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These folks feed their family with a garden in their swimming pool – and you can, too

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When Dennis and Danielle McClung bought a foreclosed home in Mesa, Ariz., in 2009, their new yard featured a broken, empty swimming pool. Instead of spending a small fortune to repair and fill it, Dennis had a far more prescient idea: He built a plastic cap over it and started growing things inside.

Thus, with help from family and friends and a ton of internet research, Garden Pool was born. What was once a yawning cement hole was transformed into an incredibly prolific closed-loop ecosystem, growing everything from broccoli and sweet potatoes to sorghum and wheat, with chickens, tilapia, algae, and duckweed all interacting symbiotically to provide enough food to feed a family of five.

Garden Pool

Within a year, Garden Pool had slashed up to three-quarters of the McClungs’ monthly grocery bill (they still buy things like cooking oil and coffee and, well, one can’t eat tilapia every day). Within five years, it’d spawned an active community of Garden Pool advocates – and Garden Pools – across the country and the world.

What began as a family experiment and blog is now a 501(c)3 nonprofit with a small staff. Garden Pool has been voted the Best Backyard Farm in Phoenix, gotten press from National Geographic TV and Wired and Make, and formed a Phoenix-area Meetup group that has nearly a thousand members. It’s attracted hundreds of local volunteers, students, and gardeners who’ve helped build a dozen more Garden Pool systems in and around Phoenix.

Scientists and engineers from Cornell University, Arizona State University, and even the space industry have all visited Garden Pool. This spring, “GP” volunteers paired up with Naturopaths Without Borders to travel to Haiti and build a Garden Pool there. Plus, Dennis says, “we’ve helped maybe three dozen being built across the country” through email and phone consultations, “from Florida to Toledo to Palm Springs.”

At first, McClung just wanted his own family to live more sustainably. Now that he’s seen the all the traction these ideas are getting, and how awesomely productive a Garden Pool can be, he says, “I want everyone else to build great systems.”

And these systems are pretty great. Instead of soil, the Garden Pool’s plants grow on clay pellets or coconut coir. Excess moisture drips into the pond below, and that, plus a rain catchment system, means that the whole thing requires a tiny fraction of the water used in a conventional garden. This is especially crucial in a place like Mesa, which gets just a little over nine inches of rain per year.

Garden Pool

Instead of commercial fertilizer, chicken droppings fall through wire mesh strung across the pool’s deep end, nourishing the algae and duckweed in the pond below. The tilapia eat the pond plants, release their own nitrogen-rich excrement, and the fish water then gets funneled (using a solar-powered electric pump) into the hydroponics system that grows the family produce.

The McClungs have added pygmy goats and a bunch of fruit and nut trees to the backyard mix, so their mini farm is starting to look a lot like a very hopeful – and very delicious – urban future.

Dennis says building your own Garden Pool is not as labor-intensive and complex as it sounds. In addition to free online tutorials like “Getting Started in Barrelponics” and “Growing Duckweed,” McClung teaches GP certification courses; so far, he’s certified about 20 “GP” enthusiasts in Arizona and about 12 more during the trip to Haiti this spring. He plans to help a few recent grads start their own Meetup groups in Los Angeles and New York.

He also just released the second edition of Garden Pool’s extensive how-to book, featuring 117 pages of detailed instructions, illustrations, photos, and QR codes that link to video tutorials. His goal is to encourage aspiring Garden Poolers to build and maintain their own aquaponics greenhouses, whether or not they’ve done anything remotely like it before, and whether or not they even have a pool. (One of Garden Pool’s main taglines is “use an old pool or just dig a pond!”)

Becky Knutson

Thanks to endless experimentation with new crops and filters and catchment systems, McClung claims his backyard is now “basically a Frankenstein laboratory” and not quite as pretty as the sparkling Garden Pool replicas and spinoffs he’s helped build around town. Various experiments have met with varying degrees of success (blueberries and amaranth didn’t do as well as eggplant and asparagus, for instance), but the list of things that grow like weeds in Garden Pool is long (McClung advises you to check out page 96 of his book).

He manages pest control by doing things like adding ladybugs for the aphids and selecting plants like marigolds and garlic, which repel whiteflies and spider mites, respectively. Since the system is closed and controlled, it’s a pretty fantastic way to experiment with organic gardening methods.

As far as they’ve come in the past five years, though, Dennis says they’re just rolling up their sleeves. Now that all the nonprofit paperwork is settled, Garden Pool staff can apply for grants, and, he hopes, “hop from place to place and make stuff happen.” He’d like to help build more Garden Pools in Haiti, Africa, South America, and across the globe, and eventually become something of an international hub for closed-loop system research.

Although Garden Pool is Dennis’s full-time occupation and has been for some years now, “it’s not a job yet,” he insists. “I love it. I dream about it. What inspires me is watching families’ lives being changed, watching communities change, observing the change.”

Dreaming the Dark Mountain: Time, Economy and Development in Senegal’s Ecovillages

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“I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future … I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.”
– Robinson Jeffers, “Rearmament”, 1935

I first discovered ecovillages on a small farm in southern Sweden. The farm itself was not an ecovillage, but it did have a small book called Ecovillages: A Practical Guide to Sustainable Communities. Between pulling weeds and trench digging, I absorbed the book in a single day. Like its author,I found provocative the idea of living in “community with others” and in “harmony with nature,” and became part of a Global Ecovillage Network​, a worldwide movement of people building a new world. It was an alternative, at least, to that dark “mighty cosmos of the modern economic order” that the German sociologist Max Weber prophetically wrote would determine the life of “every individual … born into [its] mechanisms until the day that the last ton of fossil fuel had been consumed.” Ecovillages seemed to me like a blueprint for a new world. Buzz-words like “Permaculture,” “small is beautiful,” and “sociocracy,” and technologies like reed-bed watering systems, passive solar houses, and communal living all seemed preferable to consumer capitalism, mass culture, and the dominance of rising towers of glass, steel, and concrete. At least, that is what I thought when I came across a puzzle: The Senegalese government was attempting to convert 14 000 villages-nearly half of Senegal’s rural communities-into ecovillages. How was it that the “model” of the ecovillage, a reaction to environmental and social problems of modernity in the global North, had come to be seen as a State-sponsored development solution in Senegal?

FIGURE 1 | THE DOUÉ RIVER AT THE ECO-COMMUNE AT GUÉDÉ CHANTIER
FIGURE 1 | THE DOUÉ RIVER AT THE ECO-COMMUNE AT GUÉDÉ CHANTIER
FIGURE 2 | THE SAHEL SEEN OUT THE CAR ON MY RIDE TO GUÉDÉ CHANTIER
FIGURE 2 | THE SAHEL SEEN OUT THE CAR ON MY RIDE TO GUÉDÉ CHANTIER

It was a question at once personal and intellectual: I had lived in ecovillages as an “environmental anarchist,” studying statecraft and development critiques by the likes of James Scott, Arundhati Roy, and James Ferguson. My challenge was to explore how a model of anti-modernity created in the North was becoming embedded in a decidedly pre- (or even post-) modern West African nation. I went to the land of the long boats- pirogues- to find an answer. Yet, what I found was anything but…

FIGURE 3 | PIROGUES ON THE BEACH, YOFF
FIGURE 3 | PIROGUES ON THE BEACH, YOFF

There were not, in formal ontological terms, any ecovillages in Senegal. What I encountered were not ecovillages being built “out there,” but a variety of experiments with alternatives to deeply held assumptions about Western development. Those assumptions centered on the axes of time or temporality, and value or economy. Ecovillages were, in this evaluation, a continuation of a much older history of people experimenting with, re-theorizing, and critiquing modernity in situ, effacing conventional boundaries between thinking and doing, analyzing and acting, and between the worlds of theory “in here” and of built models “out there.” In a country where the phrase ” la modernité“-in North America more often the preserve of an educated elite-came instead from the voices of Senegal’s youth; I came to see ecovillages not as a solution to the problems of modernity, but as opening up a broader questioning of modernity itself. The problematic, it became apparent, was not solely a question for the privileged intellectuals of the West, but a subject of live, political discussion about the right forms of life in Senegal, a country that has yet to experience totalizing modernization. In failing to find model ecovillages, I encountered instead ways of thinking that problematized some of the most deeply held assumptions of development.

Traditional development policy assumes a sort of that time progresses linearly towards the future. In Senegal, I saw this view of progress reflected in le Monumentde la RenaissanceAfricaine, a statue depicting an uncharacteristically small nuclear family in its advance towards a wind-swept future-trash strewn below. I read this as an inversion of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History: an Angel of Progress oblivious to the cultural and environmental havoc wreaked by a globalizing detachment that subsumes capital interest at the behest of those at the bottom of an exploitative hierarchy. Here modern time, as E.P. Thomson brilliantly observes, takes “time as money.” While the State continues with visions for that model of growth, I encountered communities hoping to reverse the logic of time converted into value. One ecovillage advocate wanted to return to an imagined past where “at night the children … would play hide-and-seek between their parents’ rice warehouses … [and] the elders would remind them of the region’s reputable populations of lions, hyenas, crocodiles, hippopotamus, and brilliant multi-colored birds.”

FIGURE 4 | PROJECT SIGN COMMON IN ALL VILLAGES IN SENEGAL, NOTES THE "ECOLOGICAL PERIMETER" FOR GOVERNMENT FUNDED ECOVILLAGE
FIGURE 4 | PROJECT SIGN COMMON IN ALL VILLAGES IN SENEGAL, NOTES THE “ECOLOGICAL PERIMETER” FOR GOVERNMENT FUNDED ECOVILLAGE
FIGURE 5 | INSIDE THE DAARA AT NDEM
FIGURE 5 | INSIDE THE DAARA AT NDEM

Contradicting the ideal image of development-the standardization and formalization of markets managed by a rationalized bureaucratic State-I found myself a disruptive economic agent in a world disrupted by Western capital. GEN Senegal, the NGO of my first contact in the country, dissolved after the promise of potential “millions” from the UNDP and the Global Environment Fund to build ecovillages at the national level. Once they realized the national government would only be appointing its own agents, many of GEN Senegal members felt disillusioned and disenchanted with the money they felt was already poisoning Senegal’s hopes for a better future. The National Ecovillage Agency, a government program I was also trying to explore, turned out to be a gate-keeper for corruption, eating away the funds provided for it by Western development agencies without engaging in the sort of disciplined work that donors foresaw. While the goal was to build ecovillages, it seemed more that foreign funds were being turned into an economy of non-sustainability, low quality solar panels, non-performing villagers and agents, and endless piles of government development documents with economic calculations being the “solution” to Western imaginaries of development. Everywhere I went, I found myself viewed as a lifeline to such notions of foreign investment. In the final weeks of my visit I even encountered a marabout (Islamic religious leader), who did a ceremony involving boiling water and ground nuts to convert my stolen laptop into $240 dollars for his own benefit.

The politics of development in Senegal turned out to be not about ecovillages but about competing visions of past, present, and future. In one community, I found myself in the midst of a political fight: between an idealistic mayor wishing to “return” to the ecovillage past (his slogan was: ” ici, on vit ecovillage“) and a new mayor more resigned to the pragmatic present of the development status quo. Both were in desperate need of solutions for the country’s youth (in a country where the average age is 21), but they were looking for it in terms of different technical models and development projects. Senegal is a country from which many young people are taking off to Europe, and many are dying in trying to escape. On this score, I found only one village-Ndem-that perhaps, could be said to be approaching that sought-after “solution.” Oddly, unlike any other Senegalese community I encountered, it was not working from established models. It resisted scalability. Its marabout had come back not to “develop” but to “reincarnate” the village’s founder, and to return the village to its past through religious teaching and practice. Its members were looking to build things as a community ” petit-a-petit“, not with sudden leaps and jumps of technology. These Baye Fall (an Islamic sect seen as a nuisance in Dakar) were more concerned with the rhythm of religious devotion than with standard uses of time and money (like getting a job and an apartment in Dakar). All the same, despite its decidedly anti-modern stance, Ndem is considered by many to be one of the most successful rural development examples in the country.

FIGURE 6 | SOCCER PITCH ON THE STREETS OF GUÉDÉ CHANTIER
FIGURE 6 | SOCCER PITCH ON THE STREETS OF GUÉDÉ CHANTIER

Ultimately, my exploration of ecovillages and resulting examinations of temporality in Senegal delved into the politics of progress, the efficacy of established models, and conflicting interests wrapped in a seeming lack of sincere direction. If there was a “model” that worked best, it was a project more considerate of local conceptions of past and future than about the clichéd standardizations of modernity. On the side of value, ecovillages offered an unforgiving look at both activists who were resisting the importation of Western money as a solution and development agencies opportunistically taking up well-funded projects doomed to fail in Senegal.

I began my search in Senegal to see how ecovillages, a posited solution to hyper-development in the North, had come to be seen as a development solution in the South. Through this exploration, I came to question conventional notions of modernity, a goal the very term “development” assumes many countries are striving to obtain. I did not find a unified vision for the future, but a multiplicity of attempts to dream a better life-often ones starkly different from the narratives of the high-level organizations working in the country, or even of “ecovillages”. There was not, I learned, a solution (singular) to the problems of modernity in Senegal or elsewhere. There were solutions (plural): operating at different levels and all at once, bringing out the multiplicity of meanings that make up our modern world. In my subsequent explorations with Aesir Lab, I hope to open up investigations that move past conventional social science framings, resisting realist framings that presuppose both the “problem” and the “solution”. Instead, I will use methods that the Senegalese context called for: pushing against realist thinking that imposes “ecovillage”, “environmental crisis”, or “development” as totalizing frames; using “both-and” instead of “either-or” logics; and looking at “actors” as theorists of their own situated contexts. In the end, what was born out of my study was a dazzling, kaleidoscopic world challenging Anglo-American framings of development as a goal to be “accomplished.” I concluded by asking whether there are not more open, discursive forms of cross-cultural engagement that bring in, rather than overwrite, the voices that are today excluded from expert discourses on development.

FIGURE 7 | BAOBAB
FIGURE 7 | BAOBAB
FIGURE 9 | SUNSET AT NDEM
FIGURE 9 | SUNSET AT NDEM
FIGURE 8 | BANANARIE IN TOBOR ECOVILLAGE AFTER PLANTATION, SINCE ABANDONED; COURTESY OF BABACAR SAGNA
FIGURE 8 | BANANARIE IN TOBOR ECOVILLAGE AFTER PLANTATION, SINCE ABANDONED; COURTESY OF BABACAR SAGNA

 

To learn more about Ecological Villages around the world, visit The Global Ecovillage Network Global Ecovillage Network

 

Photographs by Hilton Simmet (unless otherwise stated).

Featured Image by b. hessmann

References

Bang, Jan Martin. (2005). Ecovillages: a practical guide to sustainable communities. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society.

Benjamin, Walter. (1969). Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. (H. Zohn, Trans., H. Arendt, Ed.) (English Language edition). New York: Schocken.

Ferguson, James. (1990). The anti-politics machine: “development,” depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Jasanoff, Sheila. (2002). New modernities: Reimagining science, technology and development. Environmental Values, 11(3), 253-276.

Scott, James C. (1976). The moral economy of the peasant : rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Weber, Max. (1949). Objectivity. “Social Science and Social Policy.” The Methodology of the Social Sciences. New York: Free Press, 1949a, 49-112.

What No One Is Talking About When They Talk About Greece

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“You all have CSAs in the States, right? That’s amazing.”

I wasn’t entirely sure I fully understood what he was getting at. It was spring, 2012, and we were standing around at a squatted anarchist social center in a southern suburb of Athens, where I’d just given a talk on anarchism and Occupy Wall Street.

A few days earlier, in Syntagma Square opposite the Greek parliament building, a local retired man had shot himself in the middle of morning traffic. The note he left detailed his refusal to be a burden on his children as Greece’s economy spiraled, and called for young people to string up those responsible for its collapse. It made for a downright chilling read, even in translation.

“You mean, like…people buying shares in local farms?”

Back home in the U.S., Greek anarchists were celebrated for their perceived tenacity and bravado. Like giddy adolescents sharing pornography, left social media circulated YouTube clips of low-scale street warfare. (These days, the shared content is more likely to be various expressions of global panic over Greece’s potential exit from the euro.) It seemed unlikely that my companion wanted to talk to me about community-supported agriculture, the veggies-in-a-box default practice of the boring, NPR-member mainstream liberal. And yet, he did.

This was before the ascendancy of Syriza, and before Syriza’s prospects for negotiating some economic relief disappeared. A default on IMF debt repayments now seems inevitable, and an exit from the Euro seems more likely by the day. Much faith has been put in Syriza as a sort of leftist foil to late European austerity-not just in Greece, but throughout the world-and Syriza’s ambitions would have been crushed rather swiftly, were the party not willing to play the country’s exit from the continental currency (and the ripple effect that would have for financial markets the world over) like a poker chip. http://fortressamerica.gawker.com/how-the-lefts-…

While liberal and left-wing Americans stare distastefully and apprehensively at their pitiful… Read more Read more

All of this, of course, after months of domestic expectation-management from Syriza’s camp, paired with frequent slander of the very social movements on whose rhetoric the party rode to electoral victories-victories whose ends prove increasingly elusive.

But in Athens, right now, the saga appears to have resulted in a certain fatigue on the ground. Life goes on, looking much as it would’ve otherwise, beyond the occasional, small line at an ATM-or the dueling yes/no referendum rallies in Syntagma, both ends of that contrast as likely a response to relentless humiliation as they are anything else.

Monday night, as the “no” gathering in Syntagma swelled, residents in the Agia Pereskevi neighborhood gathered to discuss a scheduled day of events for this coming Sunday; events mostly for local children. These activities would coincide (however unintentionally) with the proposed referendum on the EU’s austerity proposal, and it seemed intuitive that a change of plans might be in order.

I casually browsed Twitter on my phone, watching the world collectively soil its pants over Greece’s situation, while a friend whispered translations of the discussion over my shoulder. At one point, one woman put a point to what was both the overriding sentiment, and a question well worth asking, given what’s unfolded in Greece for the better part of a decade, now: “Who gives a fuck about the referendum?”

In the wake of the 2008 uprising that swept the country following both the police shooting of a teenager in the central neighborhood of Exarchia and Greece’s economic free-fall, horizontal, community self-management became both a practice and a demand. Popular assemblies-like the one in Aghia Pereskevi-formed in roughly seventy neighborhoods throughout metropolitan Athens, some within occupied government buildings.

Earlier this year, The Guardian reported on how these structures are serving to “fill the gaps left by austerity.” A variety of what would’ve been called survival programs in the era of the Black Panther Party have been carried out through such assemblies across Athens: food and clothing distribution, supplementary education programs for children, basic health services, mental health support, eviction defense – all administered via face-to-face, direct democracy.

When a tax increase folded into electricity bills resulted in cutoffs for people unable to pay, lists were made and local electricians were dispatched to illegally restore services, with priority afforded to those most vulnerable (the elderly, new parents). A former military installation seized by residents and converted into a community park and cultural center boasted sizeable gardens, tended by locals of varying ages.

When I visited one of the city’s oldest popular assemblies in 2012, in the neighborhood of Petralona, residents had just opened a kitchen space on one street corner, with the intention of both providing affordable meals and educating young people about food cultivation, preparation, and health. Participation in all of it seemed pretty eclectic, to my outsider eye. Even local government officials joined in-acting as residents like any others, sometimes with their families in tow. Perhaps even more telling, assemblies were sharing resources between neighborhoods. They were confederating, demonstrating both an ability and an intention to scale up.

Taking all of this in, my anarchist acquaintance’s interest in community-supported agriculture that night in 2012 started to make sense. It makes even mores sense now. With the IMF and Troika twisting arms, threatening empty store shelves if its various austerity programs aren’t adopted, direct relations with local agricultural production offer a keenly radical possibility.

Channeling that possibility, a ten person collective opened a grocery and coffee bar on the edge of the central Athens neighborhood of Exarchia.

“There was a time when people didn’t have much of a relationship with the villages their families were from – specifically the land their families cultivated” a woman working in the collective explained to me (she asked to keep her name out of this piece; police and fascists are real threats in Greece). “With the crisis, you started seeing people opt to plant on land in their villages. [The grocery store] was a way of consolidating and making available what we were producing.”

Financed by a loan from a network of worker self-managed businesses scattered throughout Exarchia (mostly cafes and restaurants), the project-organized democratically, on the same consensus model that drove the Occupy movement in the US-served a threefold purpose.

“The first objective was to support ourselves; those of us whose families were producing food items in their villages, as families, not using employees” the woman told me. Basic needs. Tomatoes. Flour. Olive oil.

“The second was to support people politically close to us, to create a workplace that could serve as a safety net and provide transitional work for people who’d lost jobs.” One such woman made my espresso freddo Monday morning. A graphic designer by trade, she’d been fired her first day back from the eight months of maternity leave to which Greeks are entitled-a warning to any other staff entertaining such audacity.

“The third was to provide food produced in ways consistent with our principles.” In the last decade, organic products saw something of a boom in Greece. “The primary focus was health, meanwhile these things were being produced by Pakastani immigrants with no job security, under horrible conditions. Some were killed. Our position was that a ‘healthy’ carrot produced in this way has no meaning, at all.”

The café represents an attempt to forge networked relationships-real sustenance-unfettered by faith in conventional politics, that gives instance to an altogether distinct vision for Greece. As a founding member of the Agia Pereskevi assembly told me over coffee this week, “This is what sets us apart from the traditional left – there is no doing for; we are the people whose lives are affected. And we’re taking on transformations that affect our lives.”

While these sometimes small projects, and much of what Greek popular assemblies have carried out could be viewed as triage out-scaled by the gaps left by austerity demands, that’s never been the view of participants I’ve spoken with. With real consistency, they’ve seen themselves engaged in something prefigurative; forging new ways of organizing social life – life that will continue with or without the euro. And they’ve done so with considerable ingenuity, commitment, and (most importantly) success.

Finding myself back in Athens as the world’s gaze is cast back in its direction, with the clock ticking on the future of high politics in Greece and its relationship with the rest of the world, it seems fitting to counter the pummeling global humiliation to which Greeks are being subjected with some of what’s been done right in Greece since the crisis (none of it by anyone whose name you’ve heard). Because if we’re being even remotely honest, what titillates us most about this unfolding drama is not the great uncertainty that hovers over Greece, but that it invites us to look into our own future.

Editor’s note: Due to concerns about violent retaliation, we edited this piece after publication to remove proper names of venues and cut or crop photographs that clearly identified people. Joshua Stephens is a writer in an open relationship with Brooklyn, NY. His work has appeared in AlterNet, Truthout, Waging Nonviolence, and Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. He is the author of The Dog Walker: An Anarchist’s Encounters with the Good, the Bad, and the Canine, forthcoming from Melville House.

Forget Facebook, Abandon Instagram, Move To A Village

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In the parts of the world that we cover in our blog, many people live in villages.

Villages have their problems, to be sure. There may not be a doctor or clinic nearby. Girls may not be able to go to school. Clean water might be a long walk away.

But a new book points out that village life has its advantages.

We asked psychologist Susan Pinker, author of The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier and Smarter, to explain the benefits of living in a community of about 150 people, the average population of traditional villages throughout history around the world.

What is the village effect?

The village effect is a metaphor for the social contacts we all need as humans in order to thrive. These are the strong social ties that develop naturally in a village, where by necessity you cross paths with each other repeatedly every day. When you think of most villages, there is a central square, a public area where everyone converges or passes by going to the grocer or the post office or city hall or to sit at a cafe. And that is something we have less and less of today in our era of online connections. Commerce is moving online, everything is moving online, and these traditional village spaces are disappearing.

Why is 150 the ideal number for a village population?

One-hundred-fifty is the number that comes up time and again in the types of social interactions that work smoothly. We see it throughout history – whether we’re talking about the number of people in traditional hunter-gatherer societies, Neolithic villages, an English country village or the number of Christmas cards we send out. These are people with whom you have strong enough ties that you could ask to borrow $10 until the next payday.

How do these 150 “village” ties compare to online ties?

Not all types of social ties are created equal. Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar posits 150 as the maximum number of meaningful relationships that the human brain can manage. We know from our own lives there are only so many people that you can invest in that way, that you can call and invite to dinner or check in on when sick.

These are the types of social ties that develop naturally in a village, where by necessity you cross paths with each other repeatedly every day. When you think of most villages, there is a central square, a public area where everyone converges or passes by going to the grocer or the post office or city hall or sit at a cafe. And so these ties develop naturally through frequent in-person contact.

These are different from the weak contacts that you might have in your online social networks. You could walk by some of these online contacts on the street without even recognizing them. These weak contacts are great if you need a recommendation for a restaurant in a strange city, for instance, or [are] looking for a cleaning lady or other types of information. But in terms of social ties, it’s the difference between your mother’s lasagna or homemade chicken soup compared with fast food.

Why is the village effect so important?

If you have a cohesive community, you will have extra helping hands for the young and the old and everybody in between. The village effect impacts not only those who are vulnerable but it helps people feel they belong somewhere.

And if we know anything from all of the demographic studies in neurosciences, if you are lonely or isolated, it is almost a death sentence.

When you are getting together face to face, there are a lot of biological phenomena: Oxytocin and neurotransmitters get released, they reduce stress and allow us to trust others. Physical contact unleashes a whole chain of events that make us and make the other person feel good, and affects our health and well-being.

By contrast, according to research, we’ve never been lonelier as a society than we are now, and this can take a toll on our health.

Those of us who don’t live in villages – are we out of luck?

You can create your own village effect. Get out of your car to talk to your neighbors. Talk in person to your colleagues instead of shooting them emails. Build in face-to-face contact with friends the way you would exercise. Look for schools where the emphasis is on teacher-student interaction, not on high-tech bells and whistles.

We need to recognize that digital connections should enhance but never replace the real-life connections. I don’t think we all should throw out digital devices and move back to the village. I’m not romanticizing village life but using it as a metaphor as what is disappearing: deep social ties and the in-person contact we all need to survive.

World’s First Solar Road Already Generating More Power than Expected – NationofChange

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A new solar bike path in Krommenie, a village northwest of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which functions as a massive solar array, is already generating more power than expected. And guess what the SolaRoad is helping to generate-the electricity grid. Brilliant!

SolaRoad, the world’s first “solar road,” has only been in operation since November, but it’s already generating more power than expected. SolaRoad is a bike path in Krommenie, a village northwest of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, that also functions as a massive solar array. The project was developed by TNO, the Province of Noord-Holland, Ooms Civiel and Imtech.

“We did not expect a yield as high as this so quickly,” said Sten de Wit, spokesman for SolaRoad. “The bike road opened half a year ago and already generated over 3,000 kWh. This can provide a single-person household with electricity for a year, or power an electric scooter to drive 2.5 times around the world.”

The pilot period will run for another two and half years to see how well the panels hold up and how much electricity they generate. Since opening six months ago, more than 150,000 bicyclists have used the road. At the end of December and in early spring of this year, a small section of the panels needed repair, but otherwise the panels are holding up very well, according to the project developers. The solar cells are protected by a thin layer of transparent, skid-resistant tempered glass that is able to support bicycles and vehicles.

Where does this electricity go you ask? “The solar electricity from the road is fed into the electricity grid and can be used, for example, for street lighting, traffic systems, households and (eventually) electric cars that drive over it,” the project developers said.

The road is only 70 meters, or about 230 feet, so imagine the potential of this technology if adopted on a wider scale. We featured a similar Idaho-based project, Solar Roadways, whose Indiegogo campaign became extremely successful when their video went viral last year.

The project does have its detractors though. ZME Science points out the three-year project costs 3.5 million euros and the solar panels could need regular repair from winter weather and normal wear and tear. ZME Science said, “Maybe we should first cover every available inch on our rooftops first.”

Watch the video from SolaRoad to see how it could be the road of the future:

Here’s what your kitchen will look like in 2025, according to IKEA

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IKEA didn’t just imagine the kitchen of the future, it actually built it.

The Concept Kitchen 2025, a pop-up exhibit featured at EXPO Milano 2015, isn’t about your kitchen and its appliances doing all the work for you; its about helping you make thoughtful decisions about food and waste. New designs for passive conservation of food are popping on the internet and IKEA is giving us a look of how it could fit together

The kitchen was developed with IDEO London, a global design firm, and college students focused on “the social, technological, and demographic forces that will impact how we behave around food in 2025.” Check out all the bells and whistles below.

Welcome to 2025. This is what your kitchen looks like.

 

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Not sure what to do with that tomato that’s about to go bad? Place it on IKEA’s Table for Living to get a quick and easy recipe. The aim here is to reduce food waste.

 

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All of the recipe information shows up on the table — leave your iPad on the couch.

 

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For tiny apartment dwellers, the table eliminates the need for a stove. Hidden induction coils heat the inside of pots and pans rather than the surface to make the table amenable to working, cooking, or eating.

 

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Meanwhile, The Modern Pantry takes the doors off of your refrigerator to keep your eyes on your food, so you know what you have on hand and won’t overbuy.

 

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Refrigerated food is stored in transparent containers that are temperature controlled via an induction-cooling technology that’s embedded into the shelves.

 

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This piece of fish is placed inside a container labeled “2 degrees Celsius.” The shelf will keep it at that temperature until you’re ready to use it.

 

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The Mindful Water System encourages responsible water use. It has two sinks: one for toxic “black water” that goes out to the sewers and one for “grey water” that is reused in the dishwasher or to water the plants above the sink.

 

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The Thoughtful Disposal System keeps us conscious of what we’re throwing away. Trash is manually sorted, crushed, vacuum-sealed, and labeled for pick-up.

 

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If you’re interested in passive food conservation and what the kitchen will look like in the future. Check out La Denise, a kickstarter campaign that’s running today, made locally!

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The Scariest Trade Deal Nobody’s Talking About (TiSA) Just Suffered a Big Leak

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The Obama administration’s desire for “fast track” trade authority is not limited to passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In fact, that may be the least important of three deals currently under negotiation by the U.S. Trade Representative. The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would bind the two biggest economies in the world, the United States and the European Union. And the largest agreement is also the least heralded: the 51-nation Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA).

On Wednesday, WikiLeaks brought this agreement into the spotlight by releasing 17 key TiSA-related documents, including 11 full chapters under negotiation. Though the outline for this agreement has been in place for nearly a year, these documents were supposed to remain classified for five years after being signed, an example of the secrecy surrounding the agreement, which outstrips even the TPP.

Would You Feel Differently About Julian Assange If You Knew What He Really Thought?

TiSA has been negotiated since 2013, between the United States, the European Union, and 22 other nations, including Canada, Mexico, Australia, Israel, South Korea, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, and others scattered across South America and Asia. Overall, 12 of the G20 nations are represented, and negotiations have carefully incorporated practically every advanced economy except for the ” BRICS ” coalition of emerging markets (which stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).

The deal would liberalize global trade of services, an expansive definition that encompasses air and maritime transport, package delivery, e-commerce, telecommunications, accountancy, engineering, consulting, health care, private education, financial services and more, covering close to 80 percent of the U.S. economy. Though member parties insist that the agreement would simply stop discrimination against foreign service providers, the text shows that TiSA would restrict how governments can manage their public laws through an effective regulatory cap. It could also dismantle and privatize state-owned enterprises, and turn those services over to the private sector. You begin to sound like the guy hanging out in front of the local food co-op passing around leaflets about One World Government when you talk about TiSA, but it really would clear the way for further corporate domination over sovereign countries and their citizens.

Reading the texts ( here’s an example, the annex on air transport services) makes you realize the challenge for members of Congress or interested parties to comprehend a trade agreement while in negotiation. The “bracketed” text includes each country’s offer, merged into one document, with notations on whether the country proposed, is considering, or opposes each specific provision. You need to either be a trade lawyer or a very alert reader to know what’s going on. But between the text and a series of analyses released by WikiLeaks, you get a sense for what the countries negotiating TiSA want.

First, they want to limit regulation on service sectors, whether at the national, provincial or local level. The agreement has “standstill” clauses to freeze regulations in place and prevent future rulemaking for professional licensing and qualifications or technical standards. And a companion “ratchet” clause would make any broken trade barrier irreversible.

It may make sense to some to open service sectors up to competition. But under the agreement, governments may not be able to regulate staff to patient ratios in hospitals, or ban fracking, or tighten safety controls on airlines, or refuse accreditation to schools and universities. Foreign corporations must receive the same “national treatment” as domestic ones, and could argue that such regulations violate their ability to provide the service. Allowable regulations could not be “more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service,” according to TiSA’s domestic regulation annex. No restrictions could be placed on foreign investment-corporations could control entire sectors.

This would force open dozens of services, including ones where state-owned enterprises, like the national telephone company in Uruguay or the national postal service of Italy, now operate. Previously, public services would be either broken up or forced into competition with foreign service providers. While the United States and European Union assured in a joint statement that such privatization need not be permanent, they also “noted the important complementary role of the private sector in these areas” to “improve the availability and diversity of services,” which doesn’t exactly connote a hands-off policy on the public commons.

Corporations would get to comment on any new regulatory attempts, and enforce this regulatory straitjacket through a dispute mechanism similar to the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process in other trade agreements, where they could win money equal to “expected future profits” lost through violations of the regulatory cap.

For an example of how this would work, let’s look at financial services. It too has a “standstill” clause, which given the unpredictability of future crises could leave governments helpless to stop a new and dangerous financial innovation. In fact, Switzerland has proposed that all TiSA countries must allow “any new financial service” to enter their market. So-called “prudential regulations” to protect investors or depositors are theoretically allowed, but they must not act contrary to TiSA rules, rendering them somewhat irrelevant.

Most controversially, all financial services suppliers could transfer individual client data out of a TiSA country for processing, regardless of national privacy laws. This free flow of data across borders is true for the e-commerce annex as well; it breaks with thousands of years of precedent on locally kept business records, and has privacy advocates alarmed.

There’s no question that these provisions reinforce Senator Elizabeth Warren’s contention that a trade deal could undermine financial regulations like the Dodd-Frank Act. The Swiss proposal on allowances for financial services could invalidate derivatives rules, for example. And harmonizing regulations between the U.S. and EU would involve some alteration, as the EU rules are less stringent.

Member countries claim they want to simply open up trade in services between the 51 nations in the agreement. But there’s already an international deal governing these sectors through the World Trade Organization (WTO), called the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The only reason to re-write the rules is to replace GATS, which the European Union readily admits (“if enough WTO members join in, TiSA could be turned into a broader WTO agreement”).

That’s perhaps TiSA’s real goal-to pry open markets, deregulate and privatize services worldwide, even among emerging nations with no input into the agreement. U.S. corporations may benefit from such a structure, as the Chamber of Commerce suggests, but the impact on workers and citizens in America and across the globe is far less clear. Social, cultural, and even public health goals would be sidelined in favor of a regime that puts corporate profits first. It effectively nullifies the role of democratic governments to operate in the best interest of their constituents.

Unsurprisingly, this has raised far more concern globally than in the United States. But a completed TiSA would go through the same fast-track process as TPP, getting a guaranteed up-or-down vote in Congress without the possibility of amendment. Fast-track lasts six years, and negotiators for the next president may be even more willing to make the world safe for corporate hegemony. “This is as big a blow to our rights and freedom as the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” said Larry Cohen, president of the Communication Workers of America in a statement, “and in both cases our government’s secrecy is the key enabler.”

The director of Avatar just designed a beautiful alternative to ugly traditional solar panels

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Everything James Cameron does is big.

Eighty-five years after the world’s largest ship sank, the famed Hollywood director turned the RMS Titanic’s fatal voyage into a movie that set records for longevity at the box office.

“Avatar,” meanwhile, needs its own Wikipedia page to list all the records it has set.

Now Cameron is bringing his love of magnitude to solar energy with the Sun Flower, a large solar structure that’s actually nice to look at.

Brandon Hickman

Composed of one central panel surrounded by 14 smaller “petals,” each Sun Flower is designed to provide an alternative to traditional solar panels that, while functional, strike many people as eyesores.

“The idea was to unify form and function with this life-affirming image that anyone looking at it would instantly get,” explained Cameron, who first launched the Sun Flower grid near Malibu’s MUSE School, to Gizmodo’s Alissa Walker.

MUSE School CA

Sun Flowers, like their yellow-petaled counterparts, track the sun over the course of the day to catch the maximum amount of rays.

This is both an artistic choice and a functional one.

Traditional solar panels sit idly on a hillside, roof, or angled platform. This causes them to miss out on valuable hours of solar energy as the sun moves across the sky, reducing their efficiency.

Total Sun Flower output can reach 260 kilowatt hours per day, or enough to satisfy 75 to 90% of the school’s total energy needs, Gizmodo reports.

Cameron says the project will be patented, but released on an open-source platform.

Brandon Hickman

The designs follow Cameron’s earlier work developing a set of retractable solar panels with FEMA. The panels are designed for emergency situations when the power goes out.

His other environmentally-conscious missions have included making the “Avatar” series the first film production entirely powered by the sun, and eliminating the need for helicopters in aerial shots, since drones can accomplish many of the same tasks without the heavy footprint.

Cameron has even launched a contest in New Zealand to find the optimal drone-based camera rigging.

But act fast: The deadline to enter is July 5.

Bill Gates To Invest Billions In Renewable Energy

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The Supreme Court may have dealt a crushing blow this week to President Barack Obama’s efforts to curb climate change, but all is not lost.

Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates announced plans to spend up to $2 billion on innovative renewable technologies over the next five years. In an interview with the Financial Times ( paywall), Gates said he hopes to “bend the curve” through the cultivation of “breakthrough” technologies, doubling an already impressive billion-dollar investment. He has so far written checks to 15 green companies, he said, and has contributed venture capital funds to another 30.

In the interview, Gates calls for far greater funding for renewable research, saying investment “should be like the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project in the sense that the government should put in a serious amount of R&D.” He pointed to the drawbacks of now-commonplace technologies like solar, which can only provide power during the day.

“There’s no battery technology that’s even close to allowing us to take all of our energy from renewables and be able to use battery storage in order to deal not only with the 24-hour cycle but also with long periods of time where it’s cloudy and you don’t have sun or you don’t have wind,” he said.

Despite the recent Supreme Court ruling that undercut the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of mercury and other toxic emissions from power plants, the U.S. has been making strides in the fight against climate change.

The Huffington Post’s Kate Sheppard notes the EPA is finishing up rules that would limit greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants, which should be finalized in the coming weeks. And the president has come out swinging against the warming phenomenon, citing the hazards against American’s health and a risk to national security.

Renewable energy is expected to draw trillions in investment over the next quarter century, but the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has come under fire before for some aspects of its climate activism.

The Guardian notes the Gates Foundation has yet to announced any plans to divest its portfolio from fossil fuels, despite similar moves from the likes of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the government of Norway. The Gates Foundation has $1.4 billion invested in fossil fuel companies including BP, according to 2013 tax filings.

You can read Gates’ entire interview at the Financial Times.

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