http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kgFLvPnY_g&feature=relmfu

This information came in around the year 2000...not here since 26,000 years ago when the last Star Activation Cycle occurred.

Amazing stuff!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ-ZaU6FHNw

Earth's history, millions of years ago to the present. Books by Ashyana…

Although I am still writing my blog I have moved it to my own site, I love transitionpgh and they have been great to me but it is time to move on...

My new website is...

http://chriscondello.wordpress.com/ - Gardening as Religion

 I may still copy some posts over to this site... Not sure yet... Maybe someone else will blog here...

 Thank you for reading for the past year and keep doing the good things you guys are…

In an effort to revitalize and grow TransitionPGH’s impact (because the news on climate change continues to look Not Good), we’d like to know more about you, our community. Primarily, we’d like to know what neighborhoods you spend time in, and whether you’d be interested in helping out as a volunteer (we have lots of things we’d like to do). We’ve got a quick survey to help us with this, and filling it out would be tremendously helpful. Thanks!…

On Tuesday August 7th we had our first Neighborhood Walks event in Greenfield, a neighborhood on the southern tip of Pittsburgh’s East End. The goals were to give people (hopefully neighbors, but we weren’t restrictive) a chance to meet, to walk around and see the neighborhood from a slower and different point of view, and collect ideas for a vision for the neighborhood. …

http://blogs.sites.post-gazette.com/index.php/news/city-walkabout/34611-nursery-coming-of-age?utm_source=July+2012+News&utm_campaign=july+201red 2+news&utm_medium=email

Since the 1990s, climatologists like Jane Long and Julio Friedman have advocated cooling the Earth through solar radiation management (SRM), which proposes injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The sulfur clouds would block sunlight, imitating the cooling effects of volcanos. Advocates suggest that…

The new Transition Network movie has been out for a while now, and I’ve gotten a chance to see it and show it a few times. Whenever I show IT 2.0, I love to localize it at the end, which goes as follows:

- The Hill District has a time bank/community owned business, the Ujamaa Collective

- The East End Brewing Company did a community loan program (0% interest, mostly paid back in beer) to finance their move to a…

On Saturday, July 7th, we had a steering meeting to plan out what TransitionPGH (T.PGH) should do, in the context of both the history of similar organizations and the plethora of groups in Pgh. We had eight people come and add to the discussion, with three major outcomes:

1. A series of goals, focused around outreach, education, and training, but also with the key intention of T.PGH providing an overarching vision to projects and groups that we work with, and a connection to larger…

So, in case you don’t know (because we didn’t really announce it), I’m nominally the Education Director for TransitionPGH, at least for the next 6 months to a year. What does this mean? It means I’m in charge of putting together events like movie screenings, and for connecting ‘people who want to know things with people who already know them’. 

It also means that I can pursue the idea of reskilling events (something I’m super excited about) - learning skills that our grandparents knew…

So TransitionPGH currently works with three communities: Larimer, Monroeville, and Sewickley. We’d like to engage folks in other communities too, and I know that many of the folks who are members of this site live in many places. So this is what I currently would like:

Stand up and be counted! If you live somewhere else and would be happy to help with a localized event - meaning saying ‘I live in XX and I work with Transition and I think it’s a useful approach for our neighborhood’ or…

(Initially posted on PittEnvironmental with a slightly more collegiate focus)

Stemming out of a long, excited discussion of the state of affairs in infrastructure and government, we got to that ephemeral topic of why people do/don’t vote, and the question of ‘How are people supposed to be knowledgable about these issues without investing…

Been doing a lot of thinking about how to structure organizations such that stuff gets done. 

Bioneers and the All-Volunteer Vs. One-Paid-Position Choice [They…

(Some background: I’m going to visit at least two cities this summer for various events that have Transition initiatives, and I’m going to make an effort to say hi to them while I’m in the area. Currently on the list are Reno, NV, and the Lehigh Valley.) 

I like meeting people, for all that I am not very good at doing the initial introduction - I never know quite what to say, and I’m pretty poor at small talk. I’d rather jump straight to intense discussion of problems and…

[I walked in in the middle of it, thinking that I was in the room for the Economic Dev./Jobs group—they were meeting for the first time at the ECCO Center, actually. Poor dumb me. They're in the middle of their meeting when I get there, but I get a detailed & interesting look at what the planning process for really-developed Transition activities look like.]

Karriem: 2 hr meetings once a month seems reasonable

Andrea: …1hr is kinda pushing it

Tracy: Respecting…

[Here Fred gave us a bit more context and knowledge about how Transition Larimer could function in the midst of the other stuff going on in Larimer--he seems to see it being a more grassroots and education-oriented structure in the community. Afterwards we established plans for the Awareness Raising Group--namely, to fold ourselves into what One Voice, the Larimer Consensus Group's mouthpiece, was doing already, and offer our help to…

[Left and top-left we've got some pictures from the gathering--above is an architectural concept for what Larimer could look like in the…

[More rough notes, just to give a sense of what goes on at these meetings:]

Barton Kirk's Talk:

• Larimer Vision Plan

  • He's impressed

    • liking that they're planning with these practical things in…

At some point, I stopped talking about climate change as a major focus. It became an occasionally-stated problem which provided motivation for tackling many many things, but my focus turned to more immediately tangible items like peak oil, resource depletion, water, and food. Like President Obama, whether because of controversy or because other things were more pressing, it slipped from the center of my sustainability vocabulary. In the …

3.4.12

Monthly To Do's

[Rough notes from Pittsburgh Garden Experiment discussion on to-do's for year. Helpful to a beginner like me--in-depth tips on particular plants and gardening strategies, too. More experienced gardeners may have found it less helpful.] 

Monthly To Do's

• January

  • Seed catalogs

    • - organic

    • you get what you pay…

2/19/12

Solar Salon (and Sing-a-long!)

[From Maren Cooke's “Solar Salon” at her place: now a monthly event. People coming around to see her solar setup (and getting it for themselves, potentially) + rooftop garden (very extensive, very awesome) and hAbout buying Solar in Pittsburgh—many good, very practical information sets on getting solar individually and in entire communities—creative financing, block buying. All below:]

Joani:…