life Innovators in any way. And it especially does not imply that they publish their information “the open source way”.

Further reading:

• Website review : Green Power Science
• Website review : byexample.com
• Website review : TED Ideas worth spreading
• The brutal end of the growth paradigm
• Website review: World Community Grid

You can see videos about it here

..here..

..and here..

And read more about in on Statkraft’s own pageFurther reading:

• Must see: The transition movement movie
• Website review : Green Power Science
• Understanding peak oil
• Travel report, Philippines September 2009
• The brutal end of the growth paradigm

If you want to know a good approach to a world beyond oil dependency, and if you want to know how local resilience is a step beyond sustainability, then you should spend 20 minutes of your time watching this interesting talk.

In the “Must see” category we pick interesting and inspiring videos that we find on the video sharing sites, mainly YouTube, showing people who are in general not associated with GLI, but say or do things that we believe our readers will find interesting.

Further reading:

• Understanding peak oil
• Must see: A farm for the future
• Must see: Tropical permaculture strategies
• Must see: Richard Heinberg on our post carbon future
• Must see: Carl Sagan 10 years after the making of Cosmos

The answer to this question is that it was half full one minute to twelve. That is what doubling every minute means. If the bacteria could think, when do you think they would start to realize that something was wrong, that they were running out of space, and rapidly so?

These and many other very disturbing questions are asked by Dr. Albert Bartlett, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Physics, University of Boulder Colorado in this lecture named “Arithmetic, Population, and Energy” that you can find in these 8 video clips.

Because bacteria are not the only organisms that have to deal with the effects of exponential growth. Many human phenomena also follow this growth pattern, like population growth, migration, economic growth, consumption of  consumer goods and energy etc. etc.

Might it also be so, that we find ourselves at the time “a couple of minutes to twelve?” Now, a lecture with an old professor in front of a group of students is usually not something you would think about as terrifying. And sure it lacks the extremely graphic images of a war or a terrorist attack, but if you listen carefully and understand what he is saying, you will probably find this video more terrifying than just about anything.

The video does not only show that the human race is in bigger trouble than most people think. It also shows the mathematical fundamentals behind why we will not discover the problems until very shortly before we run into them.

By the way, you don’t need to possess university level skills in mathematics to follow this lecture.

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”

Dr. Albert Bartlett

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If you have a blog or other type of web site, please consider linking to this video. You can use this image as banner for instance by copying this code <a href="http://blog.green-life-innovators.org/2009/11/07/the-brutal-end-of-the-growth-paradigm/"><img border="0" src="http://www.green-life-innovators.org/Banners/OutOfPlanet468x60.jpg"></a>

In the “Must see” category we pick interesting and inspiring videos that we find on the video sharing sites, mainly YouTube, showing people who are in general not associated with GLI, but say or do things that we believe our readers will find interesting.

Further reading:

• Must see: Richard Heinberg on our post carbon future
• Website review : TED Ideas worth spreading
• My aliens told me that your aliens are wrong
• Welcome
• Website review: Open courseware, bringing higher learning to everyone

(This article is also available in Norwegian)

Visit to Katunggan Permaculture Art Farm

I think I start where the trip ended, with the visit to Katunggan Permaculture Art Farm, situated just outside the town of Carcar approximately 45 km south of Cebu City. Our original plan was for both Espen and me to visit the place the last week end before we left, but due to the typhoon Ketsana, some of the ships had to be canceled and Espen was in the end left with the task of getting on his airplane to Africa to get back to his work as marine chief engineer on time.

Joel Lee is the leader of Cebu Permaculture Initiatives.

Katunggan Permaculture Art Farm is operated by Cebu Permaculture Initiatives. Before I went I had the impression from videos I had seen on YouTube that the project was operated by another European in the Philippines. But it was a pleasant surprise to learn that the people behind the project are actually all Filipino.It is always nice to find local initiatives of this kind. The  foreigner I thought was behind it, was Belgian Bert Peeters, whom they use as adviser from time to time. That’s why he appears in their videos. Hence, my misunderstanding. Another foreigner they also use as adviser is the American Dave Deppner, well known for having planted more than 50 million trees, and counting, around the world. There is a link list at the end of this article with links to the webpages of these two gentlemen, and more. The chairperson of Cebu Permaculture Initiatives is Joel Lee. Joel has an ice cream business in Cebu City and it is the profit from this business he now invests in permaculture projects. In addition to the place in Carcar, the Initiative also has Elicon Permaculture café in the heart of Cebu City, and the Kamagayan Green Zone, which is an urban garden situated in walking distance from Elicon. We plan to visit both places in Cebu City on a later occation. But as we were not aware of them before the trip, and therefore hadn’t planned to visit them I also ran out of time before I too had to catch my plane out of the Philippines.

At the Pemaculture Art Farm in Carcar they are not only farming according to permaculture principles. They are also into permaculture aquaculture, planting a mangrove forest in the sea to provide a habitat for marine life, like crabs and fish. These mangroves are the ones that have given the place its name. Katunggan means mangrove in the local language.

The edge of the mangroves. Unfortunately they have found it necessary to protect the trees behind barbed wire in the sea, to keep people from cutting down the trees for fire wood and goat's food.

Sufficient access to water is a very important condition for developing a property so life can thrive there. And a permaculture farm is no exception to the rule. Instead of pumping water up from the ground, a permaculture designer typically asks the question how to stop the water from ending up deep into the ground in the first place. Therefore they have constructed 3 man made ponds on the property, to supply it with water. Later they plan to use solar and wind power to irrigate the rest of the property with water from the ponds. They also plan to combine permaculture with ecotourism and adventure holidays in which the ponds will be used for kayaking, swimming and fishing.

Man made ponds are typical parts of a permaculture project. At Katunggan Permaculture Art Farm, they would like to combine permaculture with ecotourism and adventure holidays. The spider net and the platform you can see on the trees behind the pond are parts of an obstacle course that is part of the adventure holiday concept.

The area of the property is 4 hectare. In addition to the ponds and the mangroves, it also contains a permaculture vegetable garden, a mini forest and an area that is being laid our for ecological rice production. The place will act as a training ground for permaculture, combined with being a resort for ecotourism and adventure holidays.

They also keep bees on the property. When Joel heard that my education is in electronics, he gave me and the Green Life Innovators community a challenge. Apparently a bee colony makes different sounds reflecting the well being of the bees. Joel suggested to build a device that could analyze the sound and thereby being able to remotely monitor the life in a beehive. This would reduce the bee keepers’ needs for manual inspection, as bees have a nasty habit of welcoming such inspections in their own very special way.  I will put out a proposal for how I see such a circuit could be built in principal shortly on our wiki, together with an invitation to the community to take up the challenge.

What is Permaculture?

“In the simplest of terms, permaculture is learning from and partnering with nature ”

Cebu Permaculture Initiatives' Joel Lee with the father of permaculture, Bill Mollison. Photo: Cebu Permaculture Initiatives

Permaculture is a systematic design approach used to construct systems utilizing principles learned from nature. Integrating this principles into a whole laying the foundation for a human habitat, by combining suitable organisms, plants and animals, in an ecosystem that will produce what humans need to live.

The principles can also be used far beyond food production. It is for instance possible to organize people socially according to permaculture principles.

The principles themselves have been known to man for a long time and stem from the time when our ancestors used to live in closer contact with nature. But the first people to make a systematic description of the whole concept in modern time were the two Australians, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the seventies. Please see the link list at the end of this article for further information about permaculture.

Those of you who wish to get in touch with Cebu Permaculture Initiatives can proceed in the following manner:

Elicon Permaculture Café should be the easiest location to find. It is situated on P. del Rosario Street, right across the main entrance to San Carlos Universitety in Cebu City. In Elicon you can also ask if someone would show you the way to the Kamagayan Green Zone nearby.

This is the way to get to Katunggan Permaculture Art Farm in Carcar:

1. Please contact them before you come to agree on a time to visit

2. Take the bus from Cebu South Bus Terminal, direction Carcar and beyond

3. Stay on the bus through the city center of Carcar and to a street crossing called NAPO

4. Exit the bus at NAPO and take a trike (3 wheel motorcycle taxi) down the road that goes to the left at NAPO seen from the direction you traveled to get there.  Go to you see a basketball court on the right hand side. Immediately before the basketball court there is a dirt road into the landscape behind the court. Follow this dirt road until you reach a property protected by a barbed wire fence and a big gate. Then you are there.

How to “make” soil

At Katunggan Permaculture Art Farm they have a deep layer of good top soil. Quite the opposite is the situation on Bantayan Island, where we are based. Many places there, we only have a thin layer of top soil before you come down to the rock. I raised this problem with Joel and asked him if composting would be the way to go about making more biomass. He suggested another approach, namely to plant vegetation that would thrive in spite of the soil not being so rich. One such plant is ipil-ipil. Then the vegetation would serve as pioneer-vegetation, that has the purpose of producing biomass. This is how it works. The vegetation produces biomass from air, water and sunshine through photosynthesis, like all plants do. Some of this biomass turns into soil when the vegetation sheds its leaves for instance.

This is the mind set of a true permaculture designer. Instead of moving in resources from elsewhere they seek to make them locally, through natural processes. Naturally, composting should be used as a supplement to the process, mainly for getting waste back into the cycle again.

The search for other local organizations

We also spent some time while we were there, searching for other local initiatives, whom we might seek friendship and cooperation with. We found one that is called Global Legal Action On Climate Change (please see the link list at the end of the article) that is founded and operated by Filipinos. One of the founders is involved in an initiative named School of The Seas, which happens to be situated on Bantayan Island, where we are based.

We got in touch with him on the net through the web site of Global Legal Action On Climate Change. He told us that we were welcome to drop in on the School of The Seas anytime. So, I went to see them twice, but unfortunately I did not find any people there, neither the first, nor the second time I dropped by. I did, however, stroll the place. It seems to me that they too are doing some permaculture design, although in a smaller scale than the place we visited in Carcar. On the area, I found what I believe to be 2 small man made ponds. They also had a pedal driven compost shredder, made up of the shredder itself combined with an old bicycle. Anyway, we plan to visit them again on a later occasion, when there is “somebody home”. If any of our readers know of other Filipino organizations that we should try to get in touch with, tips are welcome.

Air pollution is a big problem in the Philippines

The trip this time also marks the beginning of a pretty ambitious plan for the future. We would like do make a serious contribution to combat the air pollution problem in the Philippines. The air in the Philippines is really, really dirty. If you scratch yourself on bare skin that has been outdoors for half a day or so, you are destined to have black dirt under your finger nails immediately.

The problem is so huge, that when you look at it you would hardly know where to begin. The main cause is exhaust from cars, motorcycles and boats. They don’t seem to have any restrictions on the emissions from internal combustion engines in the Philippines. To try to start dealing with the problem in this end, would be a too formidable task, though. We would “break our necks” in the attempt if we tried to start there.

On Bantayan Island, where we are based, most people have an outdoor fireplace, like this one where they do the cooking. Hence, cooking over an open fire does not constitute the same health hazard as in the cities, where lack of space often makes it necessary to cook over an open fire indoors. But I would not describe cooking in such an outdoor fireplace as healthy either, just take a look at the layer of soot inside.

Another problem is that they have this habit of burning their garbage on an open fire, even inside the cities. This fills the air with a certain ever present bad smell. You notice it as soon as you leave the airport after arriving. I am pretty sure that if I was blind folded and taken on air trips around to the different countries I have visited, I would be able to tell just from the smell of the air when I had arrived in the Philippines. Of course, after being exposed to this air for a couple of hours you don’t notice any more. The sense of smell works like that.

We could have started our work here, teaching greener way of waste treatment, and some day we will take up on this issue, but this time we chose to start with something else, namely smoke pollution from cooking over an open fire.

Cooking over an open fire, even indoors, constitutes a major health hazard in many developing countries, not just in the Philippines. Each year the smoke from these fires cause many, many cases of respiratory disorders, even death around the world. As we saw when we visited the farm in Carcar people are also, given the chance, cutting down the mangroves that could be put to better use there instead, to use them for fire wood. That is why they have had to put up barbed wire to protect the mangroves. So, methods that would greatly reduce the need for firewood would be highly desirable. One such method is to burn the wood in a so called rocket stove, which burns it cleaner, with less smoke and more efficiently,  so that it does not require so much fire wood. We will look into the rocket stove on future trips as the alternative for days with bad weather, which we experiences a lot of during this trip, I might add. But this time we focused on the nice weather solution, solar cooking.

Solar cooking

CooKit, a panel solar cooker in card board and aluminium foil. We used this as template for our first prototype, but eventually reached the conclusion that the entire design was not suitable for the conditions at our location.

Cooking with the heat from the sun is an obvious choice in a country where there is a lot of sunshine. A typical solar cooker utilizes one or more of the following principles to work:

1. Solar concentrator. using reflectors you can concentrate the energy radiated from the sun into a larger area into a smaller one. You can even use lenses for this purpose.

2. Black thermal mass, typically a black pot.  A black surface absorbs the energy of the sun light more than any other surface. Therefore we typically place a black pot in the solar concentrators focal point.

3. Green house effect. A green house works in the following way. The energy in the sun light that is in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, that is light that we can see, goes through a transparent material. But the radiated heat, in the infrared part of the spectrum does not pass through the wall of the green house, so it is trapped inside and gives an increase in temperature. The cooker in the picture uses an ordinary cooking bag as green house.

Solar cookers come in many shapes, and they are not exactly difficult to make, but we had given ourselves an additional requirement that made it all a lot more challenging. We wished to develop a concept that would make it possible to produce a solar cooker solely from locally available materials and within the limitations given by the economy of the local population. If you click around the Internet, visiting others that are involved in similar projects, you will see that almost all of them presuppose that the production of such devices one way or another should be paid for by money from richer countries. It seems like it is almost a reflex among westerners, every time they come across a situation where there appears to be a shortage of resources somewhere, that the solution is to bring in resources from somewhere else.

You might not get past the point that you have to finance research and development of a concept that way. But when it comes to the production, be it on a large scale or for personal use, we seek to find a solution that does not necessitate someone else, on the opposite side of the world, paying for it. There are many reasons behind this point of view. First of all, reallocation of resources does not really constitute a long term sustainable solution and therefore we should try to minimize it to situations where we want to achieve some kind of transition. We should not make everyday production, after the principles have been made known, dependent upon donations from elsewhere. This is also about empowering people. If we put people in a situation where we expect them to start using some simple technology, as this, and at the same time put them in a situation where they become dependent upon others to pay for it, we would be doing the exact opposite of empowering them.

Cheaper than “4T”

4T is the abbreviation of a rule of thumb that we have named: “Tverback’s triple Tanduay theorem.” This rule of thumb was coined by GLI’s deputy chairman, Espen Tverback, hence the first t. It goes like this. “The willingness among most of the the islanders when it comes to paying for a new household item has a limit. This limit is approximately the price of three bottles of Tanduay rum. ”

Or to put it another way. At the point where you have just enough money to get good friends together for a small party, this tends to become more important than acquiring some new things. The 4T-sentence says nothing about the ability to pay for a new item. This ability is also not very high in general, but not as low as the willingness. Now, three bottles of Tanduay cost approximately 75 pesos, which is roughly 1,5 US$ at the moment. So, it goes without saying that in order to come up with a concept people would be willing to build for materials paid for by their own money, you do need to keep a tight budget. I’ll elaborate some more about some of the typical differences between Filipino and Western points of view later in this article.

Made a prototype…then the sun stopped shining

Compared to the CooKit, developed by Solar Cookers International, that we had found on the net and used as template for our first prototype there was one feature that we decided to abandon right from the start. The CooKit is made out of card board. This might work fine in a hot and dry climate. But the Philippines has an extremely high humidity of its air. I remember the first time I arrived there and got outside of Mactan International Airport outside of Cebu City, one August afternoon in the year 2002. Then I asked myself: “What is this thing that I am trying to breathe, is it soup?”

Thus, we assumed that any card board construction would disintegrate after a short while in the humid air. One of the arguments put forth by the creators of CooKit is that it can be folded and easily transported, but this is really not a big point to our intended users, as most of them usually don’t move around very much. The only situation where the ability to fold it into a smaller shape for transportation is really if it is supposed to be made in one place and brought to another place for use. But, as mentioned before, it is really our goal to develop a concept that can be produced locally.

So, for our first prototype, we decided to make one out of rigid segments made from thin plywood and attached together with fishing line.

Logistics, the major problem

The major problem building anything out in the province in the Philippines is to have everything you need readily available locally. For a small panel cooker, like the CooKit, having some parts to implement the green house mechanism, seems to be imperative, since the area of the reflector itself is quite small. It turned out that this parts were the ones most difficult to get hold of. It is suggested that the CooKit should use cooking bags to implement the green house. The nearest place for us to get hold of those was the nearest big city, Cebu City, 4 hours travel by boat and bus away. There is also the possibility of placing a transparent bowl upside down over the pot to trap the heat inside. But to get hold of one of those we would also need to travel to Cebu City.

“Back too square one”, new design

Eventually we reached the conclusion that we go back to the drawing board and focus on a whole different design than the panel cooker altogether. We think we should better try to avoid utilizing the green house mechanism entirely, as this turned out to be the mechanism where finding parts needed for its implementation was most difficult. Not all solar cooker designs utilize the green house effect, and the typical way to compensate for the lack of it is to increase the area of the reflector.

The materials we used for our panel cooker prototype, plywood, aluminium foild, fishing line and contact glue also made the device almost 4 times as expensive as the limit suggested by the 4T-rule, which also makes it necessary to rethink the design radically.

Now, we think that a parabolic reflector made out of knitted bamboo, might be a better idea. As the reflecting material we still think about aluminium foil. Compared to some of the other components the foil was not so costly and it was locally available. So, even if aluminium, from an environmental point of view, is a product with a rather high embedded energy, we can not think of any better and cheaper alternative for the time being. If some of you readers know of a better alternative, we would love to hear from you.

Now comes the glue. Contact glue, which we used for the prototype, was way too expensive for the tight budget goal we had set. So there we have to think about something completely different. Preferably glue made out of natural materials. After I came back to Norway, my father told me than when he was younger, before so many things were made out of oil, there was something called fish glue. Called so, because it was made out of fish waste. As fishing is very important in the Philippines, this might be a way to go. Again, tips from our readers are welcome.

Living in the Philippines

As I mentioned earlier the average Filipino tends to prioritize a little differently from the typical westerner, when it comes to spending money on something that gives a short term rather than a long term reward. Filipinos just likes to live more for the moment, for better or worse, I might add, that we typically do. Which is also perfectly understandable. When you are the product of the culture of generations that never needed to prepare themselves for a cold season, you can allow yourself not to worry too much about the future without facing unpleasant consequences as a result.

Life also follows a much slower pace there than in western countries. Which is something to keep in mind for all westerners planning to achieve something there, whatever that something may be. If you make a project plan following a schedule anything even remotely close to what you are used to back home, expect to miss your own deadlines big time. Also, be aware that because of the unfamiliar climate, the heat and the humidity, you yourself will tend to slow down and not be as efficient as you are used to.

Interruptions to take part in social activities, to a much greater extent than back home, should also been taken into account. That is if you don’t choose to live, as some foreigners do, in a “protected bubble,” in a parallel society, away from the locals. Which, of course, is not an option for anyone who is there to do some practical environmental work, as we are.

The Philippines was an American colony from 1898 to 1846. Because of this, English is still the official second language in the Philippines. All signs and most other written material is in English and English is widely understood and spoken by the population. So, most people who visit the country and speak English will do just fine. No need to learn any of the local languages. We, however plan to learn it now, after we started GLI. Espen, who has been to the Philippines far longer than I have, already speaks some. I, myself, only understand roughly 100 words or so. In GLI we have, however observed that we need to be able to communicate more with the people that have hands on experience solving practical problems locally. And most of those guys have very limited English skills.

I have to admit that it is a slightly shocking experience to wake up in the morning staring directly into a face like this on the wall next to the bed. But these small guys really live in a symbiotic relationship with man. Our houses provide shelter for them and in return they help us keep the number of annoying insects in the house down. The photo gives no indication of their actual size, but their bodies are roughly as thick as a pencil and they get around 10 cm long in total, tail and all.

Stable Internet access outside of any of the big cities has always been something I have been missing in the past. Now, finally it seems like we have a satisfactory solution in the shape of something called Smart Bro, mobile broadband. It is a neat little modem in a USB dongle, that we use to connect to the Internet.

But once again, we were reminded of one of the biggest collective errors of the human race. When the market chose Microsoft as the world’s de facto supplier of operating system. Mobile broadband is supposed to be “always on”. That is it isn’t really always on, it just uses the radio channels in the mobile network on demand. But this fact should be transparent to the users, and it should look like you were  continuously connected. But, of course Windows Vista did not handle this correctly, as one has come to expect from Microsoft. Every time the modem had not been communicating over the radio for a while, we lost the IP connection in Windows, even if the modem reported to be connected. So, we tried a little trick to have a little data traffic going on in the background all the time, running ping in a command window in the background, and that solved the problem.

After I started to work as a self employed in the beginning of the year 2008, I have thrown every piece of Microsoft software out of my laptop and out of my life. Everything except the operating system itself. I still run Windows Vista on my laptop. The sole reason that I have not thrown windows in the garbage with the rest is that I still encounter some hardware now and then that I need to use, but where the manufacturer has not made a Linux driver. The Smart Bro modem, that I just mentioned was one example of such a “no Linux driver yet”-device.

But one day, ONE day, I will travel the world without Bill Gates-ware as companion. That is a dream of mine.    

The road ahead

Green Life Innovators was founded on October 1st 2008. We could celebrate our one year anniversary the very same day as I visited Carcar. We have an ambitious vision and that is that our webpages will become to open source green tech what sourceforge is to open source software.

Regarding the projects in the Philippines, we will continue those. Espen will go back and forth between his work as a marine chief engineer and the Philippines until the summer of 2010. I will try to return as soon as I can, but exactly when that will happen depends on how much sponsor support we can get for GLI in the near future. We are right now inviting companies working with environmentally friendly technology in our home country, Norway, in particular to support us. Of course, sponsors from other countries are also more than welcome

We also hope that as many as possible will join GLI, and take part in the great collective brain storm for which our pages are meant to act as tools. It does not cost anything to become a member. And it is easy. Just sign up for a username and password on our main page and you are in.

And if you found this article interesting, which we assume you did, if you have read this far, please take some time sharing it with your friends. A little further down this page you can find a tool that helps you share it on many different social media as well as through email. Please help us reach out to more people with our vision, by spending a couple of minutes of your time sharing it. Thank you, in advance, and thanks for reading.

Links

The Project Page

Wow Bantayan, a page about Bantayan Island

Cebu Permaculture Initiatives

Katunggan Permaculture Art Farm, Carcar

Kamagayan Green Zone, Cebu City

Elicon Permaculture Café, Cebu City

The Cebu Permaculture Initiatives på YouTube

Global Legal Action on Climate Change

Wikipedia on permakultur

Videos Bill Mollison, permaculture, del 1, del 2, del 3

Bill Mollison’s home page

Bill Mollison on YouTube

David Holmgren’s home page

David Holmgren on YoutTube

Bert Peeters’ Cabiokid Foundation

Dave Deppner’s Trees for the future

Integrated solar cooking

Solar cookers international

Solar cooking archive

Solar cookers on YouTube

Rocket stove videos on YouTube

CIA World factbook : Philippines

Further reading:

• GLI Philippines Tour 2009, Sept 13th-October 2nd
• Save the wood burning stove for rainy days
• Made to break or last?
• Must see: A farm for the future
• Website review : byexample.com

A simple panel solar cooker

The goal

The main purpose of the trip is to start the first phase of the project teaching integrated solar cooking, using a panel solar cooker as the main cooking device and a so called rocket stove as the backup solution for rainy days and with a hay basket or heat retention cooker as a possible supplement. Indoor smoke pollution from cooking over an open fire is a big health problem in the Philippines, like in most other developing countries. In a time when people are very concerned about big environmental issues, like everyone’s global carbon footprint, it is easy to forget about the little things that people do to pollute their environment. But we should concentrate on green solution both big and small, and this is a relatively small one, but one which may have a big impact in the quality of life of those switching to solar cooking.

Important not to be too ambitious

Having been to the Philippines several times before both Espen and I know from experience that things tend to work slower, much slower, in that country than we are used to back home. Thus, it is important not to make too ambitious plans as to what one plans to achieve during a period of 3 weeks.

During my visit this time we therefore plan the following:

1. Teaching a group of locals to make the panel solar cooker
2. Looking for suitable natural local materials for the rocket stove
3. Looking for natural materials to replace the cardboard and glue of the panel solar cooker
4. Visit a permaculture project south of Cebu City

Another thing that often fails to work to western standards in the Philippines is the communication infrastructure. Sometimes we can be without Internet access and/or electricity for a couple of days out in the province. It used to be much worse a couple of years ago, but the situation is still far from good. Green Life Innovators has the possibility to even stream live video from our events, but I seriously doubt it if we get a chance to do that. So the main ways of keeping our readers up to date during the tour will be Twitter and this blog.

The location

The place where we will go is a small island, named Bantayan Island. It’s located in the Cebu province, a little to the north west of the north tip of Cebu Island, for those of you who know a little about the geography of the Philippines. The island is fairly popular with tourists but far from the tourist magnet as places like Boracay. The main sources from which people make a living on the island is fishing and egg production. The island has been named “the egg basket of the Visayas.” The Visayas is the name of the middle region of the Philippines.

Visiting a permaculture project

We have been talking to the people behind the Cebu Permaculture Initiatives about dropping in for a short visit during the stay, to have a look at what they do to implement permaculture in the Philippines. I hope to return to their site for a longer period of training later. Their site is located south of Cebu City. At the time of writing they have responded that it would be cool if we paid them a visit, and we have agreed to agree on the exact date when my trip is getting a bit closer. Here are  two of their videos. Enjoy!

Follow our tour on this blog, on Facebook and on Twitter

Green Life Innovators recently signed up for a Twitter account at http://twitter.com/GreenLifeInno. We will start twittering during the Philippines tour and continue to use Twitter afterwards. So please follow us on Twitter if you want to keep yourself up to date with what we do. And please notify your Twitter network and your network on other social media, like Facebook, too.

Follow Green Life Innovators on Twitter

Links

The 3D cooking project on our wiki
The Cebu Permaculture Initiatives YouTube channel
Wow Bantayan, an Internet site targeting tourists to Bantayan Island
Follow the Philippines tour 2009 on Twitter
Follow the Philippines tour 2009 on Facebook

• Save the wood burning stove for rainy days
• Travel report, Philippines September 2009
• Website review : Green Power Science
• Website review : TED Ideas worth spreading
• Are solar cells the solution to the energy crisis?

I think it is safe to say that whoever was born before 1980 and never heard about the Cosmos series, has probably missed out on the most important educational tv-show of all times. Cosmos was made when the cold war was still very much a hard reality. And I especially remember Carl Sagan talking about the importance of a civilization surviving its own technological puberty. I believe that is a very good way of putting it. Maybe civilizations are like teenagers, some don’t get past puberty, because they risk too much and get themselves killed in a “traffic accident.” What will be the faith of the human civilization? Today, facing the end of cheap fossil fuel, with a population way too large to sustain without some major achievements, we are once again reminded of Carl Sagan’s words, that we as a species owe our survival not only to ourselves, but to the Cosmos vast and ancient, from which we stem.

In the following video Carl Sagan shares some reflections he made 10 years after the making of Cosmos

Links

Wikipedia on Carl Sagan
The Carl Sagan Portal
Cosmos
The science network, “Sharing Carl Sagan’s vision of science as a candle in the dark”
More Carl Sagan videos

In the “Must see” category we pick interesting and inspiring videos that we find on the video sharing sites, mainly YouTube, showing people who are in general not associated with GLI, but do things that we believe our readers will find interesting.

Further reading:

• Must see: Richard Heinberg on our post carbon future
• Understanding peak oil
• Must see: Transition movement’s Rob Hopkins on TED-talks
• Must see: A farm for the future
• Must see: Tropical permaculture strategies

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the “Must see” category we pick interesting and inspiring videos that we find on the video sharing sites, mainly YouTube, showing people who are in general not associated with GLI, but do things that we believe our readers will enjoy watching.

Links

http://www.richardheinberg.com/

Post carbon instituteFurther reading:

• Must see: Carl Sagan 10 years after the making of Cosmos
• Understanding peak oil
• Must see: A farm for the future
• Must see: Transition movement’s Rob Hopkins on TED-talks
• Must see: The transition movement movie

You can hardly open a newspaper or visit a news web site this week without being bombarded with news about Michael Jackson’s death. Superstars, celebrities in music, film and sports, people that become rich beyond most people’s wildest fantasies by entertaining us, have been with us for a couple of generations now. Long enough for people to think that they have always been there. Looking at the economic climate in which they emerged it is obvious that they are products of an industrialized society. Hence, they are really one of the results of us burning large amounts of fossil fuel.

A couple of days ago, I wrote an entry in our Norwegian blog, claiming that the end of cheap, abundant fossil fuel might mean the end of superstars as we have come to know them, and that the death of Michael Jackson might very well mark the beginning of the end of superstars. As a result, someone calling himself “musician” seemed to get quite offended by my writings and wrote a comment that “I better learn the music business before I wrote one more word” That is, of course, more than just a little beside the point. Since this isn’t really about the music industry, or the film industry, or sports. Energy deprivation does not apply to any one business in particular, and one needs not know all the inns and outs of every business to see that it will, indeed, affect them all.

Musicians, actors and athletes certainly did not enjoy a status as superstars before the industrial age. Sure we had musicians and composer, like Mozart, and we had actors and play writers, but they did not all live like kings and they were not known world wide in their life time. I guess you could call Mozart a superstar of his time, but he and other pre industrial era superstars lacked most of what constitutes a superstar as we know them. When it comes to sports, superstars or stars of any kind seem to have been unheard of before the industrial age.

Dr. Colin Campbell compares the energy used in the world’s machinery to having 22 billion slaves working for us 24-7. A fraction of these slaves can be replace by sustainable energy solution, but probably far from all of them. That means that the human race will need to prioritize in the future. Is lifting entertainers to stardom and great wealth something that man will prioritize beyond peak oil? Personally, I neither hope, nor believe, that it is.

Further reading:

• Made to break or last?
• Sometimes a machine might not be the best solution
• Must see: Tropical permaculture strategies
• Are solar cells the solution to the energy crisis?
• The brutal end of the growth paradigm

Dear fellow techies, especially you green ones

If you are a little bit like me, then every time you see a problem the immediate hunch is to think: “how can we use a machine to solve that?”

Before we dive into this line of reasoning and start drawing up our requirement specifications for a system, there are a couple of questions that we don’t often ask, but maybe should start asking ourselves.

The first question is: “Do we really need to do this at all?” Some issues are not really problems when you think about it, we have just been accustomed to see them that way. When you think about it, it isn’t really a problem if you don’t at all times possess a cell phone with all the latest features, but a large number of people, nevertheless, seem to perceive it that way.

Of course, there are those cases that are not only perceived as problems, but constitute real problems. If you are a living organism, that does not happen to be at the bottom of a food chain and, hence, not fortunate enough to master the art of photosynthesis, then a shortage of nutrition is of course a very real problem. As you are all aware of, homo sapiens finds itself in quite the opposite end of the food chain than those organisms that master photosynthesis. And no matter where you are in a food chain, a shortage of water is bad news.

Many countries, especially in the third world, are quite dry. Every time it rains, it does not take long before the water is sucked up into the dry ground. But it does not disappear into nowhere. It is down there if you dig deep enough to get to it. Thus, we consider digging wells. Actually, quite a large number of humanitarian organizations world wide, seem to be raising funds to do just that, dig wells.

Now, once you have dug or drilled a well, it is the matter of getting the water up to where you want to make use of it. If its supposed to be used for irrigation, then the typical solution would be to install a pump. The green tech solution would typically be a pump driven by wind power. The not so green tech solution would maybe be one driven by a diesel engine.

What if we asked ourselves, before we started, if a well and pump solution is the best solution at all? What if we asked ourselves if, rather than getting the water up from deep down in the ground, we should think of a solution to keep some of the rain water from ending up there in the first place? With some alteration to the terrain and the right mix of vegetation, it is actually possible.

I still consider the approach a design and engineering solution, but it is engineering and design by natural means rather than machines. Sometimes that might be the best.

Further reading:

• Website review: World Community Grid
• Are solar cells the solution to the energy crisis?
• Travel report, Philippines September 2009
• My aliens told me that your aliens are wrong
• Made to break or last?