Greenhouser in the news...

One of our own housemates has made Sewanee headline news!

Read about Helen's chemistry research at the University of Oregon here.

I just wanted everyone to see this picture of Paul.
Note the (lack-of) height difference between him and the 3rd graders.

I also wanted to wish Paul a safe and fun journey!

Minutes for November 16, 2008

Minutes for November 16, 2008
· Christmas tree – native tree Becca and Jonathan?
· Paul’s email – dance or get together for senior citizen home in monteagle - post pone till Paul’s here
· Thanksgiving – Thursday at 6
· Saturday Thanksgiving dinner at 5:00 – look from last week’s minutes for to see what you greed to cook - don’t eat pecans
· Tomorrow November 17, 7:30 am in kitchen, Elspeth and Helen are making pancakes for love and joy
· Condoms in the living room if you need them
· Money for Christmas present for Regina
· Farmhouse Design Committee – Emily is going to do a independent study on subject of green living in Sewanee

meeting minutes- nov 9

meeting minutes nov 9
Chore wheel- thanks Emily for making a new one! It looks great

Garden days- this week
monday 3-4:30
Tuesday 1-3
Friday sometime
Jonathan will send out e-mail

House garden update from Carson
Planted lettuce, turnips, etc.
Tom macfie wants to work
What do we do?
Water, Carson will make a chart and we’ll sign up for days.

Events this week
Thursday music jam
Bentley will send out e-mail

Nov 16 house tour
2:00 house tour at the land trust
Let Emily know if you want to come

Becca wants to plan an event with children from the community.

Thanksgiving
Mcclurg- Thursday the 20th
Elspeth will sign up for a table
Helen, Laura, and Elspeth will send out invites to professors


Thanksgiving at the house
When?
Saturday Nov 22nd, bentley’s birthday

Elspeth will make invitations
What are we cooking and who is cooking?
Turkey- Elspeth (she and Laura will pick it up from the Keener’s)
Rice-Elspeth
Garden veggies- Helen
Pecan pie- Laura
Sweet potatoes- Emily
Pumpkin- Kate

Who is in charge of clean-up?
Carson, Helen, Emily

I know we aren't supposed to be political but....

Here is an article about Obama from New Scientist about green energy:

November 5, 2008 10:15 AM

How green will president Obama be?

Colin Powell called the prospective Obama presidency "transformational". He wasn't talking about the climate and energy. But he could have been.

The wraps will soon be off. Before long we will know whether Barack Obama meant it - when he said that, whatever the financial traumas, a national surge to equip America with home-grown, green sources of energy was his number one economic priority.

Even as the votes were being cast, some said going green would have to wait. But the president-elect has been saying it has to be done now: for the planet, for American energy security - and for the good of an economy that badly needs government investment to kick start growth. Green jobs for a green economy.

Much of the blueprint is there. I reported last month from California, where they are busy legislating a carbon-cutting programme deliberately designed to be translatable into national terms. And where entrepreneurs, backed by billions of dollars of venture capital from Silicon Valley, are ready to invest in solar and wind power, and second-generation biofuels and much else in a huge scale.

All they want is a green light for the legal fast-tracking and modest tax guarantees that will make it all profitable.

And we are not talking about bits and pieces here. We are talking very big time indeed. As David Mills, head of solar thermal company Ausra, in Palo Alto, told me: "In the coming decades, clean energy is going to be ten times bigger than the internet and IT combined."

That's not hyperbole; he means it.

It would not be ridiculous to say that if the world is to save itself from the perils of future climate change, now is the moment to act. And the US is where it must happen.

Only the US can yet drive the change needed, because only the US has the markets, the capital, the technology and now, with Obama's transformational victory, maybe the political will too. Only the US, by force of example and through the size of its market, can persuade China and the other fast-emerging economies to embrace the new technologies.

If the US wants green technology on the scale being talked about, China will break its back to provide it. And it will transform its own energy system in the process.

Some say none of this will happen any time soon. That the world has economic problems more immediate than climate change. But the world is also in a state of great political flux. And it is at times of such flux that big new initiatives are possible.

Compare Obama's arrival in Washington with that of Franklin D Roosevelt at the start of the New Deal in 1934. The New Deal remade America and the world by driving governments to centre-stage in managing economies. Environmentally in the US, it brought soil conservation programmes to fight the dustbowl and hydro schemes to bring power to those still languishing without electricity.

That drive sparked similar initiatives round the world, right through to the 1970s. Reforming zeal - whether the green revolution or family planning programmes - did make the world better then.

We need something similar now, to fight climate change and the iniquities of unbridled global markets. Why not?

Music at the Green House

Meeting Minutes 10/26/08


GreenHouse meeting minutes 10/26/08

Leader _ Ms Emily Ezell
Minutos_Mr Carson Wright

1. Evaluations – supportive, not critical
a. House warming Party
i. Worked – a lot of people came including faculty, community members, Buddhist blessing, great advertising (adds in messenger, flyers, facebook), not using disposable materials
ii. Improvements – more diverse group of people, see the same ppl at our house a lot although we did see new people at the Garden Party this evening
iii. (Chelsea just spilled hot liquid on herself)
b. Music jam
i. Pros – very diverse, a lot of new people,
ii. Improvements – GH members feel they have to instruct the crowd, maybe make it a little more open and let – tell everyone to bring 3 or so songs and do the circle/take turns
c. Game nights
i. Pro- fun things
ii. Improvement – maybe suggest to play games that se actually have, advertisement – maybe cfaculty and messenger
d. Potlucks – ER and Environmental Studies potlucks
i. Improve – advertisements (only by word of mouth not very effective) – needed to be an email invite
e. Garden Party
i. Pros – opportunity to learn/teach others – rolling out pie dough – awesome to see how a feast like ours is made – learning experiences – showing everybody the garden – seeing how excited people get rolling dough
ii. Improvement – like Hartman said, make everything a community learning point, no faculty came – the invite was sent two days ago and this is a little to short notice – invite fac earlier – work on flyering – maybe make huge banners – maybe a job for bannering? - could have done facebook – mostly freshmen came – maybe get more people from other classes – not cool to let one person clean up the mess
f. Random Dinners
i. Improvements – more people cooking, usually people cook and people who don’t cook eat all the food and don’t help – also doesn’t work for people to show up to help like 5min before the event - need a list of jobs for any event
ii. Resolution pact – make checklist for stuff to be done before and after events and draft during planning
g. EVERYBODY CONGRATULATES ELSPETH ON HER PRINCESSSHIP
h. Community Service – need more of, Dr. Haskells food and hunger class helps with CAC thnksgiving dinner
i.
2. Front Door - Heating
a. Please don’t leave front door open
b. Someone please set at 62
c. Maybe lets all sleep in the unfinished attic
d.
3. Halloween
a. Donations – should benefit community action committee – maybe should go to environment committee – Elspeth is gonna get some flyers to inform people about the CAC
b. Roles! – Video: to thriller song, Flyers: TO BE CONTINUED
c. Time: 6-8pm cause there is a wicked party at SAE
d. Halloween Candy: just one bag for random trickertreaters
e. Advertisement: cfaculty
f. Bentley is going to start setting things up
g. NEEDS – Sheets dyed black or dark color
4. Garden Hours
a. Next week – Wed 11:30-1:30, Monday sometime
b. Maybe add pictures – need to send to Angela
c. “Get fresh with a farmer” “Make out in the mulch!”
5. Middle School Mentoring
a. This Thursday – 3:15-5:00 – 12 kids doing some art project at the Garden
b. Pine cone bird feeders – pinecones, string, other crafts? Paint cans – make potted plants
6. Garden Work-----→ “Recycling” chore
7. Saturday – 8am – Trip to Keeners
a. Six of us want to go – shuttle ourselves
8. Sustainability Conference
a. Whos going?
9. Seeds
a. Spring front flower bed?
10. Cast Iron – Don’t WASH PLEASE
11.
12. Carson to clean pumpkins stuff and becca to dry dishes!


LOVE and JOY – STORY!

A Medley of discoveries.

A few of us have dreamed about installing solar panels on the top of all saints.... well apparently the Vatican has one upped us - they have not only installed such solar panels, but soon will actually be carbon neutral.

Consilence Journal, recently founded by a group of Columbia U. undergrads (i.e. kids our age), is an online journal on multidisciplinary sustainable development. Impressive.

This one is for Helen more than anyone, but perhaps a few profs would find this interesting, too. There's a group called Chemists Without Borders. Nothing too fancy, but it is just one example of people realizing that we have the solution to most of the problems in our world (such as lack of water & food & health) - it is more a matter of getting the right people to the right place with the right information.

The Global Viral Forecasting Initiative is a group of biologists who go around the world looking for the next HIV, bird flu, etc under the premise that prevention of epidemics is much easier than control, as we have learned so dramatically as HIV ravishes our world.They were just featured in the New York Times.


Dot Earth is a fantastical blog out of the New York Times which focuses on sustainable development. Also, Green, Inc. is another NYT blog you should check out.

My reading for oceanography today was about "ocean biogeochemical dynamics" - what a mouthful! Anyways, in between pages of very large equations with lots of big variables, I was shocked to learn that the current influx of anthropogenic carbon into the atmosphere - assuming we manage to stop spewing carbon out into the sky and stop the deforestation - will be around for a looooooong time:

After several tens of thousands of years, about 8% of the initial pulse remains in the atmosphere. On timescales of several hundred thousands of years, this remaining CO2 will react with igneous rocks on land, so that the entire initial pulse will disappear from the atmosphere on timescales approaching a million years.

Crazy, isn't it? Not only have we altered our world today, but we have altered the world for the next 1,000,000 years! Humans as we know them have only really been around for ten thousand, and in two hundred years of industrial activity we've seriously altered the planet. We apparently have also created (starting back in 1800) a new geologic age with all this anthropocentric activity: the Anthropocene. Hopefully we won't be extinct soon.

And here's a really cool image of a forminifera, a unicelluar organism that is important in climate change research. There's other great images (that look like galaxies in outer space) out there of these little guys, but I can't seem to find them right now.

New layout for long posts!

So I just updated the blog to allow for "Cuts". This means that from now on if you want to post something that is just ridiculously long, instead of making everyone scroll forever to get past it, you can just add a cut and those who want to read more can just click the link. So if you want to read more about this and how to do it, click the link below!
This is where you will want to hide all of the extra info! To simply explain how this works, there are some HTML tags that are being put around this text. It lets the blog know that this is all of the extra text and should be hidden on the main blog page.
If you are making a new post and want to use the cut then you should highlight the first sentence, "Type your summary here", and then start typing so that that sentence is replaced. To then add something "after the cut", highlight the second sentence, "Type rest of the post here", and add whatever you want to there.
If you would like a demonstration of it, just ask me!
Also, the necessary code was borrowed from Hackosphere! So thanks to them for this awesome hack.


Additionally, I went through all of the old posts and fixed them so that they all use cuts. Let me know what you think!

Piggly Wiggly/market letter

Hey- I'm printing this out and putting it in the front hall soon, but I wanted an electronic copy on here so you can read it and comment- If there are any comments I can fix them before I print it out:

Whom It May Concern:

As students of the University of the South, your store is the closest and most convenient place to buy our food, entertainment, and cleaning needs. As students who are socially and environmentally aware, we feel the need to suggest that if you were to stock organic, natural, and fair trade goods, you would have a market for them.

These items could include non-perishable goods to reduce your risk, such as basic natural cleaning supplies like dish soap and laundry detergent, as well as specialty items like fair trade coffee, tea, and chocolate. It is extremely difficult to find these items outside of Chattanooga, so we feel that you would have an advantage being located in a college town where the curriculum includes environmental and social justice awareness.

There are many websites you can explore to help you get started, such as http://www.fairtradefederation.org/, www.fairtradefederation.org/, http://www.transfairusa.org/, www.transfairusa.org/, http://www.wholesaledistributorsnet.com/, www.wholesaledistributorsnet.com/, http://www.fairtraderesource.org/, www.fairtraderesource.org/. It is rapidly become a popular, global movement, so it is much easier to find organic and fair trade wholesale providers.

Thank you for your time,

Sincerely,

Students of the University of the South, initiated by the Green House

Meeting Minutes for 10-19-2008

These are the meeting minutes for 10-19-08


Homecoming Weekend Activities:
Elspeth will secure pumpkins for Sunday. 25 pumpkins.
Pumpkin Carving 1-4pm, Garden Party 4pm
-Jobs
Kate-advertising sign
Helen-email cstudent
Elspeth-quiche
Laura-pumpkin bread
Emily
Becca will get ingredients -will put a list on the fridge

Emily & Elspeth:
we could have a house & self-evaluation next meeting

We could have an open meeting to involve people not living in this house - once a month?
--not an open meeting, but a meeting of all environmental groups: we will think about this, talk about it next time.

Garden Hours:
Emily - Wednesday, 2-4
Kate & Laura - Monday, 4-5:30

Glass Recycling:
where should we store it? --basement.

someone didn't recycle

kitchen wall: Kate will repair

Laura is missing a pair of running shorts

Bentley is setting up a clothesline
we have clothespins...somewhere

HALLOWEEN!!!
PKE has volunteered people and $$
Sigma Nu will discuss at their next meeting
Hunter might give some $$
will ask for 2$ donation from attendees for CAC

We could have children's activities at the house (Helen will ask the Bachmans about a good time)

Emily & Chelsea are overwhelmed with the Greenhouse Planning Committee business...help/advice welcome!

For all you cyclists out there..

Here is something I stumbled upon while reading about some really weird, random patents- here is the website for that: http://technology.newscientist.com/ridiculouspatents.ns

And here is this crazy invention that cuts down on drag for hard-core cyclists: http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg15721211.400

Cheers!

randomness.

So I'm at Boston College right now. A few random questions/thoughts follow...

Any updates on a Food/Gardening class next spring? Registration is next month for Easter '09 and we better have it sorted out before then if we want to do it. BC has a class this fall called "Food and Politics." Here's a quotation by the professor: 

"Fortunately, we will have a next generation of farmers. Not because they are inheriting land and wealthy enterprises. Not because government policy encourages the maintenance of American traditions of husbandry, land stewardship, and frugal entrepreneurship. Not because there's any money in it. But because a generation of young people wants meaningful work, and they want to heal the earth, our relationships, and our economy. And they see these things are related. They are clamoring to learn farming, real farming, the kind you do by knowing nature, knowing a piece of land, and producing in a context of community. The big ag schools, with textbooks full of fertilizer formulas, are aghast. The grand universities who thought farming was out-of-date are scrambling to build interdisciplinary knowledge about food's origins and meanings. And students, desperate for hands-on skills, are building scrappy gardens at their stately universities, vegetable gardens that light the way to a newly respectable career and industry."

And here's a quote about their garden:

The garden provides recreational and educational activities for students and faculty of Boston College as well as the local community. It is a place for people to gather and work on a fun project together outside in the sun. Once further established, groups of students from Newton’s local schools/summer camps, as well as Boston College’s Campus School will be welcomed and encouraged to take educational fieldtrips to the garden to learn about sustainable agriculture, how to garden, and the benefits of eating local. These trips have the potential to be led by students of the Lynch school and/or interested volunteers.

And this seems like a cool idea that we should totally do at Sewanee...

Furthermore, as a Jesuit school that often quotes the phrase “Men and Women for others,” the garden is also an outlet of service. That is, while other schools usually sell the majority of their produce back to the dining hall, because of the smaller scale of our plot, the idea is to donate this produce to local food shelters and host free community dinners/lunches over the summer months.

Nice links to wander around:

Real Food Challenge

BC Sustainability site

Solar & Wind energy in our backyards?

Check it out! This map site allows you to easily (it's based on google maps) predict for any location in the western hemisphere the potential for solar and wind power.

Food!

I stumbled upon this wonderful article in the NYT about a topic dear to my heart: food. Author Michael Pollan discusses the food supply in light of the elections and how interconnected our world is:

You will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

GREENHOUSE HAUNTED HOUSE!

Friday, October 31st

Themes mentioned:
Cell phones ringing constantly, spiderwebs everywhere, Sewanee Ghosts- including the Headless gownsman, Hodgeson nurse, Sewanee stalker

Any other ideas?

Meeting Minutes for 10-12-2008

These are the meeting minutes from 10-12-2008.

WHERE ARE BECCA AND JONATHAN????
J just showed up! With a mallard! Stuffed!
Carson calls the meeting to order as he walks up and down the room.
First order of business: pumpkin day- pumpkin carving, pumpkin pie, pumpkin seed roasting, pumpkin madness.
When? Sunday, the 26th during homecoming weekend at 1pm: Pumpkin baking, then Garden Party at 4pm with pumpkin festivities- carving contest.
Emily wants to bring up the bowling party on Wednesday night (the 29th) in Tullahoma –half price- being put on by Eli at McClurg.
What people are going to be for Halloween: Helen- Little House on the Prairie, Emily- plumber (Laura’s dad is a plumber), Jonathon- a trash bag, Carson- a prof. Becca should be Sarah Palin. Everyone else doesn’t know what they want to be.
Farm tour: Saturday, November 8th. More details will follow.
Letter to the Piggly Wiggly and the Market- asking for more organic and natural products. Carson will write a separate letter to the Market asking for recyclable solo cups. Kate will write the other letter.
Composting of the coffee grounds at McClurg will start soon, so it would be great if Kate could get some help. Thanks for helping with fruit composting.
Hailey wants to use the kitchen Tuesday afternoon. Elspeth wants to use it Wednesday after fall break, but isn’t sure. Kathryn Kendrick wants to use it Tuesday after fall break. But only the kitchen. Caution tape will be used elsewhere.
Garden hours. Wednesday 2:30-4:30 and Tuesday 1-2:15. Last glass bottle taken out today!!!
Helen wants all receipts. Do we need anymore tools? Hartman wants to buy us more tools. Carson wants to build hoophouses in the back garden.
Laura lost her ID card. Carson hopes it isn’t down the vent. Emily can’t hear very well and thought he said twenties.
Bentley wants to include the GreenHouse in the IFC/ISC organization because Hartman kicked him out of the alcohol meeting (or tried to, Bentley stayed anyway because he is so hard-core). Elspeth said thanks.
Halloween : Haunted House!!!! Bentley wants to make a master plan for the Haunted House. Theme: the world in 2020 if we continue on our current track and don’t save the earth. Elspeth doesn’t want to make it too political, but wants to make it nerdy, of course. Ghosts of Sewanee!!!! Bentley wants to talk to a frat house like Beta and he will. Rooms: cell phones, desert, bubble wrap. Bentley wants to get dry ice, stuff at his house, spiderwebs. Emily’s dad has haunted music.
Jonathan just bought kangaroo leather bike shoes. and Becca got him a phone that quacks.
The potluck was awesome.
Elspeth keeps talking about Walden Pond.
Love and Joy: the Barney theme song?

sustainable houses.

a different approach by our friends at F.U. 

http://www.furmancliffscottage.com/

Hey check this out!

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Build_a_Green_Roof

This would be sweet on a roof- possibly the shed roof at the garden. Or we could turn the roof of the GreenHouse into a living roof- I'm sure the admin would love that.

Environmental Studies Potluck!

Saturday, October 11, 5:30 P.M.
At the Green House

Come hang out with the Environmental Studies faculty, majors, prospective majors, Environmental Residents, and Green Housers.