Gerard Ungerman

Please consider attending this FREE event regarding Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency in the greater Butte County area and/or forward this information to anyone you think might be interested in attending  (complimentary breakfast and lunch provided).

WHEN:  Thursday May 24, 2012 – 9 am – 3 pm

WHERE:        Agriculture Training and Research Center
                            CSU Chico University Farm
                            311 Nicholas C Schouten Lane – Chico, CA 92928
                           (530) 898 6343

PRESENTERS:

 9:00   Ben House and Julie Trethric (PG&E) will talk about services and incentives for reduced energy consumption, three-phase Vs. Single phase power and voltage – Safety – Time varying pricing – Effective ways to manage energy costs – Energy efficiency and demand response programs / rebates.

10:00  Bill Green, education manager at the International Center for Irrigation Technology will present the “Agricultural Pumping Efficiency Program” (APEP) and will make a pump efficiency demonstration.

12:30  Dan Taverner, District Conservationist at USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) will introduce his agency and talk about resource concerns and conservation planning.  He will also present the NRCS Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and more.

12:45  Jacqui Gaskill, CA Energy Conservation specialist (USDA – NRCS) will elaborate on EQIP Energy Resource Concern Assistance, online tools for energy conservation and renewable energy, National Energy initiative and energy / money saving tips

1:15   Ken Householder, Area engineer (USDA – NRCS) will talk about irrigation systems and irrigation water management.

1:30   Mel & Mary Thompson, ranchers, will present their farm:  Sierra Farms Lamb.

1:45   Steven Scott Nicholls, Assistant Energy Program Coordinator (USDA – Rural Development) will present the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) and discuss funds availability (loans Vs. grants) and eligibility to acquire such technologies as anaerobic digesters, geothermal energy generation, renewable energy generation and E85 / biodiesel blender pumps.

The RSVP deadline has been extended to May, 11, 2012.  Please reserve a seat early as space is limited!

To RSVP contact:
Phuong Ly
Phone: 530-534-0112 ext.118
Fax: 530-533-4936
Email:  Phuong.ly@ca.usda.gov

Thank you,

Kelly Miller, District Manager

Butte County Resource Conservation District
150 Chuck Yeager Way, Suite A
Oroville, CA , 95965
Phone: (530) 534-0112 ext. 122
FAX: (530) 533-4936
E-mail: bc-rcd@carcd.org

“Power Down”, “The Oil Depletion Protocol”, “Peak Everything”, “Black Out”…, it is almost impossible for anyone who’s concerned about the future of our petroleum-addicted society to have missed Richard Heinberg’s impressive and scarifying body of work.  Probably one of today’s foremost experts on the consequences of our utter dependence on finite energy sources, Richard Heinberg came on Tuesday April 24 to CSU,Chico to address a well-packed room about his latest book: “The End of Growth”.

A very diverse crowd came to listen to Richard Heinberg talk about the end of growth.

“The forever growth of our national or global economy – or of any economy for that matter – is neither normal nor possible”.  Heinberg opened fire with a complete anathema for the ruling mercantile elite of our modern world where the seemingly prevailing “wisdom” is that nothing matters more than growing GDPs forever.   “We cannot go on producing more stuff forever in a finite world made up of finite resources”.  Now how about that?   Perhaps more striking than Heinberg’s comments is the mere fact that such arguments would have to be pronounced in the first place.  Even more so that some would still have the nerve to deny this mother of all duh-isms.  Now of course, most people do not even consider our utter dependence as living beings on one or another source of energy.  For many in our industrial and post-industrial societies, energy is as “normal” as air, water, and what else… cable television and cellular phones ?  Few questions what energy is and where it comes from.  “Energy is convenient;  I have access to it now, so really why worry about it ?”  If the feedbag is full, why even bother popping our heads out and looking around ?

Richard Heinberg, a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, can be credited with spending a fair share of his life trying to wake humanity from its gluttonous sleepwalk towards the cliff of resource depletion.  At the beginning of his presentation at Chico State, he mentioned the 1972 book “Limits To Growth”.   The first highly publicized book to forewarn that there couldn’t possibly be such a thing as forever growth, “Limits to Growth” played a significant role in setting a younger Heinberg on his path to questioning the hyper-consumer model.  Derided as gloomy nonsense by most economists at the time, the book has ended up not only being proven right by recent economic developments, it actually missed how quickly things would turn bad for the “forever growth” model.  Indeed, oil and natural gas production peaked even faster than anticipated and the rising price of all commodities as a result threw the entire world economy in disarray.   But Heinberg points out that there is a co-determining factor that “Limits to Growth” failed to anticipate:  loans extended by banks out of thin air (i.e. funded by the anticipated payback with interest of current debts also emitted out of thin air) to families, businesses and even countries grew totally out of proportion with the actual tangible value that the world could produce.  Soon debts would escalate totally beyond what anybody could ever pay back.   Seemingly colossal financial institutions were proven overnight to actually be little more than bogus constructions of smoke and mirrors.  Decreasing energy supply and the higher cost of commodities then came as the nails to the coffins of both over-extended consumers and rapacious smoke lenders.

As Heinberg and many like him (James Kunstler, Jeremy Rifkin, David Korten, Jared Diamond, Herman Daly or Derrick Jensen to just name a few powerful thinkers and authors) point out, there is no such thing as “a series of recessions and recoveries”.  There is instead a steady erosion of an economic and financial system that overheated in an irrational frenzy of greed.   The intention of living a rich, comfortable life is not enough to produce actual, sustainable wealth.  Money that is not backed by the value of tangible, productive work is worthless.   With over-extended credit, we invented a currency of intent in order to match the seemingly limitless promises of phenomenal fossil fuel reserves.  Credit has been and still is emitted at a sky-rocketing level.  Energy supply for its part has already peaked and plateaued.  Like ancient Rome, the West is now more preoccupied by consumerism and entertainment than it is by actual production, relegating that to the poorer nations of the world, such as China, India and South Korea.

Nothing is sustainable about fossil fuel-powered, credit-funded resource gluttony.  Credit emitted beyond repayment will fund eternal growth no more than finite resources on a finite planet will fuel it.  We now have no choice but to re-invent what comes down to an eternal model of communal life.  We need local resilience and autonomy.  We need to re-skill and we need to re-establish connections with our human relationships and natural surroundings.  We must become again integrated participants in our own communities, in touch with the resources of our own lands.  The secret is to not try to grow beyond a state of harmonious continuity.  We need to tap on our planet’s bounty at a rate that actually allows for renewable resources to replenish themselves day after day, year after year.   This after all is not so difficult to achieve since this is how life has been able to thrive on Earth for millions of years.  Are we dumber than mushrooms ?

Post Carbon Institute's Richard Heinberg: "There isn't such a thing as forever growth on a finite planet."

On Tuesday night Richard Heinberg concluded on a happy note, making reference to the nation of Bhutan and its measurement of national “Gross Domestic Happiness”, as opposed to our own “GDP” or Gross Domestic Product .  With very modest living standards in comparison with the so-called developed world, Bhutan ranks among the first nations of the world for the happiness of its citizens.   Finding the “happy” medium between sufficient wealth and time spent in family and in community seems to be the secret to happy, fulfilling and contented life.  Luckily, many groups and communities around the world are already working hard at creating new models that would be able to thrive outside the illusory, unsustainable model of forever growth.  Almost marginal today, these projects seeking to re-introduce local currencies and communal solidarity may have to become de facto research laboratories for the solutions that the rest of the world will run scrambling for when the debt-based, fossil fuel-powered globalized economy finally collapses onto itself.  It is futile to even question whether or not we have time to prepare for a post carbon, post hyper-consumerism human environment.   If we believe in creating a sustainable society, and if we have the willingness to try, then we need to strive for it with all the energy and all the enthusiasm we can muster.  Let’s give it our best shot, that’s it.

- Gerard Ungerman

Having state government food regulators at the same table as independent organic farmers who demand food safety rules adapted to their scale of operation wasn’t a big enough challenge for newly-famous and highly colorful food advocate Joel Salatin.  After meeting what he calls “food cops” hours earlier at Lundberg Family Farms’ conference center in Richvale, Salatin, a familiar figure for whoever has watched films like “Fresh”, “Food Inc” or “Farmageddon”, managed yet another “tour de force”:  bringing under the same roof over seven hundred people representing a broad array of Chico’s political spectrum. 

Joel Salatin in Chico: "Folk, This ain't Normal".

From so-called right to so-called left, “popular conservatives” (some being active with the “Tea Party”) rubbed shoulders, or at least sat next to “progressives” (some being close to the “Occupy Movement”).  Many from the first group seemed to be farmers, while many from the other tended to be organic food consumers and gardeners.  The two groups coming together in the same auditorium and applauding the same speaker and cheering at the same themes was in itself a huge victory.  Many who try to bring communities together beyond typical cultural and political divides are not so lucky.   Of course, one could say it is easy to unify people around food.  Yes, but there may be more to it than food. 

As he spoke about such aberrations as penalizing small farmers for producing and selling raw milk while large corporations that sell the most unhealthy junk food are left totally unmolested, Salatin, by his mere success at bringing so many people from so many varied backgrounds together, exemplified that the true divide in our society – as in probably most other societies – is not around people’s particular political affiliations.  Political affiliations are in great part the product of both cultural conditioning and reaction to such peripheral but emotionally charged topics as gay rights, abortion or gun control.  What Salatin’s ability to gather people demonstrates is that the true divide is actually between the willingness and/or unwillingness to question what passes for “normal”.

As a matter of fact, “Folks, This Ain’t Normal” is the title of Salatin’s latest book.  It covers such practices as pushing lands beyond their carrying capacity limits via chemical fertilizers, a practice that drains natural nutrients from soils and renders them unfertile. Salatin also finds ‘abnormal’ the fact that we have collectively unlearned how to prepare food from raw ingredients.  Abnormal for him as well is the fact that few seem to question the healthiness of food-like products that are so processed, so artificial and so un-nutritious that they can’t even decompose.  Of course, we could go on and on and on about all the things that “ain’t normal” where the food industry is concerned…  Even the expression “food industry” borders on an oxymoron.  Do we speak about “love industry” or “culture industry”?  True, food-making and selling is a commercial activity, but food is also fundamentally about nutrition and long-term survival of the living (or should be) before being about short-term, petro-chemical “industrial” profit margins.

Beyond food, it is the very relationship to the concept of normal that is being highlighted by Salatin’s on-going campaign to denounce what some call “Franken-food”.  Some seem to have a tendency and an ability to question whatever is presented to them as “the norm” by whatever authority is in charge; others don’t seem to even know that there is such an option as questioning anything.  It is not at all a function of whether one tends to be more individualistic (so-called “right”) or more collectively-minded (so-called “left”).  It is about questioning authority.  And it doesn’t matter in the least whether this authority happens to be a hyper-mercantile plutocracy, like in the Western World today, or whether it happens to be a collective dictatorship as in the now fading, post-Soviet Union “communist” world.  One can argue that conformists would be likely to obey anything presented to them as the “norm”.  What Salatin is demonstrating is that many people in the United States, Europe and most other parts of the world for that matter, have had enough of a system of short-term mercantile exploitation; a system that sends jobs overseas; a system that sells addictive junk to children; a system that pushes loans on poor elderly to expropriate them out of their homes; a system that engineers insecurity in people’s mind to manipulate them into buying stuff they don’t need and into contracting debts they will never be able to pay off.  It isn’t about food per se.  It isn’t about the poisonous “right vs. left” rhetoric meant to divide people to better conquer them.  It is about understanding our world.  It is about understanding what makes us healthy and happy; understanding what can empower us to live our lives to the fullest.  And reciprocally, it is about understanding who and what stands in the way, why and how it is happening and what we can do about it.

What really “ain’t normal” is to stand in support of whatever is poised to make our lives miserable (preventable illnesses, existential anxieties, unemployment…).  Joel Salatin may gather us around the topic of demanding food that’s good and healthy for our stomachs and for our world, as he did on April 16th.  But what he is really doing, perhaps even unbeknownst to himself, is to gather us, beyond useless political bickering, around the more general topic of reconquering our own lives, free from the exploitative control of the greedy, of the powerful and, ultimately, of the deranged.

 -  Gerard Ungerman

Joel Salatin addresses crowd at Chico Neighborhood Church

To know all the many details of Joel Salatin’s presentation at the Neighborhood Church, there “ain’t” a better way than reading his latest book:  “Folks: This ain’t Normal”.

We don't have much water - LET'S SAVE IT !

WHEN:  Sunday April 22, 2012 from 2 to 3:30 pm

WHERE:  West Lindo Community Garden @ 305 West Lindo Ave, Chico

Sign up with Jonah at 530-588-0585 or  cultivatingcommunitynv.org/register

Gayle Kimball, author of Essential Energy Tools book, CDs and DVDs offers a workshop on kinesiology:  How to balance the body and mind -  Practical visualizations to ground, center, achieve goals, protect – Introduction to clairvoyance, Emotional Freedom Technique acupressure tapping, and essential healing tools.  Reiki is available to those who complete the workshop.

WHEN:  Sunday April 22, 2012 from 10 am till 4 pm

WHERE:  Please, call or email for address and directions.

For more information:  gkimball@csuchico.edu   530-345-8118