Orion Magazine Audio Slide Show of the Lexicon of Sustainability

In this beautiful audio slide show, photographer Douglas Gayeton explains the back story regarding the series of images and words now known as the Lexicon of Sustainability. As Gayeton discusses what we talk about when we talk about sustainability, he also elaborates on the relationship between image and quotes in the larger storytelling process and encourages all of us to think more deeply about how we employ language as we conceptualize the future.  As noted on the Lexicon homepage, “Words are the building blocks for new ideas.”   If you’re unfamiliar with Gayeton’s work, check out this great article from the Art of the Rural.  

This slide show is a companion piece to an article, which will appear in the May/June issue of Orion Magazine.

Orion Magazine Audio Slide Show: Lexicon of Sustainability from Orion Magazine on Vimeo.

Persistent Story: Celebrating the West Kentucky African American Heritage Museum

Michael Morrow with students from Russellville High School, Russellville, Kentucky.

We’ve been sprucing things up around here and reorganizing files.

You can now watch the film Persistent Story: Celebrating the West Kentucky African American Heritage Museum at our Boiled Down Juice Vimeo Page. This film was made in 2008 in the Folk Studies graduate program at Western Kentucky University in partnership with Michael Morrow and the West Kentucky African American Heritage Museum in Russellville, Kentucky.  The film is used today by the center for educational and promotional purposes. Disclaimer: The film was made over the course of one semester and was my first film making experience.  Therefore, it’s not without its share of imperfections in audio, editing, and the like.  I’m sharing it here because I hope the message of the film outweighs the technical mistakes.

The Center is an excellent example of  community-based grassroots organizing, the power of oral history to unite a community, and the role of intergenerational research in planning for the future.  Working with Morrow and the center was life-changing for me and informs much of my work today.  If you haven’t been already, I highly recommend you visit the center! It’s an amazing place doing amazing work!  Once we’re finished sprucing up the files we’ll have more photos and information to post.  Thanks to Dr. Kristin Dowell for help in the production of this film.

Here’s a great article about Morrow from the Amplifier. 

Persistent Story from Boiled Down Juice on Vimeo.

Friday Video: Truck Farm

From Truck Farm film.

This week’s video is a teaser from one of the films they showed last week at the Dig In Festival in Fayettveille, Arkansas.

Based in Brooklyn, this film chronicles the making of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in the back of a 1986 truck, an effort to supply healthy, locally grown food in urban centers.  The concept has grown and there are truck farms popping up all over the nation.

Follow the project online and watch portions of the film via truckfarm.com.   Check out the film teaser below.

Would something like this work in your hometown?  Maybe you already have a truck farm.  We’d love to hear about it!

Recorded Stories from the Russellville Seed Swap

2010 Seed Swap. Photo by author.

For the last few days we’ve been posting about the organization Conserving Arkansas Agricultural Heritage.  This week’s Seed and the Story column was an overview of the organization, and this week’s Friday Video, features a trailer from the Seed Swap documentary, produced by Zachariah McCannon, about the beginning of the swaps.

Last year I attended the Russellville Seed Swap and brought along my recording equipment.  Here’s a radio essay I produced for the Ozarks at Large program featuring a few voices form the swap including new growers and those who’ve been gardening for decades.

You can listen to the story by going to the KUAF page here. Better yet, listen to the entire Friday Ozarks at Large program here. The seed swap story begins around 23:00. Or you can listen here:

CAAH Seed Swap in Logan County, Arkansas by Boiled Down Juice
Featured music includes “Ship Out On The Sea” from the Be Good Tanyas and “The Farmer is the Man,” from Fiddlin John Carson.

And if you want to see more photos and read more from last year’s swap, here’s our post from last year.  Thanks for listening/reading!

Friday Video: Seed Swap Documentary

From Seed Swap Documentary

This week’s Seed and the Story column looked at the organization Conserving Arkansas’s Agricultural Heritage (CAAH) and the annual Seed Swaps currently taking place throughout the state.  This afternoon we will be posting a radio piece which will air on KUAF today  profiling voices from the swap last year in Russellville.

In keeping with this coversage of CAAH, today’s Friday Video is a trailer for the film, Seed Swap Documentary.  Produced by Zachariah McCannon, the film documents the early days of the CAAH organization and the work of anthropologist Dr. Brian Campbell as he organizes the first seed swap in Mountain View, Arkansas.   According to the film’s Facebook page:

This documentary film uses the development of a seed exchange and agricultural biodiversity conservation project in the Ozark Mountains as an ethnographic lens to explore the seed saving subculture of the region. 

To learn more about the film, follow the project on facebook here.

To read more and to keep up with screenings around the state, visit the film’s webpage.  It looks like there will be screenings coming up this March in Fayetteville, Hot Springs and Eureka Springs.

And don’t forget there will be a swap this Saturday in Russellville and one Sunday in Conway.  Go here for a full listing of swap dates and times. 

The Seed and the Story: CAAH and Arkansas Seed Swaps

2011 Russellville Seed Swap. Photo by author

The Seed and the Story is a bi-weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!

The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  

You can follow the Boiled Down Juice on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading!

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Beginning earlier this month the organization CAAH (Conserving Arkansas’ Agricultural Heritage) began their yearly series of Seed Swaps across the state.  With the motto “One for the cutworm, one for the crow, one to share and one to grow,” the organization seeks to preserve both the agricultural folkways of Arkansas and the seeds themselves, many of which have been in families for generations.

They operate a Seed Bank on campus at the University of Central Arkansas, studying and preserving the genetic diversity of regional seeds and host twelve statewide swaps, providing a space where community members can trade heirloom seeds and gardening knowledge, sharing the wealth with both fellow community members and the CAAH organization.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting project leader Dr. Brian Campbell and hear him speak about this project and his other work, and I attended the Russellville Swap last year.  Regardless if you’re a master gardener with decades of experience or a person who’s never put a thing in the ground but posses an interest in learning more about growing your own food, CAAH is an excellent resource.

They seek to raise awareness about the problems with crop monoculture, wherein regional heirloom seeds are replaced by hybrids, the seeds patented and owned by major corporations.  As growers shift to these seeds, the regional ones die out, taking with them genetic diversity, regional traditions and a hardiness to local conditions. Just take the example of tomatoes.  There are only few varieties sold in grocery stores but literally hundreds of different heirloom tomatoes you can grow at home, ranging from pink to green to yellow and each with their own unique taste.  Heirloom gardening opens up a whole new world of eating.

Last year when I attended the swap in Russellville there were several people who brought seeds to give away and an even larger group of folks who just wanted to meet other gardeners in the area, many of whom were starting their first plots.  I came home with some okra seed, daffodil bulbs, a hummingbird vine, and French melon seeds, all of which have done well. If you have seeds passed down in your community, donating some to CAAH is an excellent way to make sure they never die out.  But don’t feel like you have to have seeds to swap to attend the event. It’s for everyone, gardener or not.

The event in Russellville will take place on the 25^th of this month at All Saints Episcopal Church from 10:00-1:00.  If you miss the Russellville event, you can make it to the Conway swap on Sunday the 26th 1:30-3:00 at the Faulkner County Library.   You can check out the full list of swaps below.

You can read more about CAAH and learn what’s in their Seed Bank here: www.arkansasagro.wordpress.com.  If you want to read more about last year’s swap and see a few more photos, go here. If you have seeds that have been passed down to you, I’d really love to hear about them!  I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for spring.  What are you going to be growing?

Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap Box Documentary

Dr. Bronner.

While scanning the Netflix streaming options last night in search for a good documentary to accompany my evening knitting, I came across Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox.  Produced by Sara Lamm in 2007, it’s both an exploration of eccentric beliefs and a profile of a social responsible company.  If you’ve already seen it I’d love to hear your take on it .

You’re probably familiar with the soap, or more so its label, a jumbled series of prophetically sounding run-on sentences about hard work, moral ABCs, and God, all culminating in the phrase, “All-one!”    A master soap maker who lost his parents in the Holocaust, Dr. Bronner escaped from a mental institution before traveling the U.S. selling his soap and, more specifically, the message printed on the bottle. His teachings were a mixture of astronomy, religion (specifically the unification of all faiths), and social commentary, specifically the belief in equality of all humankind.

The documentary centers around Bronner’s youngest son, Ralph Bronner, who travels the United States telling the story of his father and his belief in what he dubbed the “moral ABCs.”  According to the film producers, “68-year-old Ralph endured over 15 orphanages and foster homes as a child, but despite difficult memories, is his father’s most ardent fan.”

It’s a compelling film, unraveling the character of Dr. Bronner from the man himself, a flawed human who put his belief in the need to “unite spaceship earth” above his own children.  Although slow-moving at times with less than perfect footage, the film does a great job teasing out the wisdom of Dr. Bronner’s teachings from his numerous shortcomings as both a visionary and a father.

What I found most fascinating about the documentary (besides an inside look at an eccentric self-proclaimed rabbi), were the slivers of information about his descendants who run the company today.  Ralph is clearly more emotionally complex then he ever lets on, and the film follows his travels as he attempts to connect with strangers, striving to bring his father’s legacy to new generation even as he seeks out his own identity. He meets a New York subway worker and talks of the beauty of the common man. He befriends a piano player who’s caring for his dying friend. Somehow the legacy of soap continues to serve as a window to our common humanity and underlying eccentricities.  (You can read Ralph’s response to the film here).

Alongside Ralph’s bittersweet tale is a glimpse into how the company is run today, the product of Bronner’s relatives who clearly have a deep respect for the man even as they live with troubling memories.  Everything within the business is operated under Fair Trade agreements, workers are paid incredibly well, and the operation focuses on environmental, economic, and social sustainability.  The family doesn’t go around preaching Bronner’s teachings, but rather apply some of the more accessible policies of what Bronner dubbed “constructive capitalism.” According to the film, all of the Bronner descendants have “capped their salaries so that they make no more than five times that of the lowest paid employee.”

Have you seen the film?  What are your thoughts?

You can read more information from the fim’s creator here.

Also check out her interview on NPR here.

Yes! Magazine’s Breakthrough Fifteen: The Power of Storytelling, Vulnerability, and Community Action.

Henry Red Cloud, Yes! Magazine. Photo by Dan Bihn.

If you’re a frequent reader of the Boiled Down Juice, you know that Yes! Magazine is one of our favorite publications.  With the tag line  “powerful ideas, practical actions,” Yes! showcases and explores the concepts and people on the front lines of democracy, social innovation, and community action.  Back in November they issued their winter publication, The Breakthrough 15: The justice warriors, eco-innovators, happiness architects, and change artists who are shattering our sense of powerlessness.  

I recently picked up a copy (a little late, I know) of this special issue dedicated “to the power of the 99 percent—and to a group of people who aren’t looking for leadership from those with entrenched wealth and influence.”  The main goal of this special publication, Yes! claims, is to profile “a group of people who are shattering our sense of powerlessness.”

I especially love that the introductory essay, written by Madeline Ostrander, highlights the power of storytelling, noting that “personal stories remind us that others face the same difficulties and vulnerabilities we do. We discover our own power when we realize we aren’t alone.”  It’s this focus on difficulties and vulnerabilities I find particularly important.  Too often the media portrays activists as larger than life, endless whirlwinds of ideas and energy, when in reality they’re fragile humans who experience frustration and confusion just like anyone else.  Most importantly, their ideas and strategies have been forged within these frustrations and confusions.  We need more stories that illuminate this gray area between observation and action.

Ranging from the stories of Henry Red Cloud, the director of Lakota Solar Enterprises which provides renewable energy to poor Native American communities, to Lily Yeh, the founder of Barefoot Artists, an organization using the power of art to transform neighborhoods, the magazine is diverse collection of portraits of people recognizing and utilizing their skills in their own communities.

For the rest of the week we’ll be taking a closer look at some of the people featured and the work they’re doing.  Some of the people we’ve discussed before, such as the amazing work of Grace Lee Boggs, but some were new to us.

You can read all the profiles here on Yes!   Tell us if you’ve read this issue and what you enjoyed.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

“Compost Cuisine”: Article from AlterNet.org

From Alternet.org

I just came across this article via Rodele’s facebook feed, and I love, love, love it.  Ever feel like there has to be a way to make more use of the those scarps headed for the compost pile or down the drain?  Well, here’s your inspiration.

Exploring a movement called “compost cuisine,” this article written by Anneli Rufus for Alternet examines creative ways chefs are finding ways to use food that might typically wind up in the compost pile.  From the article:

Such waste-not ingenuity is part of a new movement among chefs who are taking sustainability to new heights by gazing into the depths: that is, at what would otherwise be deemed not fit to eat. While we’ve heard of snout-to-tail, “whole-animal” restaurateurship, the practice of creating fabulous dishes from stems, seeds, skins and other usually discarded plant parts gives “bottom of the food chain” a whole new meaning.

“When you have high respect for how things are raised and produced, you’re not going to throw any parts of them away if you can help it,” says Baker, who was named Esquire magazine’s 2010 Chef of the Year and is the executive chef at Gather restaurant – also in Berkeley. “If we’re using the whole animal, then why not use cauliflower leaves, carrot peels, corncobs and cornsilk?”

So, what kind of ways are they using the would-be scraps?  The article is full of example.  Here’s just one:

At Origen, Leighton and co-owner Daniel Clayton boil fruit cores and peels into syrups to use in sodas and cocktails. Ditto fennel fronds. Bumpy Brussels-sprout ends, spinach stems and other typically discarded produce parts are boiled into stock, puréed into mousses, diced and sautéed and served au gratin.  

Read this and all the other examples by clicking here.

What are some ways you keep food out of the compost pile?  Here’s a post we did a while back about an idea for over-ripe peaches.  Tell us your ideas!  We’d love to include them here.

Voices from the Root Cafe.

From the Root Cafe

You may recall a recent article for the Arkansas Times about the Root Cafe and their sustainable business model.

I also had the opportunity to visit with Root owners Jack and Corri Bristow Sundell about their inspiration for the cafe and just a few of the life events that led up to fulfilling this dream.

You can hear Jack and Corri tell more about their story via this radio piece which aired this past Monday on the Ozarks at Large program on KUAF 91.3 FM, Public Radio out of Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Visiting with Jack and Corri from The Root Cafe in Little Rock by Boiled Down Juice

To learn more about the Root visit their webpage or follow them on facebook or twitter. 

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