Pam Hatfield

Paul, absolutely I apologise if you feel I am trying to blow smoke in your face. this certainly isn't my intention. I sorta feel that that's what's happening in reverse, actually, that I came to your open house and now have to accept having smoke blown in my face if I want to stay. You may have been discussing this for years but a couple of months ago was the first I knew of it and I thought the Hatfield thing had resolved it so was astonished at the email yesterday. I was (am) only asking what losing my account means in specific terms. This isn't an attempt to annoy you, it's simply a request for clarification.

I don't even know what locking my account means. Does it mean I can no longer access the site or just that I can't post? I assume it means I wouldn't get notification of your "dailyish email." And, btw, I am not considering leaving because I "want to use an obviously fake name" but because I resent being forced to lie to stay. I was fine with the Hatfield that you assigned and thought that was the end of it, deliberately lying is not something I generally choose to do. Also, I have problems keeping track of passwords as it is, and this is just something else I'd have to keep track of. So what does locking my account actually mean? So I can make an informed decision?

I read the links and still don't see the rational behind this. I have never used a fake name unless mine was not available and I dislike intensely for very valid personal reasons, announcing my real last name to the wide world. Aside from my specific reasons, identity theft is not just an urban myth. It seems strange for you to work as hard and dedicatedly (word?) as you do to build the site and then seemingly go out of your way to alienate a bunch of people for no apparent reason. It's your site so obviously you can do as you wish with it, it simply makes little sense to me. If people can use fake names then you are not much further ahead than if they use anonymous, really. It's window dressing, is all. People will be responsible or not and the names they go by have little to do with it. imo.

ediblecities Hatfield wrote:I can't repeat it often enough don't fiddle around with barrels get something decent, a tank, it is not that much more expensive! Especially when you live in a dry area and have water restrictions. Tanks are easy to install, even I can do that. In any water emergency you will have your backup or if there's a fire. A barrel this is what I would maybe connect the roof of a shed with, but not your house.

Here I can get clean 55 gallon barrels for $10 but to buy a new tank will cost around $1 gallon so $55 for the same capacity. There are quite a few videos on You Tube where people have stacked up several rows of barrels along a wall so they have quite a lot of water storage for a minimal cost, even with the bits and bobs needed to hook the barrels together If the barrels were free, like Paul found, then the cost gap is even more significant Also, sometimes a stack of barrels is easier to find floor space for than for one large tank. Then you also can use the first one or two barrels to filter the water if you are concerned about such things. ( a screen is basic, then you can get into layers of sand or/and charcoal for example).

You likely couldn't get the same the water pressure you could get from pumping out one tank though so not as useful to battle a fire with.

As for algae...My understanding is that if you have to block the light from the water to prevent algae so white or transclucent plastic will be difficult in this regard. Never tried it but maybe paint the tank?

Here is a page about the Icy Ball which seems to be a fairly simple project although it still does use ammonia. These used to be manufactured in both Canada and the US.
http://crosleyautoclub.com/IcyBall/crosley_icyball.html There are some links on it to plans for making one, but all the links everywhere emphasize how dangerous this can be.

Another site has instructions to make one but also has some serious warnings about the hazards involved.
http://lionheart.net/fridge/descript.htm

Any idea whether this would work using something other than ammonia?

Incandescent light bulbs were supposed to become illegal in Canada today but the government has finally caught up to the mercury question so now is dithering. They aren't backpedalling very far; they are now giving the manufacturers of CFL bulbs until 2014 to figure out ways to arrange for "proper disposal" whatever that means.

Lots of people don't recycle anything as it is..I wonder how many kids will have to get mercury poisoning from stepping on a broken bulb or breathing in the vapours before the government wakes up and realizes we really could do better than deliberately putting such stuff into the environment at all. However, lots of people didn't know anything about the dangers of cfls so there may be a backlash which gets rid of them entirely.

You might want to look around for the 4x4x8 straw bales if you had any way to unload and place them, they'd put up your wall in next to no time and have fewer joints to leak air through. Not too sure about condensation though..on one of the threads I think someone said straw bales had been tried for a cold house with plastic liners and it was a disaster. You might want to look into that.

I applaud him for trying to find a way to build a CITY that was designed to be as self supporting and non polluting as possible. China happens to be the place where it might have been possible; especially since as you say the farmers are often left much worse off than before once a developer moves in. I doubt very much he chose that site himself, btw, it seems likely he was likely given a choice of a few sites and settled on that one just as he was given a choice of builders. Who knows what options he had? Anyway. China also has the cash to build such a project; few other economies have that these days. As you said, Green is a buzzword over there (though it seems likely it means as much as civil rights, i.e nothing at all) So it would be relatively easy to fall into the trap of thinking they were serious.

He may have been naive; it seems quite probably that was the case. OTOH if nobody ever tries, if nobody ever trusts, then no progress would ever be made. Also, the bolder the effort the more of a target it makes. People love to target shoot.

If you watch as many of the TED talks (and related articles) as I do, then you would see that what he planned was infinitely more sustainable and human friendly than is generally the case. I have seen stats on just what the future appears to hold and it is not a happy prospect; already millions of people are living in substandard slums (there are slums and then there are these, as well as the thousands living in refugee camps) throughout the world. Something like 2 million people don't get enough to eat on a daily basis. And, as you noted, there are people daily leaving the country to find their fortunes in the city. So cities are growing like crazy, all over the world, and almost all of them have areas for those who haven't been able to find work at least that allows for a decent place to live or standard of living. So.

One of the things that has shown up is that as the standard of living goes down, generally speaking, people have more kids. It's a biological thing; if people live precarious lives, (not of their own choosing, that is, not talking about people who like to climb skyscrapers on the outside without safety gear or who try to jump the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle) they tend to have kids so they leave someone to replace them. Lots of kids supposedly increases the chances that at least one will live to adulthood. Possibly also so few other options for entertainment are available that at least there's always sex. Maybe they just can't afford birth control or it's contrary to their culture, religion or whatever.. (Not talking about China here). Lots of people are planning cities to hold these people and their following generations and many of the plans seem to be ignoring anything even as basic as green roofs or solar orientation presumably because the scale is so big they can't deal with it.

Many will have one or two special showcase buildings which are solar oriented and which would be relied upon as food producers as most of them assume they will feed people with food hydroponically grown under artificial lights, so there is little or no concern about farmers or green space at all. I haven't seen any which planned for the sewage to be used to produce natural gas and compost to supply the city's energy needs, as his did. I haven't seen any plans which involved replacing the appropriated farmland by moving it onto the roofs of the buildings, as his did. Etc. Maybe they're out there, but I haven't run across them.

So yes, although I concede he may have been naive to think that such a plan would actually be followed through on, I do applaud him for trying to meet the challenges of the future by trying to plan a sustainable city. The fact that it was to built in China was immaterial to the prospect of having it built at all, China could have led the way.

Travis you are a GEM!!! I had looked and looked but hadn't found these guys and now I am in heaven! What a great way to start out the year. thanks so much! I am in Saskatchewan. I couldn't find out the costs of shipping but they definitely do ship so that should be fine. I am excited for spring now!

I also have a lead for someone with a tree spade so am going to try to organize a day's (or even half a day, not sure how long it would take to punch out about 150 holes for the various trees and shrubs) hire so I can get all these plants in proper sized holes as that has been a major hurdle. Now back to planning where this stuff should all go..there were a few other interesting trees in there as well. Some of them I know are not hardy enough for here, (sweet cherries are only a dream in this area) but have to look at hardiness zones for others..I didn't know it might be possible to grow locust here for example. Life is looking good right now. thanks so much again.

Admittedly I am going by the design he put forward in the presentation on the TED talks, where there was absolutely no evidence anywhere whatsoever of the sort of thing that actually happened. He has, again according to the presentation, been extremely active in helping to get toxins out of products and make them recyclable, such as carpets, which seems to me to be a rather specific example of his efforts to make the world a better and more sustainable place.

In his TED talk he clearly was trying, not to move farmers off their land, but to minimize the amount of disruption and farmland loss which IS going to occur with the population growth China is facing. Look at what has happened in North America, subdivisions have sprawled over thousands of acres, often of the best land. What actually happened in China was precisely what he was trying to avoid, by planning a sustainable CITY, for hundreds if not thousands of families, who are going to be looking for places to live and raise their family. When you have as many people as China has, even limiting the family to one child still leaves a huge population boom, and China is becoming increasingly westernised, not all of them are content to live several generations in one home. An example of that is the growth of rock and roll of all things. There is also a monstrous disparity in the haves and have nots in urban China, and civil rights are most certainly not embedded in their legal system. The Chinese government has already simply booted farmers off their land when they wanted it, no reason to think this area will be immune. He was trying to minimize the effect of population growth, by planning a sustainable CITY which will likely end up there one way or the other. The focus on the farmers presently there and the suggestion he was making a comment about how sustainable THEIR life style is totally beside the point; they won't have much choice when the government decides they are going to lose the land because they need it for housing or commercial development or whatever. This has already happened in other parts of China, and there isn't any reason to think it won't happen there.

The other day, someone said that the population of the world is now growing at the rate that EVERY DAY the number of children born equals the number of people living in Austin Texas. How many of them are in China I don't know but a lot simply because China has so many people. Why do you think that they restrict the number of children a family may have? They don't have the room or resources for them. It's frightening to think that most wars have been fought over land. I for one applaud McDonough for trying to plan a CITY which would be sustainable; it's a huge and complex vision and very sad that it got so violated in the translation. There is absolutely no hint of anything remotely like what actually happened in the plans that he presented in the TED talks, it actually goes against everything his company has worked for in the past and I don't blame him a bit for trying to disassociate himself from what happened. It seems to me that his vision was more than they could grasp or were willing to do so they just used his name as window dressing, much like they use Apple logos to sell fake Macs.