For Current and Aspiring Vermicomposters

Weird trivia that might make worm composting sexier:

In those days [1777], most gardeners viewed worms as pests, but their importance had been noticed long before. Cleopatra saw them as sacred because they were important to the fertility of the mud laid down by the Nile, and established a cadre of priests entirely devoted to their wellbeing.

I've been vermicomposting for a year and a half now, off and on (sometimes the bin gets too full, or I need to change over to a new bin and keep procrastinating on doing it). I just gave away a bunch of compost and hope to try some out on my new place's garden this year. Some people have fish tanks. I prefer my worm bin. Not as pretty, but definitely more practical (and cheaper).

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Cities' Industrial Areas: Where We Hide Our Mess

I went for my daily walk in an industrial section today. This was not really what I planned to do, but things didn't work out as planned. Anyway, several points about my walk:

• Cities are really not pedestrian friendly. It's not always obviously where you can walk and where not, and you don't want to end up walking where only cars are supposed to be. Even using Google Earth to look for footpaths doesn't always make things clear before you're out in the real world getting lost. (As an aside, Google Earth is great for tracking distances when you're not in a car. You can use the ruler tool and select path, and the unit of measurement (km or miles, etc), and then you use you mouse to click from point to point on the path you want measured.)
• Industrial areas are society's equivalent to under a teenager's bed or in the closet, where you hide all the mess. I couldn't wait to get out of this area, and so I took the nearest way out and into the adjacent residential. The state of the streets and most of the houses was pitiful. No one should have to live like that, and no area of a city should look and smell as terrible as our industrial areas. There are better ways to do manufacturing and heavy industry. See Waste=Food. The best way to deal with dangerous waste is to design it out of the system.
  
• Just because an area of the city is ugly, smelly, sidewalk free, walk light free and cut off from adjacent neighbourhoods by railroad tracks and freeways, doesn't mean no one's going to walk in it, or try to cross it into the next area. It will be interesting to see how the design of our cities and industrial sections of them changes as the car falls out of favour in the face of high oil prices.
• Nature doesn't discriminate. I saw butterflies and little birds in the midst of all the dust, garbage and grime. (I don't know the name of the particular bird, but they seem to fit perfectly in the metal fences common to such areas.)
  

I only walked just over 5km today, which is less than an hour for me, but it felt much longer. I had hoped to do 7 or 8 km as I've done two other days this week, but after my adventure through that ugly, stinking, dreary, isolated mess, I couldn't get myself to do anything but walk straight home.

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Smarten Up, Society!

Reading an article on CBC about high gas prices, I came across this comment:

The fuel price is actually very low when you consider what you get for it.

You know the price of fuel is too low when: Trucks are a fashion statement; People leave their cars idling outside shops where we all have to inhale that stuff; suburbs are devoid of groceries; ordinary people avoid transit; we leave our homes heated when at work and even on vacation (houses are even designed to never have the heat shut off); horses are driven from place to place (they used to actually be a MODE of transportation!)

It's encouraging to see other people just as baffled as I am.

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