Speaking of learning vital skills for the future: Transition Town Salem organizing!

Some of you may recall the Salem Transition Initiative for Relocalization (STIR), which attracted some interest for a while three or four years ago, but never really jelled.

Thankfully, Oregon PeaceWorks is helping to promote a new crack at this vital idea under the name Transition Town Salem.  They're planning an organizing meeting for February 13 at the PeaceWorks office, second floor.  Contact PeaceWorks for details.

Transition Towns are communities working to build resilience in response to peak oil, climate change, and economic instability. OPW seeks to work with environmentalists, economists, city planners, government representatives and members of the public to develop both a plan and hands-on projects that will demonstrate the elements of resilience and sustainability to the Salem, OR community. We are looking for like-minded individuals, especially those with relevant expertise, in developing this program. We also seek to network with as many existing sustainability projects in the Mid-Willamette Valley as possible.

Our Mission: 

To educate and activate people to work for peace, justice and environmental sustainability.

104 Commercial St. NE Salem, Oregon 97301

Phone: 503-585-2767           Fax: 503-588-0088.

OPW Staff

#	Name	Position	Phone	Mobile Phone Number	Fax
1	Kerry Fox	Executive Director	503-585-2767
2	Peter Bergel	Program Director	503-371-8002
3	Carrie Adams	Office Manager & Event Coordinator	503-585-2767
4	Jeanette Hardison	Development Officer	503-585-2767
5	Office Staff	Office Staff	503-585-2767

TTS ( boy, I still prefer STIR ... just call it Salem Transition Initiative for Resiliency if you want to include that important theme ... But hey, a rose by any other name ....) will be holding an organizing meeting at PeaceWorks on February 13

Post-collapse Transit Options: Small is Beautiful

Image by John McNab via FlickrWe're already seeing contraction in our always meager transit systems.  It's good to have some idea of how the rest of the poor folks have managed transit without ginormous transit systems.

What LEED needs to become to become relevant

THE PASSIVHAUS VS. THE SOLAR HOME

Tree Hugger - It is hard to believe, but this "mountain hut" in Austria needs next to no heating; it is all done with body heat, cooking heat and passive solar heat. it is an example of a Passivhaus design, built to a standard developed by the Passivhaus Institut in Germany, based on the work of Dr. Wolfgang Feist.

Green Builiding Advisor - An energy-efficient house without solar equipment. Designed by architect Christoph Schulte, this superinsulated home was the first Passivhaus building in Bremen, Germany.

More and more designers of high-performance homes are buzzing about a superinsulation standard developed in Germany, the Passivhaus standard. The standard has been promoted for over a decade by the Passivhaus Institut, a private research and consulting center in Darmstadt, Germany. . .

The Passivhaus standard is a residential construction standard requiring very low levels of air leakage, very high levels of insulation, and windows with a very low U-factor

Unlike most U.S. standards for energy-efficient homes, the Passivhaus standard governs not just heating and cooling energy, but overall building energy use, including base load electricity use and energy used for domestic hot water. . .

Although the Passivhaus Institut recommends that window area and orientation be optimized for passive solar gain, the institute's engineers have concluded, based on computer modeling and field monitoring, that passive solar details are far less important than airtightness and insulation R-value. . .

In Europe, most homes are heated with a boiler connected to a hydronic distribution system. Since residential forced-air heating systems are almost unknown in Europe, many Passivhaus advocates declare that their houses "have no need for a conventional heating system"ˇ - a statement that reflects the European view that forced-air heat distribution systems are "unconventional."ˇ

Local Heroes: Urban Foraging

Image via Wikipedia

Cool. Nice story on STIR member Jake Kosker and the other urban foragers in Salem.

. . . Kosker is part of a growing movement that touts the sweetness of fruit picked from street trees, local parks or neighbor's yards that would otherwise go to waste.

Urban foraging could be as simple as picking blackberries at a local park or as involved as Kosker's daily trek for plums, cherries, hazelnuts and walnuts through the alleys of his northeast Salem neighborhood.

Web sites such as www.neighborhoodfruit.com, www.veggietrader.com and Portland's www.urbanedibles.org have popped up throughout the country, providing maps and encouraging city dwellers to forage for urban fruit. From a local food standpoint, it's hard to get more local than your own neighborhood. . . .

Marion-Polk Food Share launched its own urban harvest team last year to pick neighborhood fruit trees.

The food bank often gets calls from homeowners who don't have the time or physical ability to keep up with the harvest, said Kat Daniel who runs the program as part of the Women Ending Hunger campaign.

"We have people calling saying, 'we have this plum tree. Can you pick this plum tree?' " she said.

Now they can. She hopes to expand the program to include more volunteer harvesting teams so they don't have to turn jobs away during peak times. . . .

From the Capitol Fountain to Union Street please!

Awesome:

Conserving Farmland -- Peak Moment TV on Salem's CCTV

Given that the price of oil quadrupled in Summer of 2008, what does it mean that OPEC output did not increase even as prices were skyrocketing? Image via Wikipedia

Did you miss the showing of "Conserving Farmland on Trabucco Ranch" on Salem's cable-access Channel 21 today at 5? You have another chance to see the show on Channel 21 tomorrow (Saturday, July 18 at 4 p.m.) or again on Monday (July 20, 9 a.m.). Or, if you miss all of them, you can watch the show on your computer here.

Sponsored by Transition Salem, this will be the first in a long series of three-times-a-week broadcasts of excellent programs produced by the Peak Moment TV team, dedicated to helping people prepare for the transitions ahead of us.

A new program will premier each Friday at 5 pm and be repeated the following Saturday at 4 pm and then on the following Monday at 9 am.

Peak Moment Conversations: Coming Soon to Salem's Public Access TV (CCTV)

The nice folks at Salem's own CCTV have agreed to broadcast an excellent series of shows, "Peak Moment Conversations," created and produced by two brilliant folks with lots of TV experience (so these shows are many orders of magnitude more professional -- and watchable -- than a few home-made shows you might have seen on cable-access TV before).

CCTV has provided a very nice schedule, with each program showing thrice: Fridays at 5 p.m., Saturdays at 4 p.m., and Mondays at 9 a.m., so no matter what your schedule is, one of those is bound to work for you (you may also have some sort of capability to "time shift" when you watch). There's an amazing amount of great material in these shows, which they continue to produce, so we'll probably just keep right on going.

Transition Salem sponsors this series as part of our ongoing and growing efforts to get more people involved in helping us prepare for and become more resilient in the rapidly emerging new world of peak oil/energy scarcity, carbon limits, and economic uncertainty.

Please tell your friends, co-workers, the people at church, your book group, your service club, your political friends, etc. about these shows and invite them to watch. Everyone who is concerned for the state of the world and its direction can enjoy these gentle, informative and often inspiring shows. Following is a description and some of the topics that will be shown:

Peak Moment Conversations - stories of local self reliance

Tour a suburban permaculture backyard, ride an electric bike, learn about renewables, car-sharing, intentional communities, and the elephant in the peak oil living room. "Peak Moment: Community Responses for a Changing Energy Future" showcases individuals and groups building resilient, local self-reliant communities responding to a collapsing economy, and accelerating energy and climate decline. The half-hour programs feature host Janaia Donaldson's in-studio conversations, field tours, and occasional presentation excerpts.

This program may not be about your specific community, but it's about everybody's communities in our global community. Stations and viewers tell us they love this show: it's personal, engaging, very local, inspirational, and informative.

And with the economic downturn -- it's timely. The heart of this program are stories told by people about their ideas and actions to live with a smaller footprint, to be connected to the earth and each another, to be more self-sufficient while they protect themselves and their families in the downturn.

The series (146 episodes as of June 2009) has aired for three years on about two dozen community access stations nationwide including Manhattan & Brooklyn NY, Sacramento, San Francisco, and mostly many smaller communities.

Notes to stations:

These programs are up front and personal, and production quality is quite good. It's produced by individuals in northern California with a community access TV background. Program DVDs are available for purchase at www.peakmoment.tv. Target audience is people from teens on up: anybody who eats, drinks and breathes -- and is concerned about sustainability, humans, the economy, and life on the planet.

Frequency of Episodes: Approximately every 30 days

Producer: Peak Moment Television

DL	Episode Title	HH:MM:SS	Total DL

Episode Title	HH:MM:SS
001 Conserving Farmland at Trabucco Ranch	00:28:42.03
072 "What a Way to Go" - Meet the Filmmakers	00:26:51.03
073 Post Carbon Cities - Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty	00:28:01.00
074 San Francisco Takes Action on Climate Change	00:28:04.00
075 Sustainable Connections - Transforming a Community Through Local Business	00:28:02.00
076 City Repair - Permaculture for Urban Spaces	00:27:38.00
077 Climate Change, Despair and Empowerment -- A Roadshow from "Down Under"	00:27:58.00
080 An Innovative Program Helps Residents Protect Their Water	00:27:59.00
081 A No-Nonsense Look at Climate Change and Petrocollapse	00:27:36.50
082 People-Centered Developments for Reduced-Energy Living	00:27:53.00
083 Practical Tools to Grow an Intentional Community	00:27:25.00
084 Creating the Impossible - O.U.R. Ecovillage	00:27:37.00
089 Affordable Homes Forever - Opal Community Land Trust	00:27:12.00
090 What Can One Person Do?	00:28:02.00
091 A Sustainability Renaissance Man	00:28:02.00
092 A Community Car Share Hits the Road	00:28:04.00
093 Mendocino Renegade	00:27:55.50
094 Facilitating Economic Localization in Willits, California	00:27:54.00
095 Economic Localization - A Community Rediscovering Itself	00:27:27.00
096 Reconnecting with Our Roots - Food for Body and Soul	00:27:03.00
097 Toward New Models of Shared Leadership	00:27:49.50
098 Energy Independence -- America's Road Not Taken	00:27:39.50
099 Hope Dances Eternal for this Media Maven	00:27:44.00
100 Suburban Permaculture with Janet Barocco and Richard Heinberg	00:25:23.00
101 Energy and Climate Initiatives in Santa Barbara	00:28:03.00
102 To Be of Use - Serving the Community	00:28:04.00
103 Building An Ecologically Sensible Home	00:27:41.00
105 For the Love of Trees	00:27:55.50
106 Community Gardens Grow Community	00:27:33.00
107 Plug-in Hybrids Power the Grid	00:27:59.00
108 Sustainable Bellingham — Grassroots Organizing is Key	00:27:59.00
109 Powering the Rain Shadow	00:27:26.00
110 Preparing for Peak Oil	00:27:35.50
111 We Make the Road by Walking	00:27:50.00
112 Learning From the Collapse of Earlier Societies	00:27:40.00
113 Designing the Next Generation Hybrid Jungers and Kaufman.mpg	00:28:04.00
129 Meeting the Energy Challenge	00:28:03.00
130 Oil and Gas — The Next Meltdown?	00:27:02.00
131 Making Financial Sense of the Coming Energy Crisis	00:27:48.00
132 Peak Oil and Its Effect on Climate Change	00:21:28.00
133 Two View of a Post-Oil Future	00:27:08.00
134 Shocks, Shortages, and Scenarios - Planning for a Post-Oil Future	00:21:07.00
135 Broadening the Peak Oil Conversation	00:28:03.50
136 Energy Investment - Energy Return	00:27:26.00
137 Peak Oil - Politics, Geopolitics and Choke Points	00:26:55.00
138 The Twilight of an Age	00:25:10.00
139 The Transition Movement Comes to America	00:27:34.00
140 Transit on Demand (Have Cell Will Travel)	00:27:40.00
141 Creating a Home Graywater System	00:27:59.00
142 Energy Coop Brings Power to the People	00:28:02.00
143 Corporate Couple Become Permaculture Activists	00:25:56.00
144 Local Living Economies — Protecting What We Love