peakmoment Videos

Peak Moment 149: Take a personal tour with members of Santa Barbara City College's Student Sustainability Coalition. They're propelling action -- like bringing fresh, local organic produce daily to the salad bar, and placing recycling bins in the cafeteria. They're educating the campus all year round and especially during Sustainability Week -- on the climate crisis, renewables, and campus transportation alternatives. Now their advisor, professor Adam Green, has formed a Center for ...

Tags: sustainability education activism

Peak Moment 148: In this two-part program, Diana Leafe Christian, author of Finding Community: How to join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community, zeros in on how to find an ecovillage. Once you determine what you want, what are the criteria to explore whether a particular ecovillage is a good fit for you? www.ecovillagenews.org In part two, Bob Banner, publisher of Hopedance magazine, shares insights from Andrew Harvey's Sacred Activism workshop "What breaks your heart, what you really love ...

Tags: intentional community ecovillage activism spirituality

Peak Moment 147: In Colorado it's cold for much of the year, but inside this cozy dome greenhouse, the plants are growing happily. Take a grand tour with Buckhorn Gardens manager and permaculturist Breigh Peterson: the greenhouse structure with its interplay of light and water, warmth and air; curving raised beds of vegetables and flowers; fish tanks moderating the temperature; vertical trellises and shelves to use vertical space. Outdoors a huge garden of row crops and a young orchard are ...

Tags: permaculture farming local food greenhouse

In this excerpt from a longer presentation, Shannon Biggs, of Global Exchange, describes how more than 100 communities have enacted laws that place the rights of communities and nature over the claimed "rights" of corporations. It's a radical and inspiring approach that brings decision-making back to communities. Biggs is the Local Green Economy program director with Global Exchange. The full presentation also includes Thomas Linzey of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, and is ...

Tags: democracy corporation corporate community local law rights

Peak Moment 146: The future is abundant, asserts permaculture designer Larry Santoyo. His vision of living in the present provides a wonderful antidote to fear about uncertain futures. People need to rediscover that we're part of the ecosystem, and apply permaculture design principles to the many problems we face. Larry teaches sustainable permaculture design as a discovery of the world around us. He notes that trying to be self-sufficient is really anti-permaculture. Instead, we need to ...

Tags: permaculture larry santoyo sustainability

Peak Moment 145: John Weber's Boise, Idaho house with south-facing windows rarely needs heat and never air conditioning. Meet a man who has built a passive-solar house with solar electric power and solar hot water; plus a solar-powered electric car -- and who rides a bike! With photovoltaics tied to the grid, he sells surplus electricity back to the power company. John shows how he converted his "Sun Car" from a junked Festiva to all-electric, with added solar panels on top to extend its ...

Tags: local energy passive solar power electric vehicle

Peak Moment 144: Judy Wicks' love of place has made widening ripples on a global scale. She's the founder of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), a national network of sustainable, small businesses. After moving onto a quaint street in Philadelphia, she learned it was slated to be torn down. Organizing her community, she saved the block as a walkable community. She opened White Dog Cafe coffee shop on the first floor of her home, which grew to a large restaurant proudly ...

Tags: economy local business food community

Peak Moment 143: Asking "wouldn't it be wonderful if our city could feed itself?" Joe Leitch ponders everybody in Portland planting a chestnut tree. Pam Leitch relates how they both left the corporate world after reading the book "Your Money or Your Life". As educators on sustainability and resource depletion, permaculture and social justice, they soon learned of Peak Oil. Pam initiated bringing a Peak Oil resolution to the Portland City Council, who passed it unanimously in 2006 and set up ...

Tags: permaculture peak oil energy gardening community

Peak Moment 142: What if a community owned its electric utility cooperatively, rather than paying a for-profit company? Plumas-Sierra Rural Electric Cooperative could be a model. Energy Services manager Jessica Nelson describes how this locally owned, democratically governed non-profit serves the good of the community. Besides lower rates, customers benefit from incentives to conserve electricity, install geothermal heating/cooling systems, and solar panels (photovoltaics). The coop's dream ...

Tags: wind energy

Peak Moment 141: (same as 3/4/09 with added diagrams) Trathen Heckman takes us on a step-by-step tour of how to make a safe, ecological and legal suburban home graywater system. Follow the water as it drains from the bathroom tub (and sink and laundry) through a unique valve leading into the backyard garden. It flows into an optional wetland and underground pond for filtering. The water is then piped below ground to several destinations in the yard, where it will supply water for plants ...

Tags: water graywater conservation