Metabolic Studio Public Salon
Joanne Poyourow
Friday, January 15, 2010, Noon
Free Admission


A Resilient Los Angeles: What Could It Be Like?

The Transition movement is a worldwide network of grassroots communities and neighborhoods that are preparing for a post-petroleum future. They're doing this by growing local resilience, our ability to flex and adapt to great change. And it has been said that their approach at times looks more like a party than a protest march.

Climate change plus the end of cheap oil are converging to create a potent stew. Add economic contraction, and forecasts show that our future will be vastly different from what we have today. Yet if we plan ahead with creativity and imagination, the future with less oil could be even better than what we have now.

Through the Transition approach, we look at each aspect of our current lifestyles (food, water, transportation, energy, money, livelihoods, etc.) and begin to redesign it so that our local communities can become self-sufficient and resilient.

What might a resilient Los Angeles look like? As part of this salon, you'll be invited to share your vision.

Joanne Poyourow of Transition Los Angeles will explain the initial steps of the Transition approach, and update you on all the Transition-type activities blossoming throughout the greater Los Angeles basin.

Joanne Poyourow is the initiator of the Transition Los Angeles City Hub. Over the past year, Transition initiatives have formed in Culver City, Mar Vista, and South Bay, with groups under formation in Santa Monica, Inglewood and the San Fernando Valley. Joanne is the co-founder of the Environmental Change-Makers, a community group in the Westchester/LAX area that pioneered Transition ideas for many areas of Los Angeles. For five years, the Change-Makers have offered free public sessions that highlight environmental solutions, from bicycle transportation to local foods to alternative finances. Joanne designed the beautiful and prolific Community Garden in Westchester, which is a teaching garden as well as a supplier of fresh produce to the local food pantry. Joanne is a homeschooling mother of two, and helped found one of the LA basin's major homeschooling support organizations. She is the author of two books: Legacy, a novel which envisions a positive environmental future in Los Angeles, and Environmental Change-Making, a nonfiction how-to book on making that positive future come about. Joanne was a CPA in public practice for 13 years, and is quite proud of her intricate knitting projects.

Transition LA's Website: http://www.transitionla.org/

Image Courtesy: Christine Budzowski


 



 

Metabolic Studio Public Salon
Nance Klehm
Friday, December 11, 2009, Noon
Free Admission

Everything Comes into this World Hungry:

Soilmaking and Building

There are three fundamentals that guide this time of descent into northern-hemisphere darkness. The winter season is one of decline and decomposition, activity below ground and general shadowiness. The fundamentals that guide us are:

Everything comes into this world hungry.

Everything wants to be digested.

Everything flows towards soil.

This salon will discuss various methods of transforming what is perceived as waste and turning it into soil or building/healing existing soil.

Nance Klehm is a radical ecologist, designer, urban forager, grower and teacher. Her solo and collaborative work focuses on creating participatory social ecologies in response to a direct experience of a place. She grows and forages much of her own food in a densely urban area. She actively composts food, landscape and human waste. She only uses a flush toilet when no other option is available. She designed and currently manages a large scale, closed-loop vermicompost project at a downtown homeless shelter where cafeteria food waste becomes 4 tons of worm castings a year which in turn is used as the soil that grows food to return to the cafeteria.

She works with Simparch to create and integrate soil and water systems at their Clean Livin’ at C.L.U.I.’s Wendover, UT site. She uses decomposition, filtration and fermentation to transform post-consumer materials generated onsite (solid and liquid human waste, grey water from sinks and shower, food, cardboard and paper) as well as waste materials gathered offsite (casino food waste and grass clippings, horse manure from stables, spent coffee grounds) into biologically rich soil. The resulting waste-sponge systems sustain or aid: a habitat of native species of plants, digestion of the high salinity of the indigenous soils and the capturing, storing and using of precipitation.

She has shown and taught in Mexico, Australia, England, Scandinavia, Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States. Her regular column WEEDEATER appears in ARTHUR magazine.


Read Nance's interview in the current Time magazine

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1945764,00.html


Nance's Website: www.spontaneousvegetation.net


Image Courtesy: Nance Klehm