Terra Nova Ecological Landscaping blog

An exciting new workshop series in collaboration with Jon Young

Designing a regenerative culture depends on a harmonious relationship between nature and people, in which observation and thoughtful interaction provide the knowledge and inspiration necessary to being a resilient community. In this program we take the time to listen to the birds, follow the stories of the animals through their tracks and sign, use our hands to grow our food, learn about and practice the art of peacemaking in our interactions throughout and much, much more. Through the collaboration of theGetting Nature Connected program and the 4 Seasons Permaculture Design course, our intention is to provide participants with tools and experience to begin living in a mutually enhancing relationship with the Earth.

This two-part series is presented in Santa Cruz and takes place one weekend a month.
Each weekend includes:

Friday evening and Saturday: Getting Nature Connected, with Jon Young and staff
Sunday: Four Seasons Permaculture Design Certification course, with Lydia Neilsen and the RDI staff

You can register for one or both parts of the series. To register for Getting Nature Connected click here, or go towww.jonyoung.org. Register for the Four Seasons Permaculture Design course below.

Youth programs are available throughout the weekend! Click here for the First Child in the Woods program.

Ken gives an introduction to Permaculture Design at the Food Bin Garden.

Good turn out, well done, Ken!

The first post on this blog was about my ride to the Ecological Farming Conference three years ago. This year, January 20 – 23, 2010 was my tenth year riding by bicycle from Santa Cruz to the Asilomar conference grounds in Pacific Grove. Before the Ecological Farming Conference this year we put on a pre-conference on Wednesday January 20th called Ecological Landscaping Now! I was honored to be the M.C. for this day long conference. Below are my opening remarks and some photos from my ride and the conferences.

We declare the age of : landscapes designed and installed with a cookie cutter approach without regard to, place, resource conservation and the welfare of a living planet OVER ! With this conference and the work that the Ecological Landscaping Association and like minded organizations and businesses has done over the past twenty years or so. We herald in the age of : Landscapes designed and installed informed by the fierce urgency of climate change and peak oil, of: landscapes maintained with a deep respect for people, place and the planet. With eyes made wide and bright by the science of Permaculture we herald in this age of multiple bottom lines, people, planet, profit resilient power and promise.

Register online here

Click here to Download Conference Registration Form to mail or fax

Recently there has been a large movement towards installing synthetic turf. This new generation of Astro Turf often called ‘eco turf’’, is being touted as the newest in green landscaping. To be sure, there is an impressive list of ecological concerns that this turf addresses including the elimination of the need to mow, water, install irrigation, control weeds, fertilize or haul away grass clippings.

The latest synthetic turf is even made from recycled plastic and is recyclable at the end of its life. It is true that you can play on it in the rain and it won’t get muddy and it is wheel chair accessible. That looks like we have solved a bunch of issues all with one product, so what’s not to like?

Stepford Lawns =  pseudo green product

Remember the part in the movie, The Stepford Wives where one of the Stepford wives gets stabbed and it messes with her wiring and she starts repeating, “I thought we were friends, I thought we were friends” ? That’s what I imagine synthetic turf is saying when I stab it with my accusations of being a pseudo green product. Like my friend Owen Dell would say, it’s kind of like organic heroin, organic or not it is still fundamentally a bad idea.

I’ll start with the deceptively simple argument that my primary distrust of synthetic turf is based on the fact that it is not alive. It does not breathe and therefore it offers no oxygen as a byproduct. On a hot day plastic turf smells like, well, plastic.

I have ridden my bicycle past synthetic playing fields on a warm day and the whole neighborhood reeks of melting off-gassing plastic. Not an enjoyable smell. It certainly is not aromatherapy. Again because the stuff is not living and breathing, the cooling effect is absent and thus the phenomenon known as the heat island effect is increased. The ‘Heat island’ refers to urban air and surface temperatures that are higher than those of nearby rural areas.

The images below comparing air, water, bermudagrass, sand, asphalt, and synthetic turf surface temperatures illustrate how hot a synthetic field can reach during a warm day.

Guinea Kids

Synthetic turf often includes crumbled automobile tires to mimic the look and feel of soil. Cool, a new way to recycle tires? The problem is that this soil is dead and, in addition, during rain it leaches chemicals such as cadmium. This leachate is considered toxic runoff. Where does it go? Straight into our rivers, creeks and oceans. Our kids are now expected to play on a low level toxic surface. During strenuous activities they breathe in these toxic off gasses. Because plastic is not an inert substance, it both leaches and off-gasses pieces of itself. Plastics are known to contain xenoestrogens (zeno estrogens) that are endocrine disruptors. Exposure to xenoestrogens, which are found in pesticides, plastics and other industrial chemicals has been linked to breast and ovarian cancers in women and to decreased testosterone levels and prostate cancer in men. The damaging effects have been found in birds, fish, reptiles, rodents and humans. Exposure to even small amounts of environmental endocrine disruptors concern scientists because hormones such as estrogen act in the body at very low levels measured in parts per billion. This endocrine disruptor, xenoestrogen, can wreak havoc with the puberty cycle in the human body. With synthetic turf, there is direct and close contact with the lungs and skin of the growing bodies of children. This would not seem to me to be a great combination. When will we know if there is a detrimental effect on human health from synthetic turf? Unfortunately the jury is out and won’t report back for years to come. Just call our kids guinea kids.

Soil Food Web Deprived of Oxygen

Synthetic turf lawns are one more non-porous surface that disallows rain to soak into the soil. This causes some serious drainage problems. Because of the toxic runoff and drainage issues, this is a product that is not healthy for the watershed.  I interviewed a worm regarding this product and it was none too happy about it to say the least. The soil food web, the vast ‘web’ of life in the soil beneath our feet is under extreme duress under synthetic turf, primarily because this soil is deprived of oxygen. No oxygen, no life. Much of the current product being installed today in playing fields is made from virgin plastic, a petroleum product that adds to global warming in its manufacture.

Our Children’s Trust

Our children trust that we are providing them with a safe place to play. Our challenge is to live up to that trust amidst all of the marketing hoopla about synthetic turf. It is easy to be fooled by the alluring language of this supposed ‘green’ product.

Ken Foster

I found a web site whose aim is the complete elimination of leaf blowers from California, and Nation-wide if possible.

We at Terra Nova support a leaf blower ban. Below we have reproduced some of the “high-lights“ of a ninety-two-page manifesto found on the cleanair.trilithon website. You can go here to download this manifesto. The following is from the Cleanair.trilithon website.

. . . no person shall discharge from any source whatsoever such quantities of air contaminants or other material which cause injury, detriment, nuisance, or annoyance to any considerable number of persons or to the public, or which endanger the comfort, repose, health, or safety of any such persons or the public, or which cause, or have a natural tendency to cause, injury or damage to business or property

California State Health and Safety Code Section 41700

There are over three million leaf blowers in California. The majority are gasoline-powered leaf blowers. If growth trends continue, soon there will be over six million leaf blowers in California, at which time, air pollution, water pollution, blown dust, and noise, will be twice as bad as today.

Details (illustrated with trend charts and other data) of the daily dose of pollution and noise visited upon residents of California by over three million leaf blowers are published in a ninety-two-page (including contents and index) manifesto that can be downloaded from this web site.

Manifesto updated 2007 December 13.

The first recipient of this manifesto is Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is determined to enact sweeping legislation to reduce or eliminate emissions and pollution from California.

You can help in this campaign:

• Contact the Governor’s Office to add your voice to support elimination of polluting noise bazookas.
• Tell your friends and ask them to add their support

Visit the page linked above to get in touch with the office of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and voice your support for eliminating three million polluting noise bazookas from California.

Here are “high-lights“ of the manifesto that describes the environmental destruction spewed into California cities and towns every day of the year by over three million polluting noise bazookas.

Every day, those gasoline-powered leaf blowers spew over one-and-a-half million gallons of raw unburned two-stroke fuel into your California air at two hundred miles per hour, or over five-hundred-and-forty million gallons per year.

Since the beginning of the gasoline-powered leaf blower and noise-making era in California, those gasoline-powered leaf blowers have spewed eight billion gallons of raw unburned fuel into your environment.

Every day, gasoline-powered leaf blowers spew over forty-eight thousand tons of Carbon Dioxide into California air at two hundred miles per hour, or over eighteen million tons per year , contributing to global warming.

Every dry day, leaf blowers boost over ninety thousand tons of dust into your California air at two hundred miles per hour, creating potential health hazards, for over eighteen million tons of dust per year.
That boosted dust potentially contributes to the huge increases in asthma, allergies, and respiratory ailments over the past thirty years.

Let’s go from this . . .

To this  . . .

Terra Nova owner Ken Foster and sustainable landscape guru Owen Dell meet up to read the poetry of Kenneth Patchen on KUSP Public Radio. Beyond the common passion for sustainable landscaping Foster and Dell discover a common interest in Kenneth Patchen’s poetry.

You’ll find the Kenneth Patchen show at the KUSP radio website on the May 25th post there.

Here’s the link . . .  http://www.kusp.org/shows/poetry.html

ENJOY !

Here’s one of Patchen’s art poems, very apropos to sustainable landscaping.

Ken Foster, the owner of Terra Nova drops some names.

Here I am with permaculture  teacher and author Toby Hemenway and Larry Santoyo of EarthFlow Design Works. The second edition of Toby’s book, Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture has just been published. It is well worth reading.

Just out! The revised, expanded, all-color Second Edition!
Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to
Home-Scale Permaculture

by Toby Hemenway

Chelsea Green, 2009.

“The world didn’t come with an operating manual, so it’s a good thing that some wise people have from time to time written them. Gaia’s Garden is one of the more important, a book that will be absolutely necessary in the world ahead.”

—Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy and Hope, Human and Wild