Most Recent Biochar

This week marked about three moons since beginning this most recent batch. Beginning as about five pounds of char, to which I added rock dust, nitrogen, minerals and finally finished compost rich in biological life. Finally, I added about twenty pounds of expanded mica...(vermiculite). It finally came into a status that I feel emulates healthy soil after being aerated several hundred times, over the course of several moons; it has been kept moist, allowed to stay about the consistency of a wrung out sponge, warm and under shade, so the sun's UV has never touched it. Adding this material to the top few inches of soil and continuing to protect the surface from the harsh sterilizing rays of the Sun has benefits that can last for centuries, even millennea.

There has been a longstanding rule in business, they say that to succeed, never sell what you don't have and never over promise. Biochar has the potential to double production of crops when applied at the rate of two pounds per cubic yard of soil. (1 kg to one cubic meter) The raw material that biochar is built with is pure carbon which is inert in the environment. It never degrades, nothing eats or dissolves it. instead, it provides structure upon which microbes can flourish. The waste products of these microbes are actually what healthy plants need to most easily absorb their nutrients "food" from the soil. When you say, "Doubles biomass production." people tend to think that you are over promising. To prove the point, I will send anyone who wishes to do a side by side trial of biochar enough to enrich one five gallon bucket of soil. (.2 cubic meters) If you are the type of person who cooks using recipes as guides, not as gospel, then think of char this way. Every handful has fourteen acres of surface area. when first moistening char, it is best when kept just dry enough to squeal a little, like singing sands do when you walk on them. I have made really good char that almost felt like I was stirring tiny shards of broken glass. The carbon is essentially vitrified, like firing clay, it makes it more like stone than cellular tissue that it began as. However, the carbon remains a scaled down version of the original plant tissue.

Much of the nitrogen for this batch was from blood meal and as such, this biochar has been made for the pinery and blueberry beds. This material has the effect of slightly acidifying the soil.

Another View

Last night, I took a long, slow drive out to the north end of the island, the sacred ancestral home of the Annishinabe, to the beach where I have been singing, dancing, and praying for decades. Along the drive, a mama deer darted out into the road, and took a leap to get lost in the woods again. Deer = compassion.
When I arrived, the cold wind was reminding me, "take warm clothes!" I had already packed my winter coat, so I bundled up and made my way down the banks to the water's edge.
I remember what my First Nation's friends tell me: pray to be grateful, pray to be humbled before Creator, pray to be a servant of Mother Earth.
After weeping all day while watching the live stream, I stood on the shore of one of the last great bodies of fresh water in the world with two small prayer bundles I got during the mining fight in the Penokees. I could not help but be humbled. I thanked all of creation, and I thanked over and over the brave people who stood up yesterday against the US tyranny of people who will destroy us all. I prayed for all the peoples of the world standing up against US tyrants. I asked to be humbled before my friends and neighbors and for the strength to do the right thing.
Over the course of the mining fight, I met many of my Native American neighbors: Bad River and Red Cliff, LCO, Lac du Flambeau, Ho Chunk, St. Croix—so many descendants of the families who have been murdered, abused, abducted, sold into slavery, kicked off their land (some of which is my home now)—the awful things that have happened to my neighbors does not just go back generations, but it is alive and well today.
Since I was young, I was fascinated with the story of our First Nations. I read every book I could get my hands on. Over and over I re-read those books—Black Elk Speaks, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Lame Deer—and they always ended the same: in tragedy for these amazing people and their masterful culture. Every time, I sobbed, as if, maybe this time the story would end differently. It never did.
Today, watching them take down the Standing Rock Sioux with guns, LRAD, concussion bombs, rubber bullets to the face, tear gas, I felt like I was living that ending all over again. How could it be that these people are once again being driven into despair, their grandparents' graves and sacred sites being torn up by Corporations while the jack booted law enforcement protect the tyrants? How can this be happening? Silly me. They know it can, is and does still happen in 2016. Standing Rock is just the veil being drawn back for all the rest of us people of privilege to see and experience like never before.
As much as I have educated myself on the First Nations history, yesterday I felt as if I knew something I never knew before.
The only way for me to respond is to vow never again to allow this to happen. While I cannot seem to stop our reign of terror in Syria, Iran, Iraq, I can stand up here at home. It is my bound duty to help undo the injustices that have come before. As a white person living on the land of the First Nations, it is the least any of us can do.
Go to Standing Rock. Get there. Now. If you can't, please, educate your friends and family on what is happening.
Donate to their legal defense fund.
Send them the supplies they ask for.
Call the White House, ND gov, media, senators, congresspeople, call over and over and over and do not stop until the pipeline is stopped.

Thank-you, Barbara With! Ho!

Beating Weapons Into Plowshares

Some of my readers should be familiar with the Ploughshares Foundation, this group has been around for decades and has been instrumental in pushing international conversations about the immorality of war, especially using nuclear and inhumane means of killing more people faster and with less discrimination. The recent Obama Administration's release of kill numbers for drone strikes pointing out the fallacy of a "just" war. The lives of thousands of non-combatants don't matter one whit to the war machine. When you reclassify young men as "enemy", simply for reaching the arbitrary age at which you expect them to be able to carry a weapon, the demonization of people whose eyes you never need to ponder, is complete. There was a great rallying cry for the Revolutionary war propagandists that supposedly dates back to the Battle of Bunker Hill. "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes." This was to conserve powder and increase the kill rate with their notoriously inaccurate weaponry. Today, we use such overpowering force as to make even a heat signature on infra-red sensor a "target". Can our animosity extend even into the realm of hating someone simply because they have body heat? The thought of getting to know that we are all people, with hopes, dreams and aspirations, people who love their children and hope for them to have better lives than we have had seems so alien in acceptable political discussion as to be lost amongst the calls for "extermination", "nuclear war" and deportation or putting up walls around the people of this world that are one giant human family.

A woman, proudly displaying a placard that said: "You can keep your science." is far more willing to follow along flights of fancy, in which 1/3 of the world population is demonized, and "eliminated", than to understand fact. The vast majority understand that the likelihood of the other 2/3 settling for what would be left, after another World War, rather than finding some other division to exploit, is almost as silly as the initial prospect of killing off 1/3 of the Earth's inhabitants simply for their beliefs. A well-meaning and sincere man said to me just the other day that, "Anyone who reads the Quran needs to be deported. They are all terrorists" Little did he know, the same day, I had read a story about a Muslim, from Syria, he is a devout follower of his "God" Allah. As a recent refugee, he received a piece of furniture to start his new life in this country. His reading of the Quran spoke to him in a different way. When he opened a drawer and found fifty-five thousand dollars, and the personal information of 1500 private citizens, he turned it over to police, saying that: "Allah would not want me to profit from the labor of someone else. If we could only convince our oligarchs of such truth! The ignorant are not the ones who need to be condemned, but those who see their profit flowing from uneducated folks just falling into the line of stupid stretching to the horizon.

I would like to explain the reasons that understanding and being educated about history is such an important starting point in moving forward. My young neighbor girl looked at me very coldly when I spoke of important lessons in history (herstory). "I hate history." she said. If we imagine the current time as a lens, future can and will only be an upside down and backward representation of the past. Only things that are in the consciousness of people living right now, today are based on their beliefs of the past, their knowledge of what is real and possible that gets passed down effortlessly through generations. The uberwealthy have expunged virtually all stories about self-determination or fulfillment, any inkling of satisfaction and abundance, except in the peculiar stories about "crazy artists", "mad scientists", "inventors" (who are often said to have to forego satisfaction or acceptance in their lifetimes) or lottery winners (beneficiaries of the nanny state). There is a similarity of understanding here to things they teach in military academy, CIA training and diplomacy. Every story we tell about the past, expands our possibilities for tackling the future.

Before my time, there was a strong socialist tendency amongst my ancestors. Public Service, the local electric company used to use their extra electricity to power an electric trolley, transporting people from their residential areas to the commercial areas. This was a true public service. most people from my generation don't even know that in Old Green Bay, you didn't even need a car. Another socialist plan was scrapped because of the "conservative" ideas of our fore-bearers, One of the major paper companies knew that as part of their processing, massive amounts of waste heat (in the form of hot water) would be generated and they wanted to run a cooling loop under downtown sidewalks and roadways, so the city, and residents, would have never needed to shovel snow in the downtown area. The cost of fifty to a hundred years of snow shoveling was hundreds of times more expensive than just installing the pipes to allow the heat to become useful.

Knowing that, in the old days, large corporate entities had a conscience and worked diligently for the good of all, rather than just the tiny slice of the public deemed "stockholders" changed the way we see the oligarchs. From these facts alone, we can see that at least two corporations were ethical once upon a time. Knowing that there were better ways...(I could ride the train, leaving from Green Bay, Wisconsin as recently as April 30, 1971) The train that used to run from Chicago all the way to Ashland, Wisconsin (on the shore of Lake Superior) we need to understand that the costs of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of car trips back and forth to the Northwoods could have been eliminated, just by continuing the line. Instead, the corporate climate has changed, to one of heavily subsidizing the benefits that are realized by the fossil fuel industry and requiring the rest of us to pick up the costs. The weapons corporations use to eviscerate communities are many and understanding the long-term effects of cutting services, increasing dangers and risks and the inevitable ecologic destruction of making the wrong choices have impacts that will last hundreds of generations.

The forge upon which we create the new future is fired by the longing in our hearts and souls for our progeny to have at least as much as we were granted. The materials we have available are the massive military industrial wasteland, rife with attendant bust communities, our own intellect and creativity and the sense of community that has reclaimed some of the areas in our nation that have been reduced to rubble by time and neglect, and the knowledge that there have been ways for everyone to live a better life at far less cost, to our families, our communities and to our own health and welfare as well. The anvil, far too often, is the hardheaded people who do not care to hear the truth, no matter what words we use to speak it.

Puffballs!

This year was one of the best in years for puffballs!

several massive specimens have been found this season. Plenty for eating fresh, plenty for drying, plenty for putting up in other ways for the coming cold season!
 

PayPal.Me/congressrepairteam

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Although I have suspended this campaign until the next cycle, I will use donations to further the work of ECO-Tours and to teach people how to make and use biochar. 

The Whole Kit And Caboodle

My days as an artist have been filled with materials, consumables, the materials that flow, through a process into becoming other things, making my art possible. Even the image I have conjured of an artist as a 3-D printer of sorts aptly describes the materials within the caboodle. Posterboard and felt tip pens were the "liquid" materials flowing through the creative force of my friend Wesley Willis. At once, his caboodle could fit in a single bag for his pens and a garbage bag full of posterboard that allowed him to make his kit useful. Another favorite artist, Joseph Beuys managed to pare down his caboodle (materials) to blood, lard and wool. The kit that operated on the materials was both experience, adroit skill and the specific "eye" for juxtaposing the familiar with the sacred and/or profane.

Some make the mistake of thinking that the kit is just a series of objects, but it is not just that. Of course, if I wanted to draw a circle, a compass might be necessary, but knowing how to use it, or make due with a string and a pin attests to the fact that the intellect becomes just as important as the physical object one carries to the process of creation. The artists mental state, creativity, insights, thought process and skill in making objects from what they have in their caboodle are all essential parts of the creativity puzzle. One teacher I respected a great deal once said that the difference between art and craft is that a crafts person knows what the finished product will look like before the creative process begins. artists allow their creative process to morph, often resulting in things that were never planned or imagined at the start. I am not completely convinced, but it does present a fair starting point into the meanings I want to get to with this post.

To save our species from itself, we must get on with the process of educating as if our lives depended on it, because in fact, they do. all lives matter is not the refrain, necessarily of self important bigoted fools, (although if the shoe fits wear it.) but a plain and simple fact. today, for instance, even I froze up when a person suggested deporting anyone who reads the Quran. The same day, I had read of a Syrian fellow who returned 55K in cash that he found in a donated piece of furniture he was given along with personal papers covering about 1,500 individuals. He said that Allah would not want him to benefit from the fortune that others had built. this rep[resents the vast majority of people in any religion. You know the type. People who are honest, compassionate and helpful. Trying to act as if 1/3 of the planet's population is inherently "bad" or even to be suspected for having a different "God" is absurd. We need to, each one of us, throw whatever we've got, both kit and caboodle, into speaking truth to power in this respect as well as others.

Collective evolution can only take place when we talk to strangers, spread the word, continue sharing what we have learned and spreading both the materials and techniques we have each developed for making creative contributions to society as a whole. This is most often accomplished by giving back to individuals. Break out whatever might be languishing in your caboodle, heck, even if you have things in your kit that you have forgotten or that have become rusty for lack of use, break those suckers out! The same is said for the other side of the process, if you were holding something back for just the right time, get it out! The world is ready for it, now! and if there are skills or tools that you have been hoping would one day become important, unleash their power now! We must use all that is at our disposal to evolve past fear and hate. Prove once and for all, the value of peace and creativity, we will call this evil deception and it will wilt in the light of day.

Week-long Intensive

ECO-Tours of Wisconsin offers week-long intensives as well as one day tours/classes covering a variety of topics. Welcoming people to our facility includes having a private space in which to stay. We have been and continue to convert our facility into a living classroom for such diverse retreats as Art, Biochar, Compost, Dirt vs. Soil, Energy, Food Systems, Green Living, Habitat Improvement, Investing for Seven Generations, waterfall wanders, writer's retreats, etc. Our accommodations can be booked through Air B&B, or if you are willing to camp out, we are able to offer reduced rates for Leave No Trace campers.