Skyhouse Community

I’ve been following the blog Gas 2.0 recentlyas I’ve been doing research on electric vehicles and alternative fuels and they do a great job of giving the latest news.

They had a recent post on how the hairs on ferns that help it shed water could be used to make boats more fuel efficient, potentially saving as much as 1% of the fuel used worldwide!

Since I know Jacob loves biomimicry, I thought he’d want to read the article so I figured I’d share it with everyone. Here’s a link to the blog post.

Our own Jacob Corvidae  is being honored with two different awards for Earth Day this year the Detroit FreePress Awards and the Michigan Earthday Expo awards.

The Freep says:

Its leadership is important because of its close affinity with small, fragile communities across Detroit. Where government has been tedious and bureaucratic, where private companies have been inconsistent and distant, WARM has been accessible and relevant.

And don’t miss the slideshow in the FreePress article.

Rock on Jacob!

Dan here, writing the weekly column on the happenings at DR. Well, the season is really ramping up this week at Dancing Rabbit. I said yesterday that it seems like we've already had a month of summer and we haven't even celebrated May Day yet. Normally that's when the season seems to kick off. And it's not just because of the weather. Maybe it's because we already have work exchangers and have had so many events recently.

We are now standing on the verge of another visitor season, when things get really busy and the level of activity doubles at least. Yes, this is the time when groups of interested people come to spend time at DR, and we show them how things work and how we live so hopefully they will decide to come join us. To prepare ourselves mentally Coach Hot Dog (aka Nathan) led the Second Annual Visitor Season Pep Rally. He whipped us into shape and raised our DR spirit so that we would have the energy to give our visitors the warm welcome they deserve. He was backed up by our Dancing Rabbit Cheerleading Squad (probably didn't know we had one, did you?), which mostly consisted of Nani and Jennifer. Apparently there were several others at the cheerleading tryouts earlier in the week, but they chickened out at the last minute. Then the rally was wrapped up with an inspirational speech based on the Gettysburg Address by Thomas, who was channeling the ghost of the late great Babraham Lincoln. Don't ask. Needless to say, we were somewhat inspired and definitely entertained.

Hi all. This is Alline reporting the latest doings at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. As I write this the sun is shining, and everything is green, green, green! We knew it was truly spring when Tom shaved his beard, when Ziggy began watering the strawberries on his living roof, and when the robins started shouting, um, I mean singing, each morning at 5:00 a.m. 

With the lovely weather everyone who has ever even considered having a garden has been busy digging in the dirt. I’ve seen Adrienne making numerous trips with the wheelbarrow down to the Osage Garden, and watched Alyssa take a tray of seedlings out to the Sunflower garden for planting. Sharon and Dennis have been mulching and composting like crazy in preparation for the garden at the site of their new house, and Cob and Meadow keep planting berry bushes as they arrive. Tom and Tereza went away for a few days but first arranged to have someone look in on their seedlings (as any good parent would do). BJ and Nani continue to encourage their nine varieties of okra seedlings. I’m sure that any day now Ted and Sara will produce the first tomato of the season and we’ll all be consumed with tomato envy (OK, I’m exaggerating a bit, but…). In other gardening news we were excited to hear that Dan has been approved for a grant from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service for a hoop house, which will enable him to extend the growing season on whatever fabulous things he decides to grow this year.

On Sunday we had a freakishly blustery storm which took part of the roof of Maikwe’s house and blew it into a tree. Fortunately about 25 Rabbits came to the rescue and put up a tarp, and everyone was OK. Whew!

I’ve been doing a bunch of research lately on electric vehicles to see what might make sense for us at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage for our vehicle co-op. For 12 years we have been focusing on biodiesel and vegetable oil based fuels but things have not always been smooth. The main issues have been related to winter fuel gelling and fuel filters clogging in general. We’ve also never gotten a steady system for  collection of used oil and production going, so we have been using biodiesel made from new veggie oil which is only marginally better for the environment than petroleum.

We are now embarking on a major re-evaluation of vehicle technologies for our co-op, with a team researching things like electric vehicles, hybrids, ethanol (including home made, potentially from cellulose), bio-gas, wood-gas, human and animal powered, and any new technologies in the veggie oil world.

My interest in electric vehicles (EVs) has come out of my research into a village-wide electric power co-op with a largish wind turbine to power our whole village. With an abundant source of renewable electricity, EVs could be our most ecological option. There are ecological issues related to batteries of course, but my research shows that EVs are a net benefit over petro based vehicles and on par with other bio-fueled options currently or soon to be available (more on that in a post soon).

This post is part of sustainablog’s fundraising blogathon for Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage – please consider making a donation.

Never underestimate the ability of completely erroneous information to propagate itself on the internet, especially if it makes for good headline material.

As I was doing some research on the ecological impact of the internet I kept coming across references to how two Google searches creates more carbon than making a pot of tea and how the internet uses almost 10% of the electricity in the US and may some day account for 50%. From what I can tell all of these are gross exaggerations and I won’t even bother linking to them.

The first issue is that some reports attribute all the energy used by home computers to the impact of the internet. While its true that the internet has probably increased the number of home computers and the amount of time spent on them, its hard to tell how much to attribute to the internet. Plus, more computer use has often meant less time in front of a TV, which maybe balances things out. I personally think its best to separate home computer impact and the impact of servers and internet infrastructure. See my post on reducing your computer’s eco impact for more on the former.

How Much Electricity Does the Internet Use

The internet is very electricity intensive. There are millions of servers that run 24/7 to provide us with all those billions of web pages and emails. These servers are generally collected together in ’server farms’ which then require air conditioning to keep them from overheating.

Biking for the Blogathon

For today’s blogathon-fundraiser we are trying to power our computer via pedal power but pedaling is certainly not the answer to all of our energy needs. America’s electricity use per capita is over 35 kilowatt-hours per day. If you wanted to supply all that energy via pedal power, each person would need to bike at full speed for 118 hours per day. In other words it would take the entire population of the US and China pedaling 24/7 to generate enough electricity for the current US demands. Or…

Conservation is almost always a key element to meeting our needs in a sustainable way. Before we look at alternative power or fuels it is best to look at reducing our demands. Once we are consuming less, sustainable sources of power are a lot more realistic.

How you can reduce your computer’s power consumption

Your average desktop computer uses between 150 and 300 watts while it is running. Your first step in conserving energy is to turn off your computer when you are not using it or at least make sure that its power management settings are configured to have it sleep or hibernate when it is not in use. It used to be that people worried about wearing out disk drives from turning computers on and off, but that is not really an issue any longer, given modern drive technology and the typical lifespan of a computer these days. This is the most important thing you can do to save power – make sure your computer is sleeping or off when you are not using it.

Today there is  a blogathon happening at Dancing Rabbit. Its a fundraiser so please consider donating to Dancing Rabbit.

We’ve been promoting the blog as being Pedal Powered but the company that was supposed to ship us the pedal powered generator never shipped the product! Annoying…

So last night I went into McGyver mode to see if I could come up with some way to power the blog with a bicycle. I had less than 24 hours, so I had to use what was on site or could maybe go to an auto parts store (in the end I didn’t have to). Here’s what I came up with:

First I found an old training stand and mounted my bike on it.

Bike Mounted on Training Stand

Then I found an old cordless drill that I hadn’t used in years because it wouldn’t go in reverse. I hooked up some wires to where the battery would connect and then connected it to the training stand.

Cordless Drill For Bike Generator

Then I found a pocket inverter that would convert 12 Volt Dc to 120 Volt AC and hooked that up to the wires coming from the drill.

Hi everyone. This is Alline with all the news that’s fit to print (and then some!) from Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.

On Wednesday Bob celebrated his birthday in the traditional Rutledge way with coffee and donuts at Zimmerman’s. We’re not sure exactly sure which one of the Rutledge Renegades started this custom, but we sure like it!

Amy and Juan’s son Jolyon also had a birthday this week. It was his first, and he had the parties to prove it! Joly’s grandparents came from New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Minnesota and a great-grandmother, lovingly nicknamed “Chiquita,” came all the way from Argentina. Involved in the celebrations were three cakes, lunch at the Mercantile, several hundred balloons, and a time capsule for him to open in twenty years. The time capsule proved to be especially thought-provoking – what kind of technology will we have in twenty years, and what would be the most appropriate medium with which to communicate? Joly seemed just has content with a tea strainer as with his new wood train, puzzle and books, and charmed everyone with his sunny personality. He told me that he had a great time, and is looking forward to turning two.

So it was another smashing good week at Dancing Rabbit. The cloudy weather continued throughout the week keeping us in low power and restricted in our lifestyles. It seems like we went from bitter cold winter to now having a string of nights without freezing temperatures and with lots of rain. The weather has made this a poor maple sugaring year as the sap hasn't been running much. The mud pit that is DR in the spring deepened with the warm weather and made for difficult maneuvering within the village and out on the gravel roads. We had to have a load of rock dropped in front of the machine shed so we could park our vehicles without getting them stuck in mud. Some friends of Brian Toomey got stuck on the western section of Woehrle and when our 4WD truck was sent to the rescue it got stuck as well.

Hi friends! This is Alline writing this week for Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.

As the snow melts the mud appears, we try to maintain good attitudes as we glop about in the International Mud Headquarters. UPS and FedEx will no longer come down our road because it is so very muddy, rutted and not for the faint of heart. Fortunately Charlie, our USPS mail carrier, is made of sterner stuff – a little mud doesn’t faze him, and we find mail in our mailboxes each day. Thanks Charlie!

Not to worry about us though – we have our trusty 4WD truck, and we know how to use it. There is something very empowering about plowing through seemingly impassable mire. Perhaps we are once again proving that since we don’t have television we are very easy to entertain.

Nani, Elle and Jen have gone traipsing off to North Carolina ostensibly to bring Jeff home; however, I suspect that the lure of a warmer clime was also a motivator. We expect them back any day. Friends of the Carletons, Bonnie Marciante and her son Ben, arrived for a 10-day stay, and we are delighted to see them again. The result of Ben’s arrival has been a roving herd of boys running around the village (Duncan, Ben, Morgan, Enzio, and sometimes Morgan and Ewan) playing with obnoxious (to me) but beloved (to them) toys called Bionicals. Bionacals are apparently plastic Lego robotish things with names like Takanuva and Lesovikk. They have claws, wings, and (re)moveable parts. Wild stories and plots, alliances, attacks and triumphs seem to be part of the imaginative play. Clearly 52 year-old women are not the target audience; the boys, though, are captivated, and spend hours creating (and destroying) civilizations.

Ted here with this week's news from Dancing Rabbit.

My week began with an unexpected twist. Aurelia and I, headed back from a weekend wedding in Florida on our first trip together without Sara, made it as far as Quincy on the train from Chicago, only to find that the latest bout of falling snow meant our ride couldn't make it to ferry us home. Our truck, which might have made it, happened to be in the shop for a brake job. We stayed the night in a hotel, and I must confess I felt a sadness to be so close to home yet still stranded, particularly after having spent the previous day building sandcastles on a Gulf coast beach, but Aurelia stayed buoyant throughout, raising my spirits. We passed the hours reading book after book in the local library until Sara had raised some of our neighbors to plow the road so that a car could be sent for us. It was a short trip all in all, but I couldn't recall having been more glad to be home at last. Thanks to our friends with plows, and Sara for her rescue work!

The delay meant that I'd missed the final day of our retreat, which was sad, but most business was wrapped up satisfactorily, and each villager was soon back at his or her winter routine, sunlight slowly melting the accumulated snow cover and keeping spirits high.

Sara and I celebrate our birthdays back to back each February, and Sara celebrated hers in part by joining in on a workshop Tuesday afternoon on a Chinese medicine-based therapy called Tui-Na. This is one of the primary therapies Tamar has pursued in her healing process, and to which she attributes her excellent progress in healing from cancer. Tamar had invited a practitioner of Tui-Na from Fairfield, Iowa to come down and lead the workshop. All attendees I spoke found the workshop valuable, and I was glad to see our abilities to maintain health and wellness in the community growing deeper.

Aloha All, Nani from Dancing Rabbit. We have had a great week.

Fun and hard work were our themes at Dancing Rabbit this week. Many of us worked hard at having a ton o fun, while others had fun working hard at our annual retreat. Our second week of retreat meetings went very well. We accomplished a great deal of work in a relatively short period of time. We laughed, we cried (I believe there was some onion chopping at some point), and we reached consensus. Having more of our friends back home was a treat as it always is.  The saddest update is that the 15-foot snow creation from two weeks ago could not take the heat any longer - during one of our very productive meetings, our snow man (or woman) lost his/her head. The good news is that since the meltdown a double-sided snow being has arisen. Our new sculpture was double sided and very artistically done. And then…it snowed even more and where once there were faces on our snow person, there is fuzziness! The Yeti has come to town.

Nathan being home again has brought back more sledding in our lives. Our kids and big kids have been carving some serious sled snow at Vista De La Moo. Please pardon me if my snow lingo isn’t quite right, but they looked like they were having some serious fun up there. Speaking of fun, it’s been funny listening to stories about cars getting stuck on our crazy roads. It is only funny because everyone involved made out all right. I really enjoy hearing stories about how people get out of their fixes. Those that are able to drive despite the weather are like shiny heroes to me, it’s absolutely amazing to this warm weathered woman that they can get anywhere in the heavy snow. However, even my best and brightest heroes have had to push cars to the side and walk home. We have great friends and neighbors here though, as our roads have been plowed. Yay! Perhaps we'll go to Zimmerman’s cafe tomorrow?

Hi friends. This is Alline writing for Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.

This week can be summed up in two words: snow and retreat.

While the storm that hit the Northeast Missouri area was not nearly as dramatic as the one that Washington DC received, it felt pretty big to us. It snowed, and snowed, and then snowed some more. And then it STILL kept coming. While many Rabbits are tired of it (particularly the parents who, twice a day, have to drive the kids to the blacktop to catch the school bus) I remain completely, utterly besotted with snow. Perhaps it comes from growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where, if we wanted snow, we had to drive for four hours. Additionally, I am still slack-jawed at the beauty of each individual snowflake – as a child, carefully folding up paper and cutting “snowflakes,” I could not imagine that this was a fairly close approximation of what they really looked like. If you see me standing outside in a snowstorm staring at my arms and my hands, please remember that I have not gone ‘round the bend, I am merely appreciating snowflakes!

For the sake of our power systems and the batteries that store our electricity, I am glad to see sunshine and blue sky out my window today. The reflection of the sun off of the snow is especially powerful, and it is fun to watch the charge go up, up, up!

Hey Everyone! Dan D writing to give you your weekly update on the happenings at Dancing Rabbit. After many weeks without sunlight and the common house being on black power-meaning we were basically in a blackout- for about a week, we were happy to get a stretch of sunlight to recharge our batteries and recharge our enthusiasm for getting out of bed in the morning. We need winter activities to keep us going and though some of them are dependent on power, many are not. There is a lot of reading and planning for the season going on.

I've really been enjoying the garden club meetings we are having. It's been nice have a group of people to bounce ideas off and share gardening wisdom. It gets you thinking about spring, when the world is once again green and full of life. Many of our seed orders have already been placed and in the next few weeks some of us will be starting seeds indoors. The garden club is planning a couple of field trips for future meetings. We are planning a field trip to Sandhill's greenhouse to see what kinds of crops they are growing during the winter and what their plans are for it this spring. Also, one of these weeks Alyson from Red Earth Farms is going to show us a hands on demonstration of her use of round hay bales to sheet mulch a new garden area. And sometime soon I will be talking about seed saving basics so that gardeners can plan their seed saving efforts for this season. The idea for the club came from garden clubs that have been started in recent years in Britain to bring together “allotment” (called community gardens here) gardeners to share knowledge and build enthusiasm for gardening. Apparently with the economy in the state it's in, vegetable gardening is becoming much more popular as people try to grow more of their food themselves.

At Dancing Rabbit we have been using consensus to make decisions since our inception. In consensus, decisions must be agreed to by all members of the group, with any member being able to block a decision. In practice, we now delegate a lot of decisions to committees and managers, such that the group is only called upon to make larger policy decisions.

We are at a stage where we are considering moving away from consensus to some other form of decision making. Discussions are in the preliminary stages, but one of the desires for a new system is to allow for better delegation and more streamlined management (at least some people express this desire).

It’s gotten me thinking about delegation and management and what it means to make good decisions on behalf of the group. I’ve started to realize that their are deep questions embedded here that touch on what it means to have good governance in almost any system.

How then do we define a good decision, or good management?

In a consensus organization, I would propose that a manager makes a good decision when she or he makes a decision that is essentially in line with what the group would have made if it had used its full consensus process. Another way to say this is that, if given a review by the membership, no-one would block that decision from moving forward.

Making such decisions is not always easy. It involves not just having good judgment on the topic at hand but also a strong sense of the group’s values and how to weigh them when making a decision. In a group that is functioning well, and with a manager who engenders trust from the group, the group will generally give them the benefit of the doubt as it takes a lot of effort and spending of social capital to object to a manager’s decision. So the manager does not need to be perfect, just make sure their decisions are within the threshold of the groups tolerance and/or passivity.

This started as a comment on Jacob’s Obama post but became so long I thought it deserved its own post.

I too have been noting the left’s frustration with Obama and I too feel some frustration but I imagine it is for different reasons.

First, some background. In the general election, I voted for Obama for a number of reasons:

1. I felt he was a better choice than McCain, by far — both in terms of policies and ability to govern.

2. He was not a Republican. Some may not see much difference between Democrats and Republicans but I feel like on a million little things it makes a big difference. Look at how differently the EPA is, or who gets appointed to the Supreme Court, or things like the Global Gag Rule. The stuff might seem minor but I actually think who fills the cabinet positions and makes executive orders makes a big difference.

3. I actually like Obama and think that he and I would agree on a lot of issues (not that he’ll be able to implement them as policy though).

4. He is an amazing orator and does a great job of inspiring people. I think these are positive traits in and of themselves but I’m also saying that I too got caught up a bit in his charisma and at times had high expectations.

In some ways though, a better question is why I voted for Obama over Hillary in the primaries. Aside  from the toss up question of which was more of a cultural step, electing a woman or an African American, my main reason for voting for Obama was that his style fit my values more.

Experienced Organic Gardener Wanted at Skyhouse

Our organic vegetable gardens Do you love to grow organic food?

Do you want to garden with friends and share the fruits of your labor at every meal?

Would you like to experience community life in an off-the-grid, sustainable ecovillage?

If you answer yes to these questions, then you should be interested in this work exchange opportunity.

Come Garden with Us

Skyhouse is looking for an experienced gardener to join us in growing food for our table for the 2010 season. Our ideal person would have some experience in growing organic vegetables and interest in fermentation, dehydrating and canning. We are looking for a gardener from April to November (shorter positions may be available). Ability to work independently and collaboratively a must. We have currently been growing and storing most of our vegetables for our group of approximately 8 and hope to continue that this year.

In exchange for your work in the garden we would provide organic vegan meals, tenting accommodations, and basic expenses. You'd also help out with cooking, cleaning and other rotational chores and could of course join in with other work that interested you (food processing, natural building, etc.)

Skyhouse is a small income-sharing communal group within the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. In many ways you would be joining both communities for the duration of your stay and would be part both of our tight-knit household and our ecologically focused village. While Skyhouse is a small group now we are looking to grow so long-term membership is also an option.

For more information see http://www.dancingrabbit.org/social_change/interns-organic-gardening-sky...

For an application Contact Dancing Rabbit.

I was reading fivethirtyeight and saw this interesting graph showing how liberal and conservative the democrats and republicans were in each state legislature.  (Dems are blue and left is more liberal.)

It was interesting, but not at all surprising that where I live  in Missouri the Democrats are fairly right leaning but I was surprised to see that the Republicans were the 4th most conservative in the country.

Even more surprising is that the most conservative republicans are found in California! Talk about polarized – they have the most liberal Dems and the most conservative GOP. No wonder they can never pass a budget.

And whats up with Rhode Island where both parties are left of center and only a hairs breadth apart. There must be a story there.

There are certain times of year when I find myself more aware of the differences between how and where I choose to live and the other choices I might have made. This week was one of them.

A week at a time of cloudy weather is not terribly uncommon here, particularly in winter, and our power systems are generally sized to make it through such stretches. But two weeks straight... well, when one relies on the lack of clouds for one's power, it begins to feel a little gratuitous.

Ted here at Dancing Rabbit with this week's update. Had the sun not shone unexpectedly for much of this afternoon, this might be a slightly darker (and more brief!) report, but despite the sun we still found ourselves eating dinner with our friends by candlelight this evening. (We generally update our daily power status first thing each morning, when one gets the truest reading of the state of charge in one's battery bank). Normally I enjoy dining by candlelight. But in this case, we've already been at it for most of a week, and have in fact burned through most of the supply of candles accumulated in the Community Building supply, so that we only had one candle per table of six to eight. Makes it a little harder to see your food!