Thursday, March 20, 2008
Reading materials.
On my list of reading materials at the moment:
Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place
edited by Wes Jackson and William Vitek
Here's a pdf of a particularly inspiring essay. Don't tell the authors. I'm sure that's not legal.
Jackson helps run The Land Institute of Salina, Kansas, which is the source of this study, and the farm it was based upon. Something we've all been wondering is exactly how much energy can a carefully managed site produce? In the attached essay Jackson talks about developing a system for holistic accounting,
And then there's this stuff (the ins and outs of land trusts, an interesting way to protect land from development and to hold land as a nonprofit entity).
And finally, once again, this (or, how to make your cockamamie idea sustainable, at least legally).
Tuesday evening we sat down together and went through, as best we could, the economics of the garden project thus far. We totaled up the costs of the materials we've purchased new, and compared the costs of salvaged materials to purchased ones to see what we saved by reclaiming. I'll make a more detailed post of this information soon.
It's very interesting to document how much this costs. Our accounting was not nearly as holistic as Jackson's. We did not even attempt to calculate sweat equity (the monetary value of the labor hours we've spent in the garden), or the embodied caloric energy of the work (assuming we're still not eating most of our calories from the garden itself, this represents an energy imbalance).
Anyhow, happy reading!
Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place
edited by Wes Jackson and William Vitek
Here's a pdf of a particularly inspiring essay. Don't tell the authors. I'm sure that's not legal.
Jackson helps run The Land Institute of Salina, Kansas, which is the source of this study, and the farm it was based upon. Something we've all been wondering is exactly how much energy can a carefully managed site produce? In the attached essay Jackson talks about developing a system for holistic accounting,
If we must as a future necessity recycle essentially all materials and run on sunlight, then our future will depend on accounting as the most important and interesting discipline. Because accountants are students of boundaries, we are talking about educating a generation of students who will know how to set up the books for their ecological community accounting, to use three-dimensional spreadsheets.This they've attempted to do on the Sunshine Farm,
The main goal of the project is to conduct year-round accounting of energy, materials, and labor on the farm. The aims are to examine whether the Sunshine Farm can provide its fuel and fertility, and to determine how much industrial energy society must provide from sunlight to manufacture the farm facilities, equipment, and inputs.I'm trying to find more information on how this study concluded and how the information was utilized.
And then there's this stuff (the ins and outs of land trusts, an interesting way to protect land from development and to hold land as a nonprofit entity).
And finally, once again, this (or, how to make your cockamamie idea sustainable, at least legally).
Tuesday evening we sat down together and went through, as best we could, the economics of the garden project thus far. We totaled up the costs of the materials we've purchased new, and compared the costs of salvaged materials to purchased ones to see what we saved by reclaiming. I'll make a more detailed post of this information soon.
It's very interesting to document how much this costs. Our accounting was not nearly as holistic as Jackson's. We did not even attempt to calculate sweat equity (the monetary value of the labor hours we've spent in the garden), or the embodied caloric energy of the work (assuming we're still not eating most of our calories from the garden itself, this represents an energy imbalance).
Anyhow, happy reading!
Labels: community, corporate, place, sustainability by the numbers
