Hi Everyone-

It's November already!  Instead of a monthly meeting, we have two special events for members to participate in this month.  Our annual roadtrip to Hesperia to visit visionary architect Nader Khalili's Cal Earth site in the high desert takes place on Saturday, November 4, please see below for directions and departure times (www.Calearth.org/go to photo gallery for stunning photos of earthen structures).  On November 16th, Mark Lakeman, of the City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon (cityrepair.org), will be at Santa Barbara City College for an ongoing Environmental Studies class the public is encouraged to attend, and in conjunction with their Sustainability Week. More info below.

Special thanks to Carol Ostroff for hosting our last meeting where a biodynamics compost pile was started.  We hope to return to Carol's site in the spring, where after remaining undisturbed (not turned) the compost pile will be smelling sweet and ready to apply to the garden.  In addition to explaining some of the actual biodynamic preparations, Carol shared an article about the links between biodynamics & permaculture. It suggested both "attempt to learn from the whole nexus of nature", but that focus slightly differently, while biodynamics deals with the spiritual forces at work in the world, permaculture looks for good design in the material world. See more discussion below, and for those of you who attended the meeting, feel free to add your comments, which will be included in the next newsletter Discussion section, and will now be an ongoing feature. 

This is the beauty of our meetings going to different homes & sites, we learn something different each time.  Please feel free to host a future meeting at your home.  All that is required is a space that would accomodate 10-30, a VCR/DVD player, and some light refreshments.  This is how community is formed!

Hope to see you soon-
Margie Bushman
Santa Barbara Permaculture Network

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Events/ Info October/November 2006:

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Saturday, Nov 4, All Day
Roadtrip to visit visionary Architect Nader Khalili
Calearth www.Calearth.org in Hesperia Ca.

This is an all day annual trip to visit the Cal Earth demonstration site, the Nature Center and new housing in Hesperia, all using earth architecture to build them. This is an amazing adventure, see what can be done with earth.  It is truly low cost beautiful housing that does not tax the earth's biological resources. We will leave Santa Barbara at 6:30am and be back by 6pm. For more info call Wes Roe 964-1555 or email lakinroe@silcom.com, potluck lunch.

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Thursday, November 16th 6- 8:30 pm
Mark Lakeman
City Repair Project Talk

Santa Barbara City College
Adam Green's class on sustainablity (Environmental Studies course)
Earth and Biological Sciences Building
Room 309
East Campus, 721 Cliff Dr
Co-sponsored by SB Permaculture Network, Contact: Margie Bushman, 805 962 2571,  margie@sbpermaculture.org

The story of The City Repair Project, in Portland, Oregon.
A 1.5 Hour Visual Media Presentation by Mark Lakeman,
Co-Founder.
www.cityrepair.org

As both an organization and a larger movement, The
City Repair Project inspires and guides the
transformation of the grid infrastructure of the
typical American city into a vital social commons. The
multidisciplinary nature of City Repair defies
categorization. Similar to Permaculture design, it has
become a national movement for social and ecological
restoration operating in a landscape characterized by
isolation and compartmentalization. The project takes
Fritjof Capra's 'Tipping Point' as a model for
paradigm change by intentionally focusing upon
intersections in space and time. City Repair is
directly reclaiming those intersection points,
converting spaces of collision into places of
convergence, and opening the field for what
automatically happens when people reunite with their
Place: everything.

This presentation compares the historic settlement
patterns of village societies with the dominant forces
of Western colonization as a context for describing
City Repair's work. As revealed through this visually
stunning event, the multidisciplinary culture of City
Repair combines architecture, urban planning,
anthropology, community development, public art,
permaculture and ecological design in projects that
transform space and transfer power to local levels.
The presentation is chronological, proceeding from the
most elementary and accessible project scales to
enormous visionary collaborations involving thousands
of people. Each project restates the same essential
principles of localization, community participation
and placemaking, but the forms always change and grow.
As an overall movement, each project builds upon
previous successes to manifest larger and larger
impacts.

Through a restorative process in which citizens
re-imagine and literally re-build their own commons,
City Repair is engendering relationships that
revitalize the fabric of our local community within
the existing context of social isolation. By
re-asserting localized village patterns in the city
grid, City Repair establishes both the physical and
social foundation for sustainable culture.

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November 13th through 17th
Sustainability Week at Santa Barbara City College
Annual on-campus event, at Santa Barbara City College. 
The Students for Sustainability Coalition at SBCC is a student-run and student organized group
at Santa Barbara City College which began to grow its roots in
2003.  Since then, the Sustainability Coaltion has flourished and received recognition locally and state wide for its unique projects and grass roots efforts in
creating a more sustainable campus for SBCC, providing students and community with educated choices for implementing sustainable practices into their lifestyles.

Held on West Campus, Sustainability Week spans over a period of 4 days.The schedule for the week is as follows:

Monday will be our kick-off day with live music, free yoga classes and communal art projects.

Tuesday and Wednesday will be our tabling days. We host a wide variety of organizations in order to demonstrate the wide spectrum of organizations and projects within the definition of "sustainability".  We would be honored to have you attend on one or both of these days. 

We will be hosting a mini-farmers market on campus on Wednesday Nov. 15th as well.

On Thursday night there will be lecture. The speaker will be Mark Lakeman best known for his efforts with "City Repair" in Portland.

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Nov 18th, Saturday,  3 pm - 5 pm
Permaculture Design Course Graduates Meeting in Santa Barbara
At Linda and Larry's House 
Please contact Linda LBUZZELL@aol.com  for directions

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Santa Barbara Permaculture Network Presents
Booktour & Signings in Nov/Dec 2006, Jan 2007 in CA, AZ,NM

Food Not Lawns, How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden
and Your Neighborhood into a Community,
by Heather Coburn Flores.
The premier guide for ecological living in the city through paradise gardening and shared
resources by a co-founder of the original Food Not Lawns grassroots gardening project in Eugene, OR. First Urban Permaculture Design Book in US.

Little House on a Small Planet, by Shay Salomon
"At a time when the news is filled with stories of three-car garage McMansions, Shay Salomon offers a terrific corrective. LITTLE HOUSE ON A SMALL PLANET shows how smaller, cozier homes provide an antidote to America's epidemic of loneliness, by building community, saving energy and reducing our impact on the planet. If you've ever thought of scaling down, you have a good reason to read this book. If you haven't thought about it, you have an even better one!" - John de Graaf, PBS producer and author, AFFLUENZA: THE ALL-CONSUMING EPIDEMIC

Contact for Info on Both Book Tours margie@sbpermaculture.org www.sbpermaculture.org 805-962-2571.
Contact the Authors about Upcoming Tours they are organizing too, Shay Salomon, smallhouse@theriver.com, www.resourcesforlife.com/library/people/shay-salomon/ and Heather Coburn Flores, circosemillas@yahoo.com
www.foodnotlawns.com
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Ongoing Discussion for South Coast Permaculture Group Meetings:

Article on the links between permaculture & biodynamics mentioned at our October meeting was by Jan Bang writing for the Stellar Natura 2006 publication.  It also included this wonderful quote about permaculture:

"Permaculture set out to create a greater sense of ecological awareness. It caught on because it had a snappy title and introduced this very simple idea that you could design things using templates from nature.  It took things from a variety of other disciplines, accepting anything that featured appropriate design, ecological awareness and good old common sense.  Most of all it was practical, and when introduced to places that were really suffering from ecological neglect or degradation, it worked!  Permaculture's insistence on taking personal responsibility and practicing self help appealed to a third world that was used to westerners coming in with grand ideas and mega-projects.  Vietnam and Cuba hired Permaculture consultants and tachers to help them enhance rural development.  In the third world Permaculturalists became the "Barefoot Doctors" of agriculture."

She also notes that permaculture has a focus on mulching, seeing that biodynamics has not strongly questioned the wisdom of plough agriculture, while permaculture of course has.  Chemical plough agriculture exposes the soil and it's microlife to devastating erosion by wind and weather, mulching mimics natures model by adding organic matter from above.  Interesting though that it is biodynamics that has us leave the compost pile completely undisturbed for several months, allowing microlife to form its own complex vibrant alive world, similar to permaculture's non-plough soil practices in the field.

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Resources:

Sustainable World Radio, KCSB 91.9fm, Fridays 9-10am, streaming live at www.kcsb.org

Hopedance Magazine, www.hopedance.org, includes permaculture and natural building calendar

Permaculture Activist, www.permacultureactivist.net

Santa Barbara Botanic Garden
www.sbbg.org
Bookshop:
carries large selection of permaculture & sustainability books, including the Permaculture Design Manual by Bill Mollison, Gaia's Garden, by Toby Hemenway, Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability, by David Holmgren, and many more.
Nursery:
Fall Plant Sale continues through Nov 11.  Native plants available all year, hours, 10-3pm daily.

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Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
(805) 962-2571
sbpcnet@silcom.com
www.sbpermaculture.org

"We are like trees, we must create new leaves, in new directions, in order to grow." - Anonymous