Watershed Management Group invites the Tucson community to its inaugural Co-op Bazaar, which will be held at Mansfield Park.  This is your opportunity to practice your bartering skills!  All are invited to barter home-grown produce, skills, and volunteer workshop hours with our water harvesting Co-op.  WMG’s Co-op is based on the barn-raising model, where people volunteer their labor to build sustainable systems (like water harvesting systems) and in turn earn the ability to host a workshop at their own home with a volunteer crew and certified workshop instructor. In order to join the bartering fun, please sign up with Matthew Bertrand, WMG’s Co-op Coordinator at matthew@watershedmg.org or call 520-396-3266.  When signing up, you will need to list the produce (e.g. fruits, vegetables, chicken eggs, herbs, native edibles) or skills (e.g. tutoring, personal training, home repair, babysitting) you have to barter. This FREE event will also include live music.

Join WMG for a one of 3 guided bike tours of community demonstration sites that feature rainwater harvesting, green infrastructure, and native habitat in central Tucson.  The tour will follow routes that are closed to car traffic and designated bike routes, during Tucson’s first Cyclovia event, an event that promotes walking, cycling, and neighborhood events in the street (www.cycloviatucson.org).

WMG staff will start tours every hour from 10am to 12pm.  The 10am and 11am tours will be a slower-paced tour lasting two hours.  More experienced riders can sign up for the noon tour, which will cover a longer route over two hours.  The tour will cover sites such as WMG’s award winning work in the Rincon Heights Neighborhood, as well as demonstration sites at the University of Arizona, and the Ward III and VI City Council Offices.

Tickets can be purchased for $5 per person online at watershedmg.org/earthmonth, or by sending a check made out to Watershed Management Group, PO Box 65953, Tucson AZ 85728.  Please indicate in the comments section how many tickets you are purchasing and which tour you would like to attend (10am, 11am, or 12pm).  For more information on this event, contact Lisa Shipek at lisa@watershedmg.org or call 520-396-3266.

Don’t just plant a tree for Earth Month – plant the rain to grow the tree!  Get your hands dirty and transform a neighborhood street into a green street while learning practical skills for harvesting stormwater.  We’ll start by planting the water – creating large-scale stormwater harvesting earthworks along Samos neighborhood streets.  Then we’ll plant a beautiful assortment of native shade trees, as well as flowering plants to attract hummingbirds and butterflies.  Participants will also enjoy live music and a catered lunch.  Samos Neighborhood is located in central Tucson near Campbell and Grant Roads. To be a part of this FREE street-transforming workshop, please RSVP to Catlow Shipek or call 520-396-3266.

Date: Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Times: 10 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.

Location: Grace Grove Retreat Center, 1280 Willow Point Rd, Cornville, AZ (outside Sedona)

Cost: $99 for Water Harvesting Day Course with Brad, includes lunch

Click here for more info or to register for the day course with Brad.

For details on the full course: Permaculture Elementals: Regenerative Retreat for People & Planet

Water Harvesting Course Description

Turn water scarcity into water abundance! This course will show you how to conceptualize, design, and implement sustainable water-harvesting systems for your home, landscape, and community. Learn how to access on-site resources (rainwater, greywater, topsoil, sun, plants, and more), apply a diverse array of strategies to maximize their potential, and utilize guiding principles to create an integrated, multi-functional, and water-sustainable water-harvesting landscape plan specific to your site and needs. These course will help bring your site to life, reduce your cost of living, endow yourself and your community with skills of self-reliance and cooperation, and create living air conditioners of vegetation growing beauty, food, and wildlife habitat.

Water Harvesting Course Details

The course will be held from 10:00 am – 5:30 pm at Grace Grove Retreat Center near Sedona Arizona, with a communal lunch included. Participants can stay for dinner for an additional $15.

Permaculture Elementals

This single-day course with Brad is part of a 5-day Introduction to Permaculture Workshop Retreat called Permaculture Elementals: Regenerative Retreat for People & Planet, which will focus on 1 full element each day – Earth, Air, Water, Fire. With a focus on tending the inner as well as the outer landscapes, retreat participants will learn tangible skills to heal themselves and the Earth through the lense, themes, & medicine of the 5 Elements. This 5-Day retreat and educational workshop will focus on 1 element for each full day, with the element of Spirit woven throughout the entire course. Participants will learn cutting-edge technologies and hands-on skills in Earth Regeneration & Stewardship including: Nature Connection, Water Works, Patterns Recognition & Design, Soil Building Strategies, Plants & Food Forest Gardening, Wild Plant Identification, and much more. This course will also focus on cultivating deeper connection to ourselves and to the natural world through observation, song, story, dance, health, nutrition, healing, and other activities. Grace Grove will offer a range of healing services available for retreat participants at special rates. For more information and to register for the entire Permaculture Elementals workshop/retreat click here.

Date: Monday, April 19, 2010,
Time: 7 pm

Location: Prescott College Crossroads Community Center, located off the alley behind the College’s main buildings at 220 Grove Ave

For more information on this free, public talk please contact Rebekah Doyle, (928) 350-2211, rdoyle@prescott.edu.


“Turning Drains Into Sponges and Water Scarcity Into Water Abundance”

Author and designer Brad Lancaster shares eight universal principles of water harvesting along with simple strategies that turn water scarcity into water abundance. They empower you to create integrated water-sustainable landscape plans at home and throughout your community. Rainwater harvesting is the process of capturing rain and making the most of it as close as possible to where it falls. Greywater harvesting is the process of directing water from household sink, bathtub, shower, and washing machine drains into the soils of the landscape where the water is naturally filtered and reused to generate more on-site resources. The two work hand in hand, and can reduce our water consumption by 30 to 50%! You’ll see examples enhancing local food security, passively cooling cities in summer, reducing costs of living and energy consumption, controlling erosion, averting flooding, reviving dead waterways, minimizing water pollution, building community, creating celebration, and more.

Date: Saturday, April 17, 2010
Conference Hours: 8 am – noon

Location: SW Autism Research & Resource Center, Large Conference Room
2225 N 16th Street, Phoenix AZ 85006 (Thomas Rd & 16th Street)

For full event description and to purchase tickets: www.azhomegrownsolutions.org/page/sustainability-conf

Cost: $25 for general public; $5-10 for residents of Nuestro Barrio

For more information contact: Jennifer Wadsworth, jennifer@AZHomegrownSolutions.org

Description of Brad’s talk:
Planting the Rain: Principles, Practices, and Tips for Water-Harvesting Earthworks and Raingardens: Plant the rain before you plant your trees to boost production, reduce flooding, conserve water, and create sustainable oases around your homes and community infrastructure. Raingardens and other small-scale earthworks quickly infiltrate rainfall into the soil where less is lost to evaporation, while reducing erosion. Living ‘pumps’ of vegetation then enable us the access that water. Come learn simple principles and tips to leverage greater success as you implement these simple and effective passive systems. This presentation builds on Brad’s basic water-harvesting talk, while offering more specifics and case studies. Working examples and case studies will be highlighted.

© 2010 Drops in a Bucket Blog, www.HarvestingRainwater.com

When I was little I was terrified of death. I often cried myself to sleep as I thought of the end of life. It seemed so bleak, pointless, and severe.

Mom tried to comfort me with the concept of going to heaven. This did not reassure me at all. “How do you know there is a heaven?” I’d ask. “Have you been there?”

Eventually, I just numbed myself to the fear by burying it in the recesses of my mind and body.

Years later the fear evaporated with an incredible discovery – composting. Yes! Here was tangible proof that there was life after death, that everything did not just end/stop/vanish with death. Instead, things transformed. In the compost pile I saw kitchen scraps, weeds, and a dead chicken decompose into beautiful, rich, fertile soil in which earthworms, mycelia, chiles, and all kinds of new life grew.

Death no longer scared me, now it excited me. My composting dead body could generate myriad life! Don’t get me wrong: I’m in no rush to experience this. But when it eventually does happen – no problem.

Maybe.

My dead body could generate life, or more death depending on how it is disposed of.

The conventional death industry embalms bodies with a toxic brew of formaldehyde, phenol, and menthol, which can contaminate groundwater and generate cancer and other disease in those doing the embalming.¹ According to Grave Matters, today the U.S. funeral industry buries over 3 pounds of the formaldehyde-based “formalin” with every embalmed body (totaling 800,000 gallons [3,028,000 liters] of formaldehyde a year),² while from the Civil War era to 1910, arsenic, zinc, and lead where the preferred toxic embalming compounds.³

Then there are the caskets, turning cemeteries into landfills. Grave Matters states, “Over time the typical ten-acre [4 ha] swath of cemetery ground contains enough coffin wood to construct more than forty houses, nine hundred-plus tons [816,000 kg] of casket steel, and another twenty thousand tons [18,143,000 kg] of vault concrete.”⁴

A conventional cemetery

Cremation avoids embalming toxins, and the body can be burned in a shroud or cardboard container instead of a standard casket to consume less fuel and release fewer pollutants. But the fuel needed to incinerate the body is still substantial. Carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide are typical emissions along with toxic trace metals such as mercury – which comes from dental fillings (a good reason to ask for mercury-free fillings while alive).

All crematories in the U.S. may emit 5,000 pounds [2,267 kg] of mercury a year, while in the United Kingdom four times that amount is emitted due to a higher percent of the population choosing cremation.⁵

Depressing.

Deadening.

Friend and mentor Tim Murphy gave me a different vision. He wants to be buried toxin-free and naked, ass up, in the fetal position, with an acorn up his butt. “Plant me, and plant a tree. Years later you and others can come sit under my shade, harvest some acorns, and celebrate what is possible.”

I sometimes think of Tim as a radical traditionalist, and a small, but growing segment of the death industry is enabling others to take a similar path that encourages the natural decomposition of the dead and regeneration of other life from the process rather than trying to halt or slow what will eventually happen anyway. The website www.GreenBurialCouncil.org is one conduit to this path. And the book Caring for the Dead: A Complete Guide for Those Making Funeral Arrangements with or without a Funeral Director by Lisa Carlson is another conduit if you want to reduce or eliminate your participation in a death industry.

A green burial does not allow toxic embalming, concrete vaults, or elaborate caskets, which can reduce the cost of a burial by $8,000 to $12,000, according to memorial ecologist Joe Whittaker. Young trees or an engraved fieldstone are recommended over tombstones.

I experienced a new green or conservation burial ground for all faiths first hand at Honey Creek Woodlands just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. It is a beautiful place with very caring and dedicated staff, including Joe Whittaker. And it is erupting with new life.

It is located on and beside a section of once-grazed and clear-cut forest in the heart of the 2,100-acre [849-ha] grounds of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit. The monastery grounds are bordered by and connected to a state park and the network of footpaths, creeks, and wildlife corridors of the park and encompassing 8,000-acre [2,327-ha] Arabia Mountain Heritage Area. This is a huge strength for a final resting place, since many people already feel connected to this land.

Site of old clearcut at Honey Creek Woodlands

Old clearcut site being regenerated with new growth and green burials

First and foremost, the burial grounds are a nature preserve, with the goal of enhancing a 50-year succession back to a mixed hardwood forest, through such practices as selective weeding of invasive exotics, seeding and planting native plant stock, and adding organic matter to the soil.

Bodies are planted just 3 to 3.5 feet [0.9 to 1.06 m] deep because microbial activity and soil life drops tremendously at depths greater than 4 feet [1.21 m]. Above the body the excavated soil is placed in a mound with the topsoil placed back on top for a total initial “depth” of about 5 feet [1.5 m]. This is then covered with a light pine needle mulch and native wildflower seed. The Georgia Native Plant Society ensures only natives are used. Flowers and butterflies soon cover the 2-foot [0.6-m] tall burial mound – over 64 species of butterflies were counted in one day in 2008. The mound settles completely after a few years.

Day-old green burial

Older, settled burial mound

The process is so visible! So beautiful! I visited a day-old burial; fresh flowers still atop the grave. 10 feet [3 m] away, dried and shriveled flowers rested atop a week-old burial. And as I looked about I saw I was surrounded by burials, all in various stages of settling and regeneration. The older they were, the greater the density of vegetation atop them, and the more level the soil.

I saw a family cremation plot circle of field stones surrounding a tree. All were again reunited and rooted around their family’s tree.

I felt revived just being in this regenerating forest. I felt…

Alive!

Death. Pesticide-ridden lawn above, formaldehyde-pumped bodies below within conventional cemetery.

Life. Green burial with mature forest at Honey Creek Woodlands.

REFERENCES:

1. Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. Scribner, 2007. pp. 40, 41.

2. Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. Scribner, 2007. pp. 40, 56.

3. Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. Scribner, 2007. pp. 30, 39.

4. Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. Scribner, 2007. p. 38.

5. Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. Scribner, 2007. p. 61.

For more information about the legalities of green burials in your region, seethe book Caring for the Dead: A Complete Guide for Those Making Funeral Arrangements with or without a Funeral Director by Lisa Carlson, mentioned above.

For Tucson- and/or Arizona-specific resources:

- Download AZ Green Burial FAQs, courtesy of Kristine Bentz;

- Read Kristine’s blog (which includes info on a May 2010 workshop in Prescott);

- Check out and consider joining a Tucson-based MeetUp group Kristine started which is dedicated to alternatives for death care;

- Contact Kristine by email.

Shelter for ceremonies and gatherings at Honey Creek Woodland

WMG Water Harvesting Certification Summer Courses – May & July 2010

WMG is offering an intensive 9-day Water Harvesting Certification
course this summer designed for both participants in Tucson and around
the U.S. The May 7th -16th program (currently with participants from
Arizona, New Mexico, and California) has a few remaining spots open.
This one-of-a-kind program offers 65 hours of hands-on and classroom
training in water harvesting systems design and construction.
Applications are due no later than March 15.

If there is substantial interest, we will also offer an intensive
9-day course July 9th – 18th. For more information or to apply to
either of these programs, visit:
http://www.watershedmg.org/certification
.

You may download the announcement for these specific courses at the
following link:
http://watershedmg.org/sites/default/files/newcontent/WHCert_Announcemt_2010_05.pdf

If you have any questions about the program or the application
process, please contact James MacAdam at james@watershedmg.org or
520-396-3266.

The 15th Annual Permaculture Design Course

Registration for this course opens on September 1, 2009

For complete details, visit: www.sonoranpermaculture.org/courses-and-workshops/

Participants in the 14th Annual Design Course in 2008 pictured below.

Five Weekends in February and March  -
Feb. 6th, 7th;
Feb. 13th, 14th,
Feb. 27th, 28th;
Mar. 13th, 14th;
Mar. 20th, 21st

9:00 AM to 5:30 PM each day.

Cost $650, $595 for early registration (by December 31st). There is also
a class book fee of $39 for a copy of Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison. Also highly recommended is Brad Lancaster’s Rainwater Harvesting for
Drylands and Beyond, Vol 1 and Vol 2.

For the last seven years this course has been full with a waiting list, so early registration is encouraged. To give a high
quality educational experience, we limit the size of the class to eighteen participants. Contact dorsey@dakotacom.net or 624-8030 to register or see the information below for registration info and other FAQs.

This course is one of the longest running annual Permaculture courses in the U.S. and leads to a Permaculture design certificate. It covers all aspects of sustainable design with an emphasis on Southwest dry lands, including a balance of hands on experience, classroom time, and design practicum. Dynamic exercises encourage pattern recognition, noticing the links between plants and animals, climate, and landforms that make up natural ecosystems. These patterns are the basis for the Permaculture system of sustainable design.

The course focuses on dry land communities, addressing individual site and neighborhood “problems” such as storm water flooding. Students learn to read the landscape, to map and analyze energies flowing through a site, and to develop integrated designs for sustainable systems. The weekend format of the course makes it easier for people who hold a week day job to attend and promotes better integration of the course material into daily life.

Course topics include agro forestry, appropriate technology, building design, design principles and patterning, site analysis, dry land gardening principles, ecosystem restoration, philosophy and ethics of Permaculture, regenerative community economics, soils and erosion control, village and community design, water harvesting, and many other topics.

We take field trips to working Permaculture sites around Tucson, and you will have the chance throughout the course to design and begin implementing Permaculture on a site of your choosing. This course is challenging and fun, and it shows the whole big picture of
sustainable design in Southwest Dry lands and how sustainability and integrated design really work!

Site: The classroom will be in the Central Tucson area, and at other Permaculture sites in the Tucson area. Much of the class is held outdoors.

Taught and facilitated by Dan Dorsey, Brad Lancaster, Barbara Rose, and other teachers from the Sonoran Permaculture Guild, as well as professional guest instructors. For teacher profiles see the members link on this website. To register and for more information contact Dan Dorsey, course registrar, at 624 8030 or dorsey@dakotacom.net?.