The Thought Kitchen is our effort at collective inquiry and its power to affect change. Have you ever noticed how the party is always in the kitchen? There are more walls to lean on and people are energized by the proximity to food and drink. Well, welcome to our kitchen, where we hope to tap into everything we love about that feeling—community, vivacious exchange, food for thought.
Reasons to Love Portland #82: TLC Harvest Festival
A few weekends ago my family and I headed over to the Tryon Life Community Farm to celebrate in their second annual Harvest Festival. TLC farm, as it is affectionately called, is the product of an ongoing collective of volunteers and 10-15 sustained residents who have put thousands of hours into acquiring the land, staving off development, and fund-raising to pay the mortgage, all while living and promoting their mission, “to grow community learning in Portland while preserving common green space, restoring native ecosystems, and demonstrating sustainable urban density living.”
The small farm, nestled into the woods bordering Tryon Creek State Park, is only a five or six minute drive south from downtown Portland. However, the short walk from the road into the heart of the farm seemed to transport us miles and miles from the energetic pulse of the city and into an urban yeoman’s dream come true. At the harvest festival we checked out the diverse garden and agricultural techniques used on the farm, explored a sauna and adjacent open-air living space made of cob, watched the farm’s chicken tractor in action (a portable chicken coop, left in place for a day or two, will break up the soil and deposit fantastic fertilizer), met a few of the goats used to mow future garden-space, and enjoyed eating and drinking the uber-fresh/organic/local products of a successful harvest. Live music, a raffle, and a gaggle of jubilant children (and adults!) made for a legitimately refreshing, rejuvenating, and inspiring afternoon.
Organic beer? Vegan sneakers? All-natural lube? Ideal Bite is a tasty website offering daily suggestions on how to live more sustainably. What makes the site so compelling is the fact that these eco-tips are simple, sassy and—to keep the food puns rolling—easy to swallow. Check out their Top 10 Tips to get your green on:
1. Beat SUV-related Guilt.
Want to make less of an impact? Purchase carbon offsets for your auto through services like CarbonFund and NativeEnergy. They’ll calculate the CO2 that your car is responsible for creating and you, in turn, offset that CO2 by funding projects like wind farms that combat global warming.
2. Shop Vintage.
A fact you already knew: it’s cheaper to buy used clothes and furniture at second-hand stores. But a fact you probably never thought of: buying “vintage” is just another form of reusing and recycling. It also helps to avoid support sweatshop labor, and you’ll never have to worry about your friends showing up to a night on the town in the same skirt as you.
3. Go Natural with Your Yoga Mat.
90% of today’s sticky mats contain PVC, considered to be the most toxic of all plastics. Combine a natural yoga mat (made from organic jute, cotton or all-natural rubber) with non-toxic cleaners that don’t contain potential hormone disruptors… and may all your downward dogs be chem free.
4. Go Veggie - One Day a Week.
Becoming a full-time veg head not your thing? No worries… just pick up a veggie cookbook and try cooking veggie once a week. You’ll be surprised at just how easy it is to eat well while eating healthier. Because meat production’s so resource-intensive, if 10,000 people gave up eating steak just once every seven days, it would save enough water to fill 22,719 Olympic-sized swimming pools and the weight of more than 9 humpback whales in fertilizer.
5. Lather, Rinse, But Do Not Repeat.
According to many hair stylists, shampooing once every two days is usually plenty, unless maybe you’re a swimmer or mud wrestler. The waste that shampoo bottles create should be reason enough, but shampooing too often also strips away beneficial natural oils from your scalp, along with floating more soapy chemicals into the waterways.
I happened to catch “Manufactured Landscapes” during its brief stint here in Portland and it brought my busy mind to a screeching halt. It’s a documentary about nature transformed by industry in rural and urban China through the lens of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. It won several “Best Documentary” and “Best Canadian Film” awards since it was released earlier this year. I can say with absolute certainty that I will never look at the “Made in China” stamp again without thinking about the images in this movie and my personal contribution to their existence.
I was hanging out in front of a local restaurant and noticed a cool bit of graffiti on its bright orange doorway. It was a sticker with Braille on it, tagged with another sticker that read “Braille Graffiti.”
I walked back into the office and immediately Googled the subject, a query that resulted in my finding out that one of Portland’s most infamous “public artists” was responsible for the work. It was the latest project by Scott Wayne Indiana, the guy we blogged about almost a year ago who’s best known for attaching toy horses to the century old horse-rings on PDX’s sidewalks. This latest project, peppered around the city last month, arrived just in time for Portland’s Time Based Art Festival, and raises the question: Why shouldn’t street art be enjoyed by everyone?
Click HERE to watch a video about the project and to find out what the Braille says!
Where do ideas begin? How does one inspiring idea or inspiring individual influence a series of additional ideas or people? I ask the question because I just received a phone call from a friend informing me that Anita Roddick, the founder of The Body Shop and a major shit disturber (in the best sense of the term) just died suddenly from a brain hemorrhage. I was utterly shocked and saddened to hear the news. But, Anita’s flame burned incredibly brightly. I knew and worked with her at The Body Shop. She had infectious enthusiasm and was absolutely relentless about wanting to change the world, in big, bold ways. She was a maverick thinker and doer; one of the first to demonstrate that business could actually be a force for positive change in the world. She will be remembered as a great activist, an impressive entrepreneur, a source of inspiration to women worldwide and as a person who wasn’t afraid to take a stand in the face of difficult looking odds. Her ideas and her inspiration live on. I can’t help but think, for example, that Nau wouldn’t exist if Anita hadn’t done the early pioneering work that she did. Thanks Anita. You will be missed but your spirit carries on. And Gordon, please know that I’m thinking of you, Justine and Sam.
When we launched The Thought Kitchen it was our aspiration to make it a venue for robust dialogue and conversation. Well, a few months ago, as a result one of my posts, I began an online exchange that subsequently turned into a telephone exchange with Deron Triff and Alex Hoffman, the founders of Changents. Deron and Alex are inspired and inspiring. Changents is a recently birthed (alpha stage) socially progressive media company that is providing a forum for people who are “asking tough questions about society and demanding a platform for their voice and expression.” They’re definitely our kindred spirits, particularly given that they’re into showcasing inspiring stories of positive change within a social networking community and closing the loop by providing tools to take action. I harbor a strong suspicion that we’ll be hearing more about these guys and their emerging community, but in the mean time I encourage you to take a peek for yourself.
This Saturday, Portland Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation is putting on a paddle-out in the mighty Willamette River. The intent of the event is to raise awareness of the watershed, specifically the impact of pollution from Portland finding its way into the ocean via the Columbia Rivermouth. Surfrider Portland and other guest speakers will be discussing their programs and highlighting legislation that will benefit river and coastal water quality. Bring your surfboards, paddleboards, kayaks, canoes, and maybe a hazmat suit… Joking! Events like these will hopefully prevent us from ever having to wear body condoms in our beloved rivers and oceans.
Surfrider’s Paddle Out Portland will be held at noon this Saturday, Sept. 8 on the public dock under the SE side of the Hawthorne Bridge.
The fate of Oregon is on the ballot in less than nine weeks. Measure 49 is the upcoming ballot measure to protect our home — to safeguard those things that make Oregon Oregon. M 49 will fix Measure 37 and protect Oregon from unchecked growth. The work in the next couple of months to pass Measure 49 will determine whether hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland, forestland, mountains, coastal areas and special places in Oregon will be safe, or whether land speculators will turn Oregon into a land of strip malls, sprawling subdivisions, open pit mines and traffic jams.
The passage of Measure 49 is the only way to prevent the destruction of the Oregon we love and the stakes couldn’t be higher…
Measure 37 passed in the 2004 election and not only threatens farms, forest land and open spaces, but has opened up Portland, Bend and other Oregon towns and cities to dangerous, unchecked development such as more Wal-Marts, huge billboards, and buildings without height limits. There are already about 8,000 claims for developments including 6,000 housing subdivisions in the works.
The question is whether or not citizens like you and me will step up to the plate and provide the resources and volunteer hours needed to pass Measure 49. Fighting the misleading campaigns that big land speculators are launching is going to be a challenge, but it’s better than the alternative — unchecked sprawl and the destruction of Oregon’s farms, forests, waterways and open spaces.
I did! And it was really cool. Ecomotion, a new Earth friendly vehicle dealer opened near my house in Northeast Portland last week, and I couldn’t resist swinging by to see what they were selling. The showroom was filled with electric Zap! cars – lipstick pink ones, Kermit green ones, fluffy cloud white ones, and even a surfboard blue teeny truck that got me thinking about the possibility of zapping my way to the beach every weekend. Unfortunately, this version of the electric car — only capable of going 25 miles per charge up to a maximum speed of 40 miles per hour — is not freeway legal… yet. Apparently, within six months Ecomotion will carry souped-up versions of the Zap! car that will be faster and capable of going much farther. I’m sure it’s not this one, but the notion of pimping my electro-ride makes me wonder if I could run an extension cord from the bathroom at Short Sands to a parking space.
The car I test drove was the Zap! Xebra, a three-wheel, four-door sedan that seats four and weighs in at 1,800 pounds. The first thing I noticed about the car was how quiet it was. I had no idea the thing was on until I pushed down the accelerator (not “gas pedal”) and it took off. The car has more spunk than I was expecting, and feels pretty solid on the road. I hesitate to call this a glamorized golf cart, with its fully enclosed seating area, classy interior, and faux wood dashboard, but it did rattle a little over bumps. No problem, I thought, and cranked up the little stereo system. Classic rock inspired me put the pedal to the metal and within seconds I had the green machine maxed out at 40.
A couple months ago, I came across an article in The Christian Science Monitor that went into great detail about Britain’s recent revolt against the plastic bag. It chronicled how concerned citizens across the pond have gone as far as encouraging small towns to ban plastic bags and as a result, large retailers have been experimenting with plastic-bag-free days and reusable totes.
Of particular interest to me was a section of the story describing a limited edition reusable cotton bag emblazoned with “I’m Not a Plastic Bag,” designed by London fashion house Anya Hindmarch. The reason it caught my attention was because my Thai sister-in-law had called me a month before, asking that I beg, borrow, or steal one of those very bags for her when they came to the US on July 20. At $10, I didn’t think it was a big deal, but then I found out how impossible they were to get.
It turns out that this bag is a major status symbol, not only in Asia, but around the globe. Sold in limited runs that didn’t come close to meeting their demand, the bags are virtually impossible to buy, unless you’re willing to shell out much higher prices (somewhere between $600-$1000) for originals that are being resold online.
All evidence points to the fact that people want to be seen as green, which is an interesting trend around the world, and not necessarily a bad thing in cases where positive change is the end result. But a trip to Anya Hindmarch’s website made me scratch my head. On the section of the site devoted to the bags, several disclaimers described why bags are so hard to get:
“Due to the unprecedented demand for I’m Not A Plastic Bag in South East Asia and our concerns for our customers safety we will be cancelling [sic] the launches at the following stores: Anya Hindmarch Beijing, On Pedder in Shanghai and On Pedder in Jakarta.”
“Please note all I’m Not A Plastic Bag bags have now sold out in the United States.”
This made me wonder why Hindmarch doesn’t simply make more of the bags (in more earth-friendly ways), allowing more people to use them, thereby reinforcing her mission to raise awareness of the message written on it. And, more importantly, if more people can actually buy and employ the bags everyday, less plastic bags will be produced that will eventually end up in our oceans… right?
3. 
Where do ideas begin? How does one inspiring idea or inspiring individual influence a series of additional ideas or people? I ask the question because I just received a phone call from a friend informing me that 
A couple months ago, I came across