I don't believe everything I read, that's a simple truism that I think can hold us all in good stead. The broader you source any kind of information the better. But a pretty trusted source I find is the Arch Druid, John Michael Greer, who is always interesting, detailed and thought-provoking in what he has to impart on us. His latest post on Catabolic Collapse I have linked and would be keen to have any of your feedback on what you think.
Having recently finished his book, The Long Descent, I'm always keen to find out what his take is on the ongoing converging crises that we experience and should be all seeing around us; political, financial, societal, environmental and climatic.
I'll add some more links to my page so you can visit his new forum on Green Wizadry... don't laugh, Druidry is quite simply reverence of the natural world, Spiritual Gardening if you will and we can take what we want from it and leave the "hocum". But as this blog's raison d'etre (apologies to the french-speakers out there) is to track the descent of our society, this information is useful.
Enjoy!
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/01/onset-of-catabolic-collapse.html
Thursday 20 January 2011
Tuesday 18 January 2011
Water in the Landscape
Wow, it's January, already. After an bit of a lay off, lets put it down to the excesses of modern Western culture, it's time to knuckle down and get re-focused on what really matters. That's permaculture and feeding ourselves, so hoping to have a productive year of posting... you never know i may even get a guest post here or there in 2011.
1. Consider your impact on each of the three water cycles. Try to determine your level of involvement, use and dependence on each. How do you currently collect and use water in the home and out of doors? What can you do to minimise your water usage and reduce the levels of contaminants entering each of the three systems? How will you increase the number of uses of your water before losing it from your system? Do you purify your waste water before returning it to the environment? If so, how? If not, who does?
In our current setup we collect very little water outside of the primary resource which is being supplied by the local utility company Southern Water. In the home we use water for the obvious, cooking, cleaning (both the dishes and our clothes), washing ourselves (we use shower or sink depending upon how dirty!), washing hands and cleaning teeth. Our garden is the recipient of quite a bit of water as it houses a lot of our food. We currently have but are hoping to expand our water collection ability from one down-pipe water butt to multiple butts or maybe even, if funds allow a semi-buried larger water collection device.
We try to reduce our water usage in a number of common ways; we take showers versus baths and never leave the taps running when doing anything in the sink (shaving, teeth-brushing, dish-washing), adding devices like “hippos” to the toilet cistern to reduce the amount of clean drinkable water that is used with each flush. We water our garden plants at night to minimise water evaporation loss and only ever use the contents of our water butt. Obviously, we can properly mulch our plants so that their water retention is better in the first place, ensuring that the majority of our planting is perennial species as these will use existing water more effectively with their more extensive root systems. Swales have also helped to reduce the need for watering of our plants allowing the water to remain in place and seep down deeper then it normally would.
There are a few ways which we can increase the uses of water that goes through our “system”. We could be using more of the grey water (from washing machine, shower etc) to use on our garden making sure to watch the sodium build up from this water source. At the bottom of our site we could create an informal reed bed that would make good use of this grey water, allowing us to cultivate the reeds and use them as mulch. Or we could even think about a more extensive reed bed filtration system that would return the water from a raw sewage or grey water state into a more filtered state before returning it to the water cycle. The key thing is that we need to be thinking not just about our own needs but that of the water cycle itself and the other people and non-humans that use the water further along the cycle.
We currently don’t filter our water before returning it to the system and on investigation we were disappointed to find the following information from Southern Water, our utility company that supplies our water, on what it does to the water. In summary the water leaving us in the form of grey water and raw sewage is all combined, passes through a gridded piece of metal to remove most of the larger detritus the remaining liquid is simply piped out to sea.
http://www.brightonbusiness.co.uk/secure/assets/BrightonandHoveSummary.pdf
1. Consider your impact on each of the three water cycles. Try to determine your level of involvement, use and dependence on each. How do you currently collect and use water in the home and out of doors? What can you do to minimise your water usage and reduce the levels of contaminants entering each of the three systems? How will you increase the number of uses of your water before losing it from your system? Do you purify your waste water before returning it to the environment? If so, how? If not, who does?
In our current setup we collect very little water outside of the primary resource which is being supplied by the local utility company Southern Water. In the home we use water for the obvious, cooking, cleaning (both the dishes and our clothes), washing ourselves (we use shower or sink depending upon how dirty!), washing hands and cleaning teeth. Our garden is the recipient of quite a bit of water as it houses a lot of our food. We currently have but are hoping to expand our water collection ability from one down-pipe water butt to multiple butts or maybe even, if funds allow a semi-buried larger water collection device.
We try to reduce our water usage in a number of common ways; we take showers versus baths and never leave the taps running when doing anything in the sink (shaving, teeth-brushing, dish-washing), adding devices like “hippos” to the toilet cistern to reduce the amount of clean drinkable water that is used with each flush. We water our garden plants at night to minimise water evaporation loss and only ever use the contents of our water butt. Obviously, we can properly mulch our plants so that their water retention is better in the first place, ensuring that the majority of our planting is perennial species as these will use existing water more effectively with their more extensive root systems. Swales have also helped to reduce the need for watering of our plants allowing the water to remain in place and seep down deeper then it normally would.
There are a few ways which we can increase the uses of water that goes through our “system”. We could be using more of the grey water (from washing machine, shower etc) to use on our garden making sure to watch the sodium build up from this water source. At the bottom of our site we could create an informal reed bed that would make good use of this grey water, allowing us to cultivate the reeds and use them as mulch. Or we could even think about a more extensive reed bed filtration system that would return the water from a raw sewage or grey water state into a more filtered state before returning it to the water cycle. The key thing is that we need to be thinking not just about our own needs but that of the water cycle itself and the other people and non-humans that use the water further along the cycle.
We currently don’t filter our water before returning it to the system and on investigation we were disappointed to find the following information from Southern Water, our utility company that supplies our water, on what it does to the water. In summary the water leaving us in the form of grey water and raw sewage is all combined, passes through a gridded piece of metal to remove most of the larger detritus the remaining liquid is simply piped out to sea.
http://www.brightonbusiness.co.uk/secure/assets/BrightonandHoveSummary.pdf
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)