Home Remedy Kit Essentials, Part I

Posted by Lourdes Gonzaga

arnicaMust Have Homeopathic Medicines for your Home Remedy Kit

These are the homeopathic medicines I carry with me and always part of my first aid kit:

  1. Arnica montana – the Number One homeopathic medicine for shock and trauma.  If I can only carry one remedy with me, I’d take this.  Just because life happens.  For injuries to soft tissues, there is nothing better.  For any injury to the body, you take it first. Bruises disappear or don’t show up at all (if you take it immediately).  For falls, sprains, strains, bumps in the night, arnica first.  You can also take it BEFORE you engage in something physically challenging (running a marathon, long hike, climbing a mountain or just plain day long gardening). Here’s how I do it: I put a few pellets in my bottle of water, shake the bottle, and sip as I go along. After the activity, I am still fresh as a daisy. No over exertion hangover! I once climbed Mt. Fuji for two days sustained mainly by my bottles of arnicated water! Thanks to Arnica, I was vertical and didn’t have to be carried all the way back to my hotel. And I was frankly amazed that my soreness lasted only 12 hours after the climb!  (more…)
Posted in Community Building, Health and Healing on March 28, 2013

Memorial Park Edible Landscape Project

Posted by Catherine Sutton

Check out our progress by going over to the site, or coming to join us on a weekend morning – either Saturday or Sunday: check the calendar!

ELP

Right by the Memorial Park picnic area, east of the baseball field and the batting cages and south of the general use park/dog park are two mulched beds which Transition Albany and people from the community are busy working to transform into an Edible Landscape, with the blessing of the City under the Friends of Albany Parks program.

Yes, you can imagine fruit trees, canes, vines, herbs, flowers that attract beneficial insects and pollinators, small fruits, beans, tomatoes, greens … in fact a veritable Food Forest! More to come on this concept, but for now let’s just say it’s low maintenance, high yield, and very good for the soil.

We meet every weekend to work on it. At present we’re finishing up a design based on the principles of permaculture to present to the City for their approval before we go ahead making paths that separate walkable areas from beds (a lot of people walk all over it at the moment, which doesn’t help with the compaction of the clay) and dealing with the large amount of water on the site with swales and berms.

We are very open to donations of plants (especially perennials), seeds, labor, useful materials that are looking for a good home (things vines can climb up, rotten wood for the swales, rounds of wood at least 1 foot long, broken concrete and other useful path materials like narrow rounds of wood, drain gravel and crushed granite for one of the paths), and money. In the main we would like to use materials that don’t have to be bought new, since that is the most duplicatable, cheapest and carries the lowest carbon footprint.

If you’d like to come down and check out the site, we’re usually there on weekend afternoons, mostly Sundays but sometimes Saturdays. Just check the calendar. The more people that help with this the more fun it will be. We need everyone from experts to total beginners, of every age, so come along down! We’ll also announce on the email list, the Yahoo group and our Facebook page when we’re ready to get to work with the digging and path making, and then … the planting.

Please join us.

HERE’S A REPORT AS OF APRIL 7, 2013 (more…)

Posted in Community Building, Food and Agriculture, Local Activities, Social Justice on March 5, 2013

What are the priorities for a sustainable and resilient Albany?

Posted by Catherine Sutton

Screen shot 2012-09-28 at 11.47.59 PMThat was the question posed to me by Sheri Spellwoman when she was running for Albany City Council in 2012.

And this is the answer I sent her:

 

As Yogi Berra famously said, “The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be.”

Let’s start by agreeing on a fully-responsible frame of reference that doesn’t shrink from the facts:

  1. The human race has to stop using planetary “resources” at a rate that is destroying habitat, causing the Sixth Great Extinction (see National Geographic article), and producing greenhouse gases at a scale that threatens to heat the global environment beyond the tolerance of plant and animal life.
  2. Going small and local will not only mitigate our effect on the planet, but help prepare us for when these “resources” run out – in the foreseeable future, and almost certainly within the lifetime of the young – so that we, and all our (human and non-human) cohabitants on the planet, can continue to meet basic needs and live with dignity.
  3. The global economy – based on extraction of limited resources yet demanding constant upward growth – is bound to fail, either quickly and dramatically or slowly and painfully, and we need to prepare for that by putting in place localized, alternative ways to get our needs met.

So what should our priorities be in Albany? At this point, “Sustainability” seems almost out of reach. “Resilience” might be a better goal as we adapt to an uncertain future – but these are just my thoughts. I strongly believe that we have the ingenuity right here in our own community to come up with effective solutions.
(more…)

Posted in Community Building, Economy, Energy, Food and Agriculture, Resources on February 21, 2013

Restorative Justice

(Event Sponsored by Transition Albany)
March 3, 2013 2:00 pm - Event Details
Posted by Catherine Sutton

restorejusticeimage

A DISCUSSION ON RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

with Harriet Whitman Lee and Deborah Tuttelman

Sunday March 3, 2013, 2 – 4 pm

Albany Library Edith Stone Room, 1247 Marin Avenue, Albany CA

Restorative justice is an emerging alternative to the retributive justice or punishment model of the criminal justice system. Our discussion is lead by two women actively engaged in restorative justice work with communities and schools.

Harriet Whitman Lee has been a mediator, facilitator, trainer, and circle keeper for many years. She has served on law school faculties and taught academic courses at various levels. She has trained people in conflict resolution in a variety of contexts. She is on the Alameda County Restorative Justice Task Force. She is a volunteer on the SEEDS Restorative Justice Task Force. She is a volunteer in the Insight Prison Project Restorative Justice  Offender Victim Education Group Next Step Program.

Deborah Tuttelman practiced law in the criminal justice system for over twenty years, and currently is a mediator and arbitrator. She volunteers in the SEEDS Restorative Justice Program, and participates in the inmate run restorative justice roundtables at San Quentin.

Join us in a discussion of this vital and timely subject as it relates to our communities and schools, inspired by the recent attack on Albany High School students on the Ohlone Greenway.

 

Posted in , , , on February 1, 2013

An Ecology of Mind – coming on March 21, 2013

(Event Sponsored by Transition Albany)
March 21, 2013 7:30 pm - Event Details
Posted by Catherine Sutton

Thursday March 21, 7:30pm 

A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson  

AN ECOLOGY OF MIND   
Eco_of_Mind_poster_with_laurelsAlbany Twin Theatre, 1115 Solano Avenue, Albany, CA
Tickets $10 /$8 from the theatre in advance or at the door   
Film website, trailer    Facebook   Ticket Sales (or find Albany Twin, then Buy Advance Tickets)

Winner: Media Ecology Association John Culkin 2011 Award for

Outstanding Praxis

Winner: Audience Choice BEST DOCUMENTARY The Santa Cruz Film Festival 2011 
Winner: BEST DOCUMENTARY The Spokane International Film Festival 2011
Official Selection: The Vancouver International Film Festival 
Official Selection: Bioneers Film Festival
Official Selection: Cinema Pacific Film Festival
Official Selection: Haida Gwaii Film Festival  
NEW YORK TIME OUT MAGAZINE’S PICK OF THE WEEK
for the American Museum of Natural History NY Premiere.

We are very fortunate that Nora Bateson, the filmmaker and his daughter, will be present for this screening, the official public release of her documentary. The documentary leaves me in a clear, expanded and joyful state, of heart rather than mind. It is a testimony to the universal relevance of Gregory Bateson’s thinking and the skill of Nora’s film making that everyone I have shown it to has loved it. 

I first came across the film in Oxford, England, where Nora was screening it to a largely academic audience. At the end she asked for questions and comments but people were sitting in a kind of altered state, so she simply continued to weave the magic beautifully as she spoke for another 20 minutes.

This kind of experience is rare but has never had more relevance. Unless we find a new way to see the world and our place in it, there may be little hope for the human race. Gregory Bateson is a compelling thinker and teacher who might be able to help shift the balance from ‘me’ and ‘mine’ to ‘we’ and ‘ours,’ in the native American sense of  ’all our relations’.

Here are a number of reviews that demonstrate the broad reach of Bateson’s teaching.

(more…)

Posted in , , , , , , , on January 28, 2013
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