Urban Food

In the midst of a transition like the one our society is presently beginning, growing organic food locally is one of the most sensible things we can do. Being the kind of person who likes to do stuff that is sensible, I decided to start this process in the little yard of the rental property where I live. As you can see, it is the only patch of yard in a sea of apartment buildings and pavement.

Like many such properties, this had more or less been treated like a garbage dump for decades. The "soil" consisted of gravel, broken glass, construction waste, sand, and dog poop. So I started with compost (after coming up with a plan and getting formal approval to go ahead with the project).

I built a little box from scrap wood, found a suitable indoor collection can, and labeled the top of the can with some simple instructions for the half-dozen fellow renters I share space with.

By picking up food waste from local businesses and yard waste from nearby alleys, and combining this with a couple of yards of donated-by-a-good-friend farmpost, I was in business.

Using permaculture techniques, simple hand tools, and scavenged materials, I got the space turned into a healthy and productive outdoor place. In another few years, it will be a maintenance-free and food rich micro habitat.

As you can see, the project is coming along okay a year or so later.  Some tasty stuff is growing, there are all sorts of critters stopping by, and the land is starting to get healthier.  



It isn't much, obviously, but it is something.  Which is more than most people do towards fixing the broken world we inherited.

What is The Trancewar?

 You may already be familiar with information warfare...I use "trancewar" as something of an extension of that concept. Being of the mind that reality-as-we-perceive-it is illusory by design, and further that the nature of this illusion we call reality is partially determined by our own imposition of patterns, associations, and definitions, I contend that the power to define this illusion is the only power that really matters. From here, I would argue that every single conflict that exists is a conflict over control of this power in some form or another. The trancewar is the eternal struggle for whatever experiential world one seeks to inhabit.

This is not to say that I think no objective reality exists, but rather that whether or not true objectivity exists is irrelavant to the extent that we are incapable of knowing the world except through the biological and psychocultural perceptual filters available to us. The nature of these filters is the trancewar's primary concern, because these filters frame our experience of reality to the point of becoming that reality. In later posts, I'll further detail my reasoning as necessary.

It's really all about stories...who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, what they're fighting over, how, and so on. It's about symbols in play, what these happen to represent, and how these happen to interact. It's about people, what they desire, and why. Mostly, though, it's about playing around with stuff that most people take way too seriously. Like pretty much everything.