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When Jay and I got a wood stove last fall, he surprised me with his Boy Scout knowledge and made these little wax fire starters to help get the stove rockin’. Remember to be careful when heating up the wax, especially if you are working on a gas stove with a flame.

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Last summer we had the opportunity to document the PostSecret Community Picnic. PostSecret is an online art project started by Frank Warren. Hundreds of thousands of people have mailed him postcards with secrets emblazed upon them. Every Sunday he posts a handful on his blog. These powerful messages have connected with so many people, a community has formed around the project. The PostSecret Picnic was their first face to face meeting, and we had the pleasure of participating. Enjoy!

Check out Frank’s beautiful books on Amazon:

The new book, PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God, is coming out in the fall.

We recently attended and made videos for Transparency Camp hosted by The Sunlight Foundation and iStrategy Labs in DC. They invited the policy wonks and tech geeks to hang out, hack, brainstorm and collaborate. It was a great step towards getting online government transparency to be a reality. See the individual interviews, all of which are available in the open source Ogg Theora video format, on TransparencyCamp.org.

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BTW: This video is safe for work and all ages, totally PG. Have no fear, there is nothing graphic in this video. Also we’ve received requests for DVD copies of this video. Please email us for details, hello@ryanishungry.com.
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We first met Katherine and Todd through LocalHarvest.org as our closest Community Supported Agriculture provider. We quickly became interested in their story as small farmers trying to make a living growing food and selling it locally. Needless to say we started documenting work on their farm the week after we signed up for their CSA share. A month into taping, Katherine said “I hope this doesn’t affect the story, but I’m three months pregnant”. As you can see, it didn’t just affect the story, it helped us go deeper into it, focusing on the fact that they were planning a home birth.

Simply put, their labor and birth would be an assisted, at home process attended by Certified Professional Midwife Peggy Franklin and two assistants Aimee and Desiree, with no unnecessary interventions including pitocin, epidural, C-section, etc. CPMs and their assistants are highly trained to watch for danger signs before, during and after birth so they can swiftly assess if the mother and baby need to go to the hospital for any reason. Luckily, a large majority of healthy, low risk women giving birth naturally at home, with the assistance of midwives, have no reason to be transported to a hospital.

If you live in the United States, your choices for how, where and who can attend your birth, depending on your state of residence, may be very limited. Some states are still struggling to get certain Midwifery certifications to be legally recognized. See this state by state guide of legal status and resources on Citizens for Midwifery. Here is another chart on Midwives Alliance of North America. However, the American Medical Association claims that “…the safest setting for labor, delivery, and the immediate post-partum period is in the hospital, or a birthing center within a hospital complex”. As you might imagine, not everyone agrees with that statement. Especially since the World Health Organization says a healthy Caesarean rate should be between 5-10% and no more than 15%. The average rate in The United States has, since the 1960’s, creeped from below 5% to currently 30%.

While birthing centers within hospital complexes are often champions for uninterrupted labor and vaginal birth, in many places, including our rural part of Virginia, there are no birthing centers available. So the choices are limited to hospital or home. The Direct Entry Midwife credentials (midwives allowed to attend births outside a hospital like CPMs) are legally recognized in Virginia so home is openly an option, but for several states in the US, they are not.

With the recent premiere of Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein’s documentary The Business of Being Born, home birth and the practice of midwifery have been gaining more attention and popularity. We highly recommend this film as well as Ina May Gaskin’s books Spiritual Midwifery and Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth as good starting resources for learning about home birth. Also check out Child Birth Connection, International Cesarean Awareness Network and Pushed Birth Blog.

Big thanks to Katherine and Todd for letting us document and share their most intimate life moments. Also to Bekah Havens, Aimee Fairman and Kate Dimbleby and Rupert Howe for sharing their stories.

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[tags] Cesarean section, child birth, home birth, midwife, midwifery, natural birth, thebusinessofbeingborn, ryanishungry, Virginia[/tags]

Milk, illegal? Yep. Unpasteurized, non-homogenized, raw milk is illegal for human consumption in 22 states (including my own Virginia!) because of ‘health’ reasons. And probably because the milk lobby doesn’t want you to not buy milk from big industry.

I ran across this article, More Dairies Go Raw, in The Boston Globe about how some industrial dairy farmers are deciding to down scale and sell raw milk. I was very excited to hear that. We just found a local source for raw milk, and if I don’t have to, I’ll never go back to using pasteurized, homogenized. Raw milk with the cream on top is simply luxurious, good for you food.

Check out the campaign for Real Milk for more info.

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We recently had the pleasure of making a screencast for OpenCongress.org, an open source, collaborative website that helps citizens keep track of everything happening in Congress. We think it’s pretty awesome. Check them out!
p.s. for all the video geeks, the video is overlapping the sidebar- i wanted to keep it big so you could see all the detail…enjoy!

One of our friends here in the Shenandoah Valley recently linked to this great site Vermicomposters.com, where lovers of worm composting can connect, trade secrets and show off their bins. We love the google map they have on the front page where you can find your local vermicomposting neighbors. We even found some of our friends in far off locations. It really illustrates how popular worm composting is becoming, as there are about 600 people listed on the map. Check out their Ning Social Network and add yourself to the map!

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Our dear friend, co-creator of the amazing Freshtopia.net, Oscar Grimm passed away last week after fighting brain cancer for the last two years. We are deeply saddened that the world has lost such a smart, creative and caring person. Our hearts go out to his partner in crime Tanja Andrews.

We first met Oscar and Tanja in 2006 at the Geeks Off The Grid Montana meet up, though they were our Bay Area neighbors at the time. Soon we visited their Oakland warehouse space where Freshtopia was born. The treated us to raw chocolate treats and fine conversation about being geeky and eating raw. Oscar, you will be missed.

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Update: If you are a media outlet and wish to use this video or photo, please do. As this is a Creative Commons Licensed video, please accompany media with the attribution “Courtesy RyanIsHungry.com”. Thank you.

Jay and I are shocked and saddened to hear that Kirsten Brydum, organizer of San Francisco’s Really Really Free Market, was found murdered in New Orleans yesterday. As you can see in this July 2007 interview we taped, she was extremely committed to educating people about alternative economies and passionate about connecting people to the idea that we can share in the abundance that exists all around us. Kirsten, you will be missed.

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We recently returned from a 15 day trip to Beijing for this summer’s Olympic Games and what some would call China’s “coming out as a global super power” party. Though we were not able to attend any of the official events, we had a very positive experience with Beijing citizens- their hospitality and generosity welcomed us at every corner. Every enthusiastic family we’d meet would exclaim in English “Welcome to Beijing!”.

Our mission was to document actions by Students for a Free Tibet protesting China’s almost 60 year occupation of Tibet. Using a small HD camera and a laptop, we were able to grab high quality video and photos, upload to a secure ftp server and get the media out to the world.

As independent media makers with no established credentials, it was a frightening task to attend an action, document it properly and not get arrested for just being there. We had no hand in the physical actions themselves, we were there only to document- much like The Associated Press photographers and British ITV reporter John Ray who, incidentally, got pushed around, questioned and media confiscated. These incidents made it clear that the cooperation of independent folks, videobloggers, photographers, etc with corporate media outlets was essential. Anyone with a camera, voice recorder or a pen was equally threatening in the eyes of the Chinese government.

In a country so locked down on free speech, we had to often speak in hushed tones and not even mention the word ‘Tibet’ in public for fear of arrest. The Tibetan flag is completely illegal and cannot be shown in all of China. Several of our fellow media makers, in town for the same reasons, were not so lucky and got arrested and detained for 7 days after being followed by plainclothes police for several days. We are happy that they have all returned home safe.

Reflecting on our trip to Beijing we have a more clear understanding that this is not just about the Free Tibet movement, this is about basic human rights in Tibet, China and the rest of the world. Tibetans can’t speak out about what is happening in their country. Chinese can’t speak out about what is happening in their country. If they do, they face harsh, life threatening consequences. Some might argue that this is the only thing these two cultures have in common, but we believe it will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and the tiny spark that ignites decades of dissent from all corners of China. The protests by Students for a Free Tibet demonstrated to the world that China, with it’s oppressive treatment of their people and the people of Tibet, cannot rise to the level of global super power without facing the consequences of their actions.

For more info on China’s occupation of Tibet and how you can get involved, check out Students for a Free Tibet. Check out this wrap up article on the CCTV Banner Hang in The Washington Post and an Op-Ed about China’s use of the Olympics to lie about human rights. Also we got interviewed by Xeni on Boing Boing TV.

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We recently had the privledge to make a video about Rainforest Action Network, the non-profit envrionmental change maker. We first met Julie Wolk, RAN Grassroots Organizer, at the Bioneers Conference. Julie explained that RAN works to hold corporations accountable for their environmental practices through an ‘inside-outside’ approach to activism. Having protesters outside a store or shareholders meeting helps to put the pressure on, having a contact meeting directly with CEOs on the inside helps get the demands met, both creating space for each action to make real change.

We were super impressed and moved by the passion and dedication that everyone we interviewed in the organization has. They’ve made incredible changes and continue to train and empower the next generation of environmental activists to get engaged and tell corporations that ‘business as usual is just not OK’.

We’ve been working on this for a few months, going through their extensive video archive, gathering interviews and trying to bring 20 years of RAN’s work into the spotlight. All media in the video (music, photos and original interview footage) is Creative Commons licensed. Thanks to everyone at RAN for letting us come in and document your work!

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I’ve been meaning to make this video for weeks. Check out our place and our gardens. We’re gardening using the Grow Biointensive methods we learned in Willits, CA from John Jeavons and Carol Cox. All hand tilled baby. Everything is growing wonderfully.

Inspired by our tour, Wendy Tremayne, of the infamous Wendy and Mikey, made a tour video too. Click on the picture below to go to their Vimeo page. If you make one, link to it in the comments, I’d love to see what other people are doing.

Speaking of growing Red Fife Wheat in North America, I ran across this article on Boston.com about farmers in Vermont starting to grow grain again after a one hundred year absence. The price of growing and transporting grains from the midwest has given northeast farmers a competitve reason to start growing again.

The resurgence of interest in regional grain-growing picked up momentum about five years ago, as Vermont dairy farmers faced escalating costs for grain shipped from the Midwest to feed their cows. Costs have doubled while supplies have grown more scarce, farmers said, because of a host of factors, including crop failures in the American heartland, increasing global food demand, unprecedented fuel costs … more and more Vermonters, from all walks of life, are turning to locally grown foods, farmers and bakers said, creating new markets for, among other products, Vermont-grown wheat for making flour and bread.

I think we’re going to start seeing more and more of this as the price of oil goes higher and higher. Why get your wheat from 1500 miles away when you can grow it in your own county?

Before we started driving from San Francisco to Virginia, we loaded up the iPod with podcasts. One of the broadcasts we became quite fond of is Deconstructing Dinner, a weekly show out of Kootenay Co-op Radio in Nelson, British Columbia, Canada. The host, Jon Steinman, does some pretty in depth research into each subject ranging from where that bacon on your plate came from to the resurgence of Heirloom Red Fife Wheat in North America. In fact, this particular episode inspired me so much that I planted some heirloom wheat in our garden and have inflated dreams of becoming a small grain farmer. We’ll see if that ever comes to light, but for now I can hear about others successfully growing it in Canada and parts of the US via Deconstructing Dinner. Check out their archive or subscribe on their Podcast page.

Cathleen recently joined the Vermicomposting e-mail list, a place for folks to swap knowledge about worm composting indoors and out. She sent a link to her blog, North Carolina Family Living, where she’s documenting in text and video clips how their doing things in their backyard garden. The videoblog geek in me loves that she’s throwing clips up on her blogger blog using their new ‘upload video’ feature. It couldn’t get much easier than that. I love to see gardners blogging!

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The Great Village is a videoblog born from the peeps who make Seesmic, a microblogging site for folks to converse through webcams. Think video version of Twitter. Recently featured on The Great Village, was Melinda Stone of HowToHomestead.org. Filmmaker, teacher and farmer, Melinda shows how she’s livin’ in Northern CA. We were tickled that she mentioned our Apartment Composting 101 video. Thanks Melinda and Giselle for including a clip.

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Rupert and Kate of twittervlog fame, have recently moved their family from London to a small town on the west coast of Canada. Having a little more space has allowed them to start gardening in their front yard. As you can see, Kate is using the raised bed approach; instead of digging up the ground to start planting in, she’s adding a bunch of soil and some scrap wood to hold it all in. The advantage of this method is having instant, nutrient rich, aerated soil for your plants’ roots to really spread out and thrive, so expect things to grow fast. As you can see, her bounty has been really successful. Big props to Kate who was building this while 7 months pregnant, now that’s dedication. Can you say superwoman?

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On our way across the country to Virginia (our new home!), we stopped by Erik Nelson’s place in Vermont to help tear down a barn. He’s salvaging the wood to build a house on his land. Very exciting and a lot of hard work. Check out the video Jay made and the Wreck and Salvage post to see how they actually tore the structure down.

We’ll be more settled soon, so there will be more posts…I promise!

P.S. Check out our new post office!

As some of you might remember, we traversed through T or C last year and taped a bunch with Mikey and Wendy of Green Acre Hotsprings. On our way over to Virginia, we have stopped by again to catch up and meet some new folks hacking out here in the desert. The photo above is us taping an interview with Asher, who sells biodiesel and WVO (waste vegetable oil) for fuel in Mimbres, NM. He also has an off the grid household with solar power, a humanuare outhouse, a greywater system and a newly planted food garden.

We also got Mikey hooked on No Knead Bread and he’s successfully cooked two batches in his kick ass solar oven. I was incredibly skeptical of the solar oven at first, but when i saw it jump from 0-300 degrees in about 10 minutes, I was sold.

We are excited to post all our videos from our cross country trip as soon as we get settled in our new home. Stay tuned!

photos by Mikey Sklar

p.s. sorry no video this time! soon, soon

We got an email from another No Knead Bread Fan, Lucy from New Bedford, MA. She showed us her ultra geeky method of getting her dough to rise in a drafty, New England house- put it on top of the hard drive!

Me and the girls threw it together last night and then looked for someplace warm in this drafty old house of ours. Then I remembered I have an external hard drive that runs very hot. I’ve used it in the past to germinate little pots of seeds, and so I thought – why not?

Thanks Lucy, I’ll be sure to do this next time I makeathebread!

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Can I get a ‘hell yeah!’? I was reading this article in the New York Times today about the resurgence of young farmers when I saw a link to The Greenhorns film. Talking to our friend Chris from Wanna Farm he asked

there sure is a lot going on in our country involving small farms. i just can’t tell if we’re just standing in the middle of the choir or if change is really happening.

I’m hoping that change is really happening. Connection to our most basic necessities- food, water, shelter, community- have been close to lost in a few short generations. For me, I just want those things back. I’m hearing about and meeting more and more people who feel the same and are taking action to find those things again.

Go nominate a young farmer to be part of The Greenhorns documentary here.

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We had the privilege of attending a very hands on greywater workshop courtesy of The Greywater Guerillas, a local Bay Area crew of experts who are passionate about teaching folks to use their water (twice) wisely. Greywater is water that has been used once in your home and only contains a little soap, dirt (from laundry or skin) or kitchen particles like food or grease. Unlike blackwater, which is water that has touched excrement, like toilet water, greywater is safe to use in watering your garden. As Laura Allen, co-editor of the book Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground, and our amazing instructor points out in this video:

You don’t want to put the greywater onto the part of the plant that you’re going to eat…if you get the water going into the ground, there are no more health risks than would be [associated with the regular dirt in your garden]. So you want to get the greywater into the ground soaking down to irrigate the roots of your plants.

We were able to do just this in home owner Tara’s backyard. We replaced her kitchen sink pipe with a 3 way valve giving her the choice to send her sink water back to the sewer or out to the greywater system of pipes and mulch basins surrounding four fruit trees. The system was relatively simple and inexpensive. Total price was $200 for all new pipes which included a $60 top of the line 3 way valve, a bunch of 2 way splitters and under a hundred feet of piping. If you live close to a salvage yard or are savvy on Freecycle or Craigslist you can get these materials for way cheaper or even free.

Laura touches on some of the legality of systems like this:

California has a greywater code so greywater theoretically is legal…some states have no code so greywater is not legal. In California, you have the potential to do greywater…that said, the code that’s written down for greywater is very, very wasteful, it’s very bad, most people don’t follow it. In California most people have unpermitted systems which are…technically illegal, just as building anything unpermitted is technically illegal.

There are a few states, like Arizona, that encourage safe and resourceful greywater systems like the one we built here. So find out what your state allows before cutting into your pipes. But if you’re like these Californians and your state codes are no good, you’ll want to find some greywater experts to consult and keep in touch with to help change the codes for better.

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[tags]graywater, green, greywater guerillas, greywayter, ryanishungry, san francisco[/tags]

Bruce F. left a comment on our Alemany Farm video last week and pointed us to a pretty amazing rooftop garden that he and his friends have built. After seeing the pictures, I think you’ll agree he’s being too modest. He says:

A few of us who live in the city of Chicago are trying to grow heirloom vegetables on our rooftops in cheap homemade earthboxes. It sounds more than a little preposterous to suggest that what we’re doing is a real solution to the huge environmental problems we’re facing, but it might be a tiny piece. We think they’re a great way to build connections in a fragmented social/political landscape. Not selling anything, I’m giving “it” away.

Here’s the Flickr link, along side the pics is a little how-to guide with plenty of relevant links.

We really love to see smart people start taking advantage of resources around them. Americans currently live in such abundance that making a rooftop garden, at first thought, might not make much sense. However, growing food is a great skill to learn and a valuable way to spend your time. Bruce has plenty of good info on his designs and links to online support.

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Jamais Cascio is all about solutions. He considers himself an ethical futurist- one who designs and executes resilient and sustainable solutions that will not adversely effect present and future generations. On his blog, OpenTheFuture.com, Jamais writes about three cornerstone issues that will make or break this planet: Global Warming, Global Poverty and Nanotechnology. As he explains in this video

All of these are intrinsically connected. If you are to succeed in any one of them, you have to deal with the others…everything is connected. Fortunately, the solutions are connected as well…As these concepts become more commonplace, what happens is they disappear into the woodwork. They really become expectations.

By Co-Founding the site WorldChanging.com (also check out the beautiful World Changing Book), Jamais is helping to make these solutions part of the planetary problem solving vocabulary.

Big Thanks to Lisa Rein for connecting us and letting us take over her apartment for the interview!

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[tags]jamais cascio, worldchanging, open the future, futurist, ryanishungry, nanotechnology, san francisco[/tags]

The Rainforest Action Network recently started a video segment called The Greenwash of the Week. This was their first post and we thought it was clever, funny and it informed us of Virgin Atlantic’s most recent greenwashing campaign. It seems that as ‘being green’ becomes the most obvious and urgent thing to do, corporations that have been known looters and polluters are jumping on the PR bandwagon. Thanks RAN for keeping us informed and making us laugh.