Table of Contents

Woodland Farming versus Monocultures

Monocultures are how farming is usually done today. A huge field is planted with one thing, wheat for example, and everything is done with machines.

• Monocultures have very inefficient irrigation systems—they waste water.
• The single type of plant uses only a specific set of nutrients—eventually causing the soil to become stripped of the required nutrients and therefore useless in monocultural farming.
• The single plant type uses only the water and nutrients of a specific soil depth—wasting more water.
• Since everything is done with machines, harvesting included, there is a lot of waste.
• If one plant in the monoculture gets a disease or is affected by a certain pest, it will wipe out the entire crop since there is no buffer.
• They require pesticides/herbicides/insecticides.

There are probably plenty of other reasons why monocultures are a bad idea. Now here’s why woodland farms, a type of polyculture, are better:

• Woodland farms usually do not need irrigation however if you live in a dry climate they are easy to irrigate and due to the layers of vegetation the water usually won’t evaporate.
• The incredible diversity of woodland farms uses and replaces all the nutrients in the soil, and the soil gets richer every year.
• From trees to tiny plantains, the differing root lenghts use up the water and the nutrients from all soil depths.
• Everything must be harvested manually and nothing is wasted.
• If a plant or tree gets a disease, it will not spread because it surrounded by different species which are not affected by the disease.
• Woodland farms do not need any pesticides or insecticides, because there are natural ways of dealing with pests.
• They do not need herbicides because weeds are encouraged, being easier to maintain.

Plants Working Together

It is essential in woodland farming that the plants work together. Strategic planting designed so that the plants benefit each other is called companion planting. Certain plants have useful traits such as repelling insects, enriching the soil, trapping water in the soil, providing something for climbing plants to climb, etc. Some specific plants/plant types are very important in a woodland farm for that reason. 

• Trees provide shade for plants that need it and protect from wind heavy rainfall and soil erosion. Also they give somewhere for climbing plants (like legumes) to climb.
• Legumes (beans, peas, etc) have bacteria in their roots which add nitrogen, a nutrient that all plants need, to the soil.
• Onions have very nice flowers but they also repel insect pests very effectively.

Dealing with Pests

Every farm needs pest control and woodland farms are no exception. Lots of wild animals will happily help you with this—you just need to provide them with homes. Such as:

• Bat boxes—inviting bats to live in your woodland farm is always a great idea. A single brown bat can eat up to 600 mosquitoes in an hour! And one bat box can be room for 100 to 300 bats—you do the math.

Learn More about Woodland Farming

Edible Forest Gardens: and invitation to adventure (the Natural Farmer)

Plants for a Future—a database of useful plants (woodland farming section)

Edible Forest Gardens: the ecology and design of home scale food forests

Mother Earth News: Plant an Edible Forest Garden 

The Guardian: Garden of the Future?

Electricity happens when electrons start moving around. Running or spinning a magnet past a copper coil makes them start moving around in the copper coil. So the axel of the spinning part is attatched to a wheel on the inside which has either the magnets or the copper coils on it. The other component stands still.

The electricity created by the copper coil will flow through wires attatched to either end. You can charge a battery (do not ever try charging a battery unless you have an extensive knowledge of electronics or a kit or something because if it is overcharged it could explode), run a motor, turn on a light, etc. A gigantic wind turbine or a hydro dam (which also uses a turbine) can hook up to the grid and power a whole neighborhood!

Coral reefs are masses of natural structures composed of skeletal material from by reef-building (or hard) corals, small organisms that grow in shallow water. Corals are found in both temperate and tropical waters. Reefs, however, can only form within about 30° of the Equator. They leave their exoskeletons when they die and the tide movement slowly layers them to form many different types of coral. The corals can only grow within 30 meters (100 feet) of the surface of the water where the temperature is above 16° .

Some people mistakenly call corals polyps. ‘Polyp’ describes a stage in the life of a coral, and is not specific to that species. Corals are hydroids, in a polyp form.

A healthy reef normally has a lot of algae, including turf algae, coralline algae, and macro algae. The coral itself does not actually produce the amazing pigments that make it so pleasing to look at. The colour comes from an algae which has a symbiotic relationship with the coral. A symbiotic relationship is when two plants and or animals live with each other and they both benefit from the relationship. The corals provide a safe place for the algae to live, and the algae give the corals food. The algae is called zooxanthellae. Coral reefs support a huge diversity of marine animal and plant life. They are, in fact, the most biodiverse type of marine ecosystem in the world. It takes many years to form a reef, (the average growth rate being a minute 1 mm per year) yet with the new modern threats such as dynamite fishing, it can take a few seconds to destroy one.

Coral reefs are threatened in many ways. Coral bleaching happens when the zooxanthellae in the coral is killed, usually by global warming or by a chemical change in the water. When coral is bleached it turns white and dies. Dynamite fishing, as mentioned before, consists of throwing explosives into a reef, liquifying the innards of small fish and causing them to float to the surface for easy collection. Cyanide fishing is somewhat similar—dumping poison on a reef to make the fish sluggish and easy to capture. People eat the poisoned fish without knowing it. Just plain overfishing kills coral reefs even if no incredibly destructive methods are used. Reefs are very valuable, even in non-environmental fields; medicine, tourism, and of course the fishing industry.

Click here to learn more about coral reefs

There are many cutting edge wind technologies out there; most of them are silent, beautiful, able to be installed in an urban setting, and do not kill migratory bats and birds. The majority of these cost hundreds of dollars and can power a whole house.

Another option is making your own turbine, maybe even from recycled materials for that extra greenness. There are many places you can find instructions. MAKE: magazine, Instructables, and many more locations on the ‘net. Sometime I’m even going to post wind-turbine making instructions right here on the CAN website!

If you want to learn about the inner workings of wind turbines— ALL turbines, in fact, click here.

The first comprehensive global assessment of sea grass losses (a fancy phrase for a study on shrinking seagrass beds, or ‘meadows’) showed that 58 percent of seagrass beds are shrinking. The study also showed that, since 1990, the amount lost from each marine meadow annually has gone from 1% to a staggering 7%.

A co-author of the study, James Fourqurean (a professor at Florida International University), claims that the reason sea grass is dissapearing is that it likes the same type of water that people, especially tourists, like: shallow, sheltered areas. Sea grasses are most common in bays and around river mouths, also epicentres of human activity. Though the grass can deal with, in fact clean up, some degree of pollution, when the dredging and dumping is too much, it dies.

“Globally, we lose a seagrass meadow the size of a soccer field every thirty minutes,” are the words of another co-author of the study, William Dennison of the University of Maryland.

The scientists also said that global warming ‘is predicted to have deleterious effects on seagrasses.’

There are ways to help seagrass recover. In Florida, USA, treated wastewater being dumped into caused sea grass to begin dissapearing until the method of treating wastewater was changed and the grass recovered.

This is an example of how we have the technologies and solutions to many of the issues we (as a global community) face, we just need some more motivation to implement them.

Energy is never created or destroyed. The amount of energy in the universe is exactly the same as it ever was in the past or ever will be in the future. The thing with energy is it is always changing forms. There are a few forms of energy:

• Kinetic energy: motion. A ball that is rolling has kinetic energy.
• Chemical energy: chemicals that have energy stored in them. Wood has energy stored in it from the sun, which is released when it burns.
• Heat: pretty self explanitory.
• Light: also self explanitory.
• Electrical energy: electricity, both static (sparks you get from touching something or from clothes that just came out of the dryer, also lightning) and current (the electricity that runs through wires, powering lights and appliances).
• Sound energy: ripples in the air that register as sounds to our ears.
• There are more types, like tension and magnetism but lets stick to the basic ones above.

Some energy transformations are obvious, like current electricity can be used to create heat, light, sound, kinetic energy, etc, and plants, through photosynthesis, store energy from the sun in chemical form. Kinetic energy, when combatted by friction can create heat (try rubbing your hand together fast—it is more difficult than moving them the same speed while they don’t touch, but it creates heat). Burning chemical energy usually creates heat and light, and some machines turn the rising heat into kinetic or electric energy by catching it in a turbine. Now that you sort of know the basics about energy, I will move on to what this article is really about.

A good example of what I said in the first paragraph is SodaStream. SodaStream is a company which produces home soda makers— devices with a chamber of compressed carbon dioxide to which you can attatch a bottle of water and, with the press of a button, carbonate it. The seltzer (soda water) can then be flavoured with many ready made flavours sold by SodaStream.

SodaStream claims to be ‘The Earth’s Favourite Soda.’ Not to say they aren’t; they are certain to save a lot of cans and bottles from the landfill. However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that, since the machine uses no electricity or batteries, it is more environmental. Although Sodastream does not directly list this fact as one of their environmental virtues, it is, discreetly, on their ‘Environment’ page. And someone on teensygreen, the blog where I heard about SodaStream, did make that mistake (which is why I decided to write about it).

So what is not environmental about using no electricity, you ask. Well, think back to how energy works. It comes from somewhere! The energy that powers SodaStream home soda makers is from the compressed carbon. The CO2 is under pressure because it is squished so tightly, so when there is an opportunity it squirts out. But obviously, for the CO2 to contain stored energy, it must have come from somewhere. And, surprise surprise, somewhere down the production line electricity compressed the carbon. So it does use electricity!

In fact, if it used electricity more directly, SodaStream may be made more environmental. Then it could take CO2 out of the air, where it is harming the environment and put it in the soda. Also, that way, the machine would never run out and need to be replaced.

To test the oven  I got one of those super unhealthy cookie dough rolls from the store (So I wouldn’t be too disappointed if they didn’t work out). I covered the bottom of the oven with wax paper and spooned the cookie dough onto it. Wow, that dough was so greasy! Then I covered it with the sheet of plexiglass and set it in the sun on my roof deck. I propped it up a bit so it was angled towards the sun.

The cookies took somewhere from two to four or possibly five hours to cook. There was so much grease that it went through the wax paper and got all over the bottom of the oven. When I opened the oven, I picked up a cookie and the bottom stuck so I ate that one and let the rest cook for about another hour and a half. By then the cookies where equally done and the bottoms still stuck. It was because I had used wax paper instead of an oiled tray (which I will do next time), not because they were undercooked.

The oven works by using the aluminum foil covered flaps to reflect heat from the sun through the acrylic cover where it is absorbed by the black paint and trapped by the cover. According to Kyoto Energy, it can heat up to 100°C, but probably only in, say, 40° weather (it was designed for third-world countries near the equator, not for Vancouver).

Fortunately, it is a lot more complicated than that. At the talk I went to which took place on UBC Farm, Pollan pointed out how people who eat for health and are obsessed with their health are less healthy than people who eat for community or identity or pleasure. He also pointed out the connection between healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals and healthy people. The same things that make our environment healthy also are beneficial to our own health. Industry tries to make us eat more so they can sell more food, but in almost any culture you can find some ancient saying warning against this; eat until you are 80% full, eat until you are 75% full, etc. Even the prophet Muhammad said that a full belly is one that is one third food, one third drink, and one third air.

Things you can do to make a difference with food are:

Buy from farmers markets.

Eat food for the food not for the nutrients.

Show corporations that you care by voting with your fork. (making good choices as a consumer when you buy food)

Show your political leaders that you care by voting with your vote too.

Read the book to find out more!

With normal sidewalks, water washes off all of the chemicals that lie around on our roads and sidewalks. Then all this dirty water goes back into the water system. If the sidewalk is permeable, water filters through it dispersing the chemicals in a way the environment can cope with them and returning, clean, to the water system.

Our sidewalks collect air pollution that was taken out of the skies by rain, rubber and other materials that make the soles of our shoes (ever wondered where the soles of your shoes go when the wear away?), they collect gasoline from cars and they collect loads of other nasty stuff.

Permeable sidewalks help to preserve water, our #1 most important and crucial resource. Without it we would never have come about, and without it we are in serious trouble.

As well as inspiring amazing inventions, biomimicry is also a source of practical solutions to everyday problems. One example of this is how when concern arose of calcium buildup causing blockage in water pipes, the solution was found in shellfish. The shellfish build up their shells from calcium, and because their shells stop growing at some point they are able to stop the calcium buildup using proteins. This, when applied to the water pipes, worked.

Biomimicry does not always involve things in nature that are visible to the unaided eye. The use of cell-structure geometry has both aesthetic (pleasing to look at, beautiful), ergonomic (made for comfort), and economic (saving money) virtues.

Perhaps nature offers us the knowledge of how to protect it if we care to look.