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

A must-see: Food, Inc. Starts July 10 in Salem!

Another reminder that Salem has a really, really terrific indie movie house, one that puts nearly every other US city to shame: Salem Cinema, with THREE, count 'em, THREE screens so that a wonderful array of movies that will never reach the megaplex will be shown right here in Salem, often before they reach much larger cities.

This summer's must see indie film: Food, Inc. From the website for the film:

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield's Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms' Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

Making Salem Saturday Market even cooler

Image by tps12 via Flickr

Free bike safety instruction at Salem Saturday Market, where there's also free monitored bike parking. Nice.

Post-Peak Remodeling: What do we do with all those garages

Image by riebschlager via Flickr

Despite being created by a lawyer, there's a very nice blog, "The Sharing Solution," that has some really great ideas, including this one on repurposing garages and turning them into community building and useful spaces. An excerpt:

Picture a block where 8 neighbors repurpose their garages:

• Garage #1:The Gym. Drawing from neighbors' existing equipment, put in the stationary bike, a treadmill, an elliptical machine or two, weights, and so on, and give everyone access during reasonable hours. Cancel your gym memberships and save some money, too.
  
  
• Garage #2: The Music Room. Soundproof the heck out of one garage, roll in a piano, put in a drum set, and a disco ball, and the neighborhood garage bands will be off and rockin'. Sometimes open the garage door and have a dance party in the driveway.
  
  
• Garage #3: The Workshop. Consolidate tools, workbenches, and other useful items into one garage. Be sure to carefully label everything or take inventory so you don't forget whose tools are whose. All neighbors can come to repair broken household items, or do wood working projects.
  
  
• Garage #4: The Rec Room. Give it a cozy feel with some carpeting and couches, fill it with toys, games, and a ping pong table, and let the fun begin!
  
  
• Garage #5: Art Studio. This would be a place for folks to share art supplies, spread out with their art projects, and store their works in progress.
  
  
• Garage #6: Stuff Library. This is where you store that one neighborhood lawn mower, and any other items that neighbors are willing to lend to each other - bread machines, sewing machines, camping gear, volleyball net, and so on.
  
  
• Garage #7: Dry Goods "Store." Neighbors who want to save money could make bulk orders together and store goods in once place, and maybe come up with a ticket system for dividing expenses. For example, neighbors could buy 500 rolls of [recycled] toilet paper and store them in Garage #7. Each time a neighbor needs to stock up, he or she can go in the garage, "pay" 4 tickets per roll, and take home what is needed. It's like having an informal grocery cooperative on your own block.
  
  
• Garage #8: The Library. Carefully label your books and DVDs and shelve them here. Come up with a system for checking items out. Add a couch or two, and the library becomes a quiet place for anyone to come, relax, and get lost in book land.

Decoding the Ethanol Scam and CBO Coverup

Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via Flickr

This op-ed reads like an example in "How to Lie with Statistics," one of the key intellectual self-defense tools ever created for living in the modern world. The author (a former corn-state congressman) spins the data to fool the gullible into thinking that our ethanol mania isn't killing us on our food bills. But a good analyst puts the brake on Big Ag's spin machine. See below (from an email exchange):

Yep, its responsible for a fifth of our high food inflation rate. That percentage translates to roughly [$]9 billion in higher food costs for all Americans. That is well over twice the money spent on ethanol blending subsidies (45 cents for every gallon of ethanol) and about the same as the cost to consumers ([$]9 billion) due to ethanol's lower gas mileage. Together, those costs are about [$]22 billion. The CBO is downplaying the fact that it is costing us [$]9 billion by expressing it as a percentage of a confusing percentage.

It is a reality that ethanol has had an impact on American food prices, exactly how much is debateable, but that impact pales in comparison to the impact in third world countries that rely on our corn exports where people survive on ground corn. Average monthly corn prices remain about 100% higher than historic averages (almost $4.00 a bushel versus $2.00). Those high corn prices have driven some poultry producers into bankruptcy.

Update: Excellent dissection of a cellulosic ethanol scam that snagged one of the country's biggest ethanomaniacs here.