Close the loop: rethink waste water

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WE REALLY DO NEED TO RETHINK THE WAY WE GO TO THE TOILET!

In this 18 min. 47 sec. TEDxTalk Anders Nyquist might just change your mind about the way we should go to the toilet in the 21st C. He a Swedish architect, designer, planner, contractor, teacher and school-master – and he ain't talking shit!

Instead, he talks about vortex toilets, sustainable architecture, how to close the loop for water and how to adopt a circular way of thinking instead of our linear way of thinking adopted in the industrial era. This talk is well worth the time!

CLICK HERE TO GO TO ANDERS NYQUIST'S TEDxTalk

LANDSHARE: A growing idea in Australia

Landshare Australia is a new kid on the sustainability block and it brings together people who have a passion for home-grown food, connecting those who have land to share with those who need land for cultivating food.

It is an idea that has its roots in the UK, launched through the River Cottage television program in 2009. The concept has since landed here in Australia. As yet there are less than a 1000 Aussies who have embraced the idea but it is early days. As they say, it began with the tiny seed of an idea – and it's growing and growing.

To quote the website "Landshare is for people who:
* Want to grow vegetables but don't have anywhere to do it
* Have a spare bit of land they're prepared to share
* Can help in some way – from sharing knowledge and lending tools to helping
out on the plot itself
* Support the idea of freeing up more land for growing
* Are already growing and want to join in the community"

In the end the concept has a lot to do with food security and reducing the food miles our food travels from where it is grown and onto our plate.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE LANDSHARE WEBSITE:

• The UK site
• The Australian site
  

CoHousing – A New AFFORDABLE Australian Dream?

Living Cooperatively: Affordable Housing – Sustainable Development - a Swedish model – has aroused quite a bit of interest, and there were similar ideas on display at Melbourne’s Sustainable Living Festival. What’s happening in your state or territory?

Sustainable Living In Intentional Communities (SLIC) is a group auspiced by the Sustainable Living Foundation (SLF) as it works towards a society that includes:

* Cohousing, where residents own their own home, but regularly share in community activities including common meals, centred around a community house. Cohousing communities are designed to address and encourage social interaction and ... click here to go to the full story

CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO 'Pigs Will Fly'

Food-sensitive planning and urban design

The Heart Foundation Victorian division has recently released Food-sensitive planning and urban design – a conceptual framework for achieving a sustainable and healthy food system.

Food-sensitive planning and urban design (FSPUD) recognises that access to healthy, sustainable and equitable food is an essential part of achieving liveable communities.

It is an approach to planning and urban design that addresses the critical intersect between public health, planning and urban design, and environmental sustainability. It presents the case for prioritising food in the planning and design of our cities.

FSPUD provides tools, suggestion and case studies to enable the practical reconciliation of food considerations with planning and urban design objectives. The document can be found here – These resources are for planners, architects, urban designers, engineers, policymakers, community members and elected representatives involved in urban land use and development. It provides tools, suggestions and case studies to help reconcile food considerations with planning and urban design objectives.

ANOTHER LINK: Click Here

TREVALLYN COMMUNITY GARDEN: Vision Lost or Redirected

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A TREVALLYN COMMUNITY GARDEN is the vision of a small group of Trevallynites that came together as the Trevallyn Sustainability Group. Their proposal came with the full package of ideals – social networking, community building, food security etc. etc. Sadly we are speaking in the past tense here because it seems that all these things are like, as our American cousins say, "motherhood and apple pie". But it seems that on Trevallyn the 'NIMBY syndrome' is alive and well and even for a community garden – an idea that most people purport to like. So why not?

The community garden idea was sold well enough it seems but actually there was not that much of a need to SELL it as it is one that comes with a full load of positive cultural cargo laced with social benefits. Nonetheless, the idea attracted its share of detractors. There was a laudable attempt to be 'professional' in order to win the day for the concept aided by a professionally prepared concept plan developed by Launceston City Council. Despite this, and possibly because of it in some cases, the outcome was the kind of polarisation that demands that there must be a winner no matter what the cost – or indeed no matter what is lost in order to win. A win-win outcome occasionally would be refreshing.

The Information Meeting was well managed as it seems that the Trevallyn Sustainability Network is well populated by qualified professionals of one kind or another. Most of whom it seems are women which may have gone some way to the polarisation. The detractors were by-and-large 'blokes' – and 'sporty blokes' at that. So it would seem that the men's business, women's business dynamic cannot be dismissed. But what about sustainability, food security, community networking, community development, etc.?

In this case the blokes have control of the land and for their purposes for they could line up long list of reasons as to why this proposal should go nowhere. That is so despite the women amassing an equally impressive list potential positives. Given this it looks like there is a need to be subversive and surreptitious in order to achieve at least some of the outcome sought. This could mean guerrilla gardening, or even gorilla gardening, [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6], street verge colonisation or even a touch of cultural jamming. If reasoned argument and logic doesn't cut it, well other methods need to be considered.

Yes some of the detractors may have had legitimate concerns about untidiness, access to public land regarding THIS proposal, etc. However, it would be a pity if the Trevallyn Sustainability Group lost heart and momentum. We should watch this space for developments it might be a lot of fun.

Click here to read about BANKSY

Energy Workshop on the Tamar

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Shanty or Sustainable Shelter ?

When you come into 'sustainability' from a cultural perspective you sometimes discover, happen upon, some extraordinary things. Taking a look at NVA's Website – a Glasgow based arts group – there was this entry ... "Harvest’s Eccentric Sheds ... Alongside Glasgow Harvest NVA wanted to try and find some of the most original allotment sheds in Glasgow. We commissioned film stills photographer Neil Davidson to search for, and record the most unique and interesting ‘eccentric sheds’ he could find. These are some of the results of his quest.

These structures are recycled architecture, they are all well ahead of their time and show a beautiful combination of practicality and imagination. These are the sort of buildings that give authorities a headache. They represent a freedom of spirit, an ‘outsiderness’, that hasn’t been tamed by petty planning restrictions or B&Q-itis."

To see the full project visit Neil Davidson’s WEBsite www.stillsman.co.uk.

And his two WEBgalleries on the sheds – Gallery 1 • Gallery 2

These 'sheds' are at the cutting edge of the sustainability endeavour. They speak volumes about the experimentation that goes on in "allotments" – 'Pommy speak' for community garden – alongside the community building, social networking, etc. These sheds also explain the not-in-my-backyard syndrome – wonderful but not in my backyard – that is exposed when this kind of social and cultural experimentation is proposed on a plot of land near you. Rather than say no, and with no discussion, we need to find ways to say yes if .............

These sheds not only represent experimentation into sustainable living social networking and cultural connection they also represent a threat to bureaucracies almost everywhere where the evidence is increasingly point to the unsustainable paradigms bureaucracies increasingly support for fear of loosing their authority. Interestingly, these sheds are not only of evidence of lost authority they are blatantly disrespectful of it – as a consequence each builder is a hero, an artist, an activist and a cultural treasure.

Smart and Seeking Sustainability by Design

Responsible and sustainable design is a sheik idea that helps a business cut it in a competitive market place – even when it might be critiqued for being a part of excessive consumerism .... click here to read more

Wasting Water and Money

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Click here to go to the program

In Tasmania we have all watched the State Government inexplicably take water management away from Local Government and pay the new bureaucrats extraordinary salaries to run a new water authority. We are discovering, as the plan unravels, that the promise of a better water future is a mirage – or is it a smoke and mirrors demonstration.

It turns out that researchers in Melbourne – Monash & Melbourne Universities – have been telling urban planners for some time that the "environmentally responsible" thing to do with stormwater is not to pipe it into rivers from urban landscapes as has happened on Trevallyn. ... click here to read more

What these researchers are saying is not so dissimilar to the proposition that was put to Launceston Council's engineers in respect to the "Trevallyn Stormwater Separation" folly. These people where placed in the invidious position of implementing a flawed planning decision that in the end they had no influence over. Worse still it cost Launceston ratepayer something in the order of two million dollars!

The rationale for the project and its method of implication had no credibility at all –nor did it ever have any. It may be misguided but it seems that there is no evidence that it had, or has, any credibility at all. Furthermore, there is very good evidence that the environmentally responsible thing to do is ‘treat’ urban stormwater before releasing it to a river system – either via a sewerage plant or via the landscape or wetlands, using it on site etc.

In a letter to the editor at the time Launceston's General Manager, Frank Dixon, threw away the line "the council will be exploring opportunities to reuse rainwater" that underlines the follies deeply embedded in the Trevallyn Stormwater Separation project. It was a hollow promise, it makes no commitment to do just that and it is one that totally lacks credibility based on the evidence. Excuse the ratepayers if they might think that in regard to that project an opportunity "to reuse rainwater" was bureaucratically squandered.

Indeed, the Trevallyn Stormwater Separation project represents a misuse of ratepayer's funds on a number of fronts. It is painfully clear that this project has cost Launceston's ratepayers far too much. In the end it did not deliver cost effective nor environmentally appropriate outcomes.

Clearly there is a disconnect between the planning and the implementation of a project and clearly planners have never been in a position to change the direction or even challenge the wisdom or efficacy of any bit of bureaucratic folly that is costing ratepayers millions of dollars. The more one looks the less wisdom one finds in Government to do with water management.

Why did Launceston's ratepayers pay anything at all when the responsibility to do so is no longer Launceston’s? This project was a very large impost on all of Launceston’s ratepayers and you can bet that the new water authority will find ways to slug them for what they have already paid for.

The worst of it all is that storm water is being treated as waste water. Its quite clear that nobody on Council understands Launceston’s looming water problems it seems. If they do they have been sidelined.

Nobody is likely to get a rationale explanation for any of this because there just isn’t one. However, there is always the hope that we might find someway to cut through and get government – Local, State and Federal – to start to take notice of the research and implement sustainable water planning. There is no option but to do so really!

21st Century Community Gardening, a whole new take on it

Community gardening is a multidimensional activity that is increasingly being used as a social strategy to address all kinds of community ills and social circumstances.

During the austerity of the Second World War in Britain, and Australia too, all kinds of spare land was commandeered for food production. Indeed the the "DIG FOR VICTORY" slogan is being invoked again in a 21st C context.

Austerity is a relative thing and right now in Tasmania the food shortages that were experienced in WW2 Britain bear little or no comparison to what know today. Nonetheless, there is a VICTORY to be won over relative poverty, social isolation and exclusion, the creeping unaffordability of energy and housingand more still.

Even though Australia/Tasmania has escaped the worst of the ravages of the international GFC the imperatives that seem to be driving community interest in food gardening are still with us – and are likely to be so for some time yet. Community gardening is seeming to win some attention as a kind of economic stimulus interestingly.

The Internet is turning out to be a useful 'garden tool' as all kinds of once obscure information is now readily available at the click of a mouse. Indeed intending community gardeners need only click here to get the 'good oil' on the basic infrastructure required for a community garden and here for a fascinating story in the Hobart Mercury that puts a whole new spin on the subject.

There are many ways to reimagine rubbish

If you have an idea and you want to sell it, this might be a way to go but maybe not. Anyway it is an interesting picture. Now that we have your attention please read on!

There is indeed a multitude of ways to reimagine rubbish and it needs to be done. The 'old' so called tried and true methods are failing not only badly but VERY badly. At the top of the heap are the so called "public servants"! Sadly they no longer seem to see their role as being 'of service.' Worse still, they are all too often aided and abetted in their social dysfunctionalism by our "political representatives" many of whom seem to have lost the plot.

There is a need to think outside the box but bureaucrats are generally not good at that. Their best work is often done managing, and reimagining, their promotion options and superannuation alternatives. Too many of them are addicted to the status quo but it is not really their fault. Why? Because we tend to be more comfortable with that and we send out that signal – we must stop doing that!

The NOTrubbish BLOG is starting to try and show another way of imaging 'rubbish'. There are some interesting ideas out there and there needs to be a forum through which they can be discovered, interrogated and tested for veracity.

There is also a SNAZZYidea out there that is also a TAZZYidea. It is the Hobart Tip Shop – click here to read more – This group of people are at the cutting edge of sustainable cultural activeism in Tasmania. A spin off from their original concept is their ART FROM TRASH PROJECT and it is a space that we might do well to watch – as they say.