What a great thought!

...it's been almost 2 months since our last post, which clearly unacceptable, but our organization is really coming along! we've hit some major milestones this year and are very proud.

In some research today, I came across this great quote:

"the key to sustainability lies in enhancing the resilience of social ecological systems, not in optimizing isolated components of the system. If we examine [sustainability] through a resilience lens, it's clear that we still have a way to go."

-Brian Walker & David Salt


email us any good quotes you might want to share at info@transitionstudio.org or post them in the comments section below!

Love your farmer knowledge!

Hey friends!

we wanted to pass along some interesting facts about farming in the US and VA!

*farms cover nearly 1/3 of the land in Virginia and much of our farmland is covered with hay
*it takes 60 cotton bolls to make a t-shirt or 180 bolls to make a pair of jeans...so you are most likely wearing 240 bolls of cotton right now!
*approximately 540 peanuts are processed to produce a single 12 ounce jar of peanut butter
*cows drink 30 gallons of water and give 6 gallons of milk everyday!
*100 tomatoes will yield four, 14 ounce bottles of ketchup
*chickens can run 9 miles an hour!

THE PRINCE EDWARD CANNERY!!!

who wants to do some community canning next summer?

http://www.co.prince-edward.va.us/cannery_index.html

Excerpt from Wendell Berry... we love farmers at T | S!

"For an index of our loss of contact with the earth we need only look at the condition of the American farmer - who must in our society, as in every society, enact man's dependence on the land, and his responsibility to it. In an age of unparalleled affluence and leisure, the American farmer is harder pressed and harder worked than ever before; his margin of profit is small, his hours are long; his outlays for land and equipment and the expenses of maintenance and operation are growing rapidly greater; he cannot compete with industry for labor; he is being forced more and more to depend on the use of destructive chemicals and on the wasteful methods of haste and anxiety. As a class, farmers are one of the despised minorities. So far as I can see, farming is considered marginal or incidental to the economy of the country, and farmers, when they are thought of at all, are thought of as hicks and yokels, whose lives do not fit into the modem scene. The average American farmer is now an old man whose sons have moved away to the cities. His knowledge, and his intimate connection with the land, are about to be lost. The small independent farmer is going the way of the small independent craftsmen and storekeepers. He is being forced off the land into the cities, his place taken by absentee owners, corporations, and machines. Some would justify all this in the name of efficiency. As I see it, it is an enormous social and economic and cultural blunder. For the small farmers who lived on their farms cared about their land. And given their established connection to their land - which was often hereditary and traditional as well as economic - they could have been encouraged to care for it more competently than they have so far. The corporations and machines that replace them will never be bound to the land by the sense of birthright and continuity, or by the love that enforces care. They will be bound by the rule of efficiency, which takes thought only of the volume of the year's produce, and takes no thought of the slow increment of the life of the land, not measurable in pounds or dollars, which will assure the livelihood and the health of the coming generations."

VOTE FOR US PLEASE!!!

Transition Studio [wowcrowd]

great article on BPA dangers in home canning!

this is something I haven't thought about, it makes sense and from now on we will go BPA free on our lids!

http://www.grist.org/article/2010-07-09-ask-umbra-on-the-dangers-of-bpa-in-canning-lids-and-canned-food

from David Orr's book, Earth in Mind

"year-by-year, the number of people with first hand experience in the land dwindles. Rural populations continue to shift into cities...In the wake of this lose personal and local knowledge, the knowledge on which a country must ultimately stand, has come something hard to define but I think sinister and unsettling."
[pp 10]

The Dangers of Traditional Education...
1 - formal education will cause students to worry about how to make a living before they knew who they are

2 - it will render students narrow technicians who are morally sterile

3 - it will deaden their sense of wonder for the created world

[this is not to blame education alone, but in conjunction with our culture, it is part of a greater decline...]
[pp 24-25]