This is the Waterpod™.

If you live in New York—or if you’re a sustainability geek—you probably heard about this highly ambitious project: 5 artists living on a barge on the waterways of New York, creating their own food, water and shelter in a demonstration of sustainable technology. The Waterpod visited each borough of New York, hosting events and offering free demonstrations and information to all visitors.

Cool stuff, at least in theory. Apocalypse enthusiasts and Kevin Costner fans alike have long toyed with the idea of living on the water; finally, somebody (one Mary Mattingly) got up the gumption to try it. And as it prepared to launch this spring, everyone from Discover to Inhabitat was singing its praises.

However, by the time I arrived in NY, the project had gotten some mixed press. Questions of the barge’s true sustainability were rampant—and my interest was piqued.

I tried to find information on the technical details via the project’s website, but only found a lot of artist-speak and a long James Joyce quote about water. What was the Waterpod exactly, and was it actually a viable living space—or just a high-concept artpiece created by ambitious amateurs?

The answer, not surprisingly, was a little of both. What I found at the Waterpod was not so much a fully-functioning project as a demonstration of possibility. Maybe it doesn’t work perfectly, but it offers fantastic food for thought and a lot of inspiration.

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Read the rest of The Waterpod: life on a New York boat (883 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agritourism, alternative, art, biotecture, chickens, citizen science, design, diy, ecotourism, education, energy, energy-efficient, environment, experimental, farming, featured posts, gardening, green building, green living, habitat, New York, organic, permaculture, radical, recycling, reuse, river, solar, starving artists, sustainable, teaching, water

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Remember when you got your first bike? Was it a Christmas present, or maybe a birthday gift? Remember how much fun you used to have on that bike, how fast you went, how great it felt?

Well, these days, most kids want an Xbox for their birthday; their parents ride around in cars with seatbelts, talking on their phones. Cycling is a thing of the past: a sport, a hobby, but rarely a mode of transportation. But I’m here to tell you: riding your bike is still fun, and still fast, and it’s the cheapest and most socially responsible workout you’ll ever get.

And there are no two ways about it: if you give a kid a bike, that kid will ride.

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Read the rest of Save the World, Ride a Bike (883 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: alternative, art, bicycle, biking, buy nothing, citizen science, community, counterculture, dumpster diving, eco travel, ecotourism, ecotravel, education, energy-efficient, environment, free sources, freegan, garbage, green living, how-to, politics, radical, recreation, recycling, reuse, starving artists, sustainable, teaching, transportation, travel, volunteer

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Yesterday I told you all about Farmer John’s struggle to save his family’s farm and preserve his unique identity (The Real Dirt on American Counterculture: How Farmer John made ideals come true).

From a family farm, the place has grown a lot. These days, Angelic Organics does a lot of education, from on-farm training to urban workshops to sustainable-building courses. See all they do here.

I visited an urban garden in Chicago’s South Side, just one of many teaching gardens founded with the help of Angelic Organics. It was a sunny day and the birds and bees were out. Here are some photos of the garden and the things living in it:

The next day, we drove out to Caledonia to visit the farm where Angelic Organics began. Unfortunately, it was a gray day and the Learning Center was mostly deserted. The farm itself is off-limits to tourists, with good reason; unfortunately, this meant there wasn’t much for us to see. We wandered around the grounds a bit, pet the goats, and went on our way.

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agriculture, agritourism, alternative, animal, biodynamics, Chicago, chickens, community, counterculture, ecotourism, ecotravel, education, environment, farm, farming, flowers, gardening, Illinois, insect, locavore, organic, outsider art, photography, radical, sustainable, teaching, travel, voluntourism

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Still from “The Bug” music video
photo courtesy of AngelicOrganics.com

In honor of Burning Man—which I’m reluctantly skipping this year—I’d like to talk a little about the counterculture in modern America.

After leaving Chicago, I stopped by Angelic Organics: a bastion of creativity in conservative Northern Illinois, a leader in organic and biodynamic agriculture, and the subject of a PBS documentary entitled The Real Dirt on Farmer John.

Teen John
photo courtesy of Angelic Organics

John Peterson grew up on this farm in Caledonia, near the Wisconsin border. His father died when he was young, and he wound up running the farm himself by the time he started college.

“To me, farming is poetry, drama. It’s a source of infinite fascination.”
- Farmer John Peterson

In school he met the counterculture: 60s idealists and artists, revolutionaries and back-to-the-landers. Farmer John believed in the importance of agriculture, and he was astounded that some of the city kids had never touched hay; he was also enamored of the free-spirited creativity they brought to his life. He opened the farm up to friends who wanted to visit and work, and created a place where openness, artistic expression and creativity mixed with hard work and good food. His farm, in many ways, realized the dreams of a million hippies—and it worked. For a while.

But the 60s ended, and times got rough for Farmer John. By the 1980s, he’d lost most of his land and had been ostracized from his community by a series of nasty rumors about his lifestyle and friends.

For small-town kids like me, the rumors sound familiar: it’s a cult! A satanic cult! They’re a bunch of gays and druggies doing animal sacrifice! I heard the same rumors about members of my own community, and accepted them as fact. So did many people in John Peterson’s hometown.

In the film, he talks about the pain of living as an outsider when you’ve done nothing wrong—which, in his case, was compounded by massive debt. Over the course of several years, Farmer John was forced to sell nearly the entire farm: he found himself destitute, hopeless and friendless in a town where his family had been pillars of the community.

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Read the rest of The Real Dirt on America’s Counterculture (580 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agriculture, agritourism, alternative, art, biodynamics, Chicago, counterculture, ecotourism, education, environment, farm, farming, featured, featured posts, film, Illinois, locavore, organic, outsider art, permaculture, politics, radical, starving artists, sustainable, teaching

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What does this mean? It means that if you’re looking for work in Colorado, green is the way to go.

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Read the rest of SEI Eco-Campus: Hands-on training in alternative energy (413 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: alternative, Colorado, education, energy, energy-efficient, environment, green building, Paonia, solar, sustainable, teaching, training, wind

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photo by Karina Salinas Heredia

When I was in third grade or so, my class visited a local farm. I didn’t learn a lot that day, not exactly: mostly what I recall is the smell of hay&manure, and the big scary turkeys clucking at me through a fence. Still, it brought the idea of a farm out of the Old MacDonald fantasy realm, and into reality; thereafter, when I saw an Orzalli peach pie at the farmer’s market, I knew where it had come from.

Don and Daphne at Zephyros Farm have taken the farm visit a step further: more than just a tour, their educational visits give kids the chance to see earthworms up close, weed and plant, and cuddle any adorable quadriped that might happen to be grazing nearby.

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Read the rest of Flowers, Lambs, Worms & Dirt: A Kid's-Eye View of Organic Farming (212 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agritourism, animal, Colorado, community, education, environment, farm, organic, Paonia, photography, teaching, tourism, touristry, WWOOF

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Right off the bat, I knew I’d love this place. 35 acres of organic, healthy goodness: Zephyros abounds with beautiful veggies, scampering lambs, mouthy goats, budding blooms, and one big black dog called Ullur who spends all day prancing around with giant sticks in his mouth.

The farm (and garden!) is run by Don Lareau and Daphne Yannakakis. They’re a bit hard to photograph, since they’re usually each in the middle of five hundred different and equally important tasks. Between the two of them, they run a diversified organic farm and CSA; manage four full-time interns and various short-term workers; raise two absurdly cute kids, Sophia and Diego; manage a website full of photos, links, recipes, and news; host farm dinners and educational sessions; serve in the local organic growers’ association; make gourmet bread and cheese and lasagna and run their own house besides.

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Read the rest of Zephyros Farm and Garden (524 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agritourism, animal, Colorado, education, environment, farm, flowers, organic, Paonia, photography, spring, teaching, volunteer, voluntourism

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yeahhh arms & legs $5.00 good price

steel tins

It’s a lovely, one-of-a-kind place: a hybrid of thrift store, recycle bin, and craft depot that puts big-box stores like Michael’s to shame. Art supplies sold by artists, and at prices artists can afford? Genius. Not to mention that by putting recycled materials to good use, the Depot keeps massive amounts of junk out of landfills.

Fueled entirely by donations, this place has been providing art and school supplies to starving artists and under-funded classrooms for over 30 years.

The shop itself, a creatively cluttered storefront on Telegraph Ave, is never the same from one day to the next. Linda, the Depot’s director, points out a few items from the current displays: a mountain of stainless-steel containers that were donated because the lids are too tight for kids to easily open; a stack of tote bags, still in the plastic, left over from a medical conference; rows of pressboard folders arranged by color. The Depot is selective about the donations it accepts, picking things that are in fine shape and can be resold— but you just never know what someone will donate next.

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Read the rest of One Man’s Trash: Recycled Art Supplies (331 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 19 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: art, California, education, featured posts, garbage, Oakland, photography, recycling, reuse, starving artists, teaching

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