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May 2013

Nature and Survival Shows on US TV 2014

There’s nothing quite like the great outdoors. However, with the hustle and bustle of daily life it can be difficult to get out there are truly appreciate all nature has to offer, if you want to share that experience with your children. But there are educational programs on TV that are a great and exciting substitute. Here are three of the best nature and survival shows.

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People

Off-Grid Street-lamp featured in NY Daily News

NY Daily News features BALDEV DUGGAL who came to New York in 1957 from India with $200 and no ticket home and has built up a multi-million dollar eco-light business.

Now he’s poised to change the world. Duggal, who first made a name for himself when he founded a photo studio in the early 1960s that later became one of the largest production houses in the country, now controls 100,000 square feet in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, including a huge, eco-friendly building that was once an asbestos-filled abandoned monstrosity.

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Remote UK farmhouses

Rather than standing out from the landscape, Three Glens is almost invisible from across the valley. Its massive stone walls link to a dry stone wall that seems to flow right through the building; on another flank the oak cladding merges with a small stand of fir and birch beside it.

The owners, Neil and Mary Gourlay, wanted a farmhouse that “belonged” to the land it stands in. Stones for the walls have been collected from the fields, the oak is from wind-felled trees on the farm and the wool insulation is from the Gourlays’ own flock of blackface sheep. Three Glens is one of a new breed of “eco-farmhouse”, costing its occupants nothing to run, an important consideration when upland farming has become such a marginal occupation.

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Community

Kosher Certification Program Bans All GMO Ingredients

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As always, I’m on the lookout for non-GMO foods, when I read this article I jumped for joy, finally a mainstream (at least as far as I’m concerned) food industry is going non-GMO, I am thrilled beyond words! Here is what I found on this:

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Energy

Tesla supercharger network

elon-muskHelp may be at hand for off-gridders who want to see an alternative to the power grid. It is provided by Elon Musk, boss of Tesla, who is no fan of off-grid living as far as we are aware, but his needs happen to coincide with those who live outside the power Utility networks.

“Tesla needed to solve the problem of long-distance travel and we can’t wait for others to agree with our strategy,” says Musk. “If we wait for some sort of consensus, it’s going to take too long. We just need to get going and other manufacturers can either copy us or join us.”

Musk, founder of PayPal, and owner of SpaceX, isn’t a guy to wait around and hope technology adapts to his product. No, Musk would rather adapt and invent technology to support his product.

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Energy

Australian off-grid movement gets a new leader

Tosh Szatow has been campaigning for years in Australia to build systems that can scale and make sustainable living possible.

Tosh recently joined the Cape Paterson Eco-village, near Phillip Island in Victoria, attracted by the holistic approach to sustainability adopted by developers Brendan Condon and Mike O’Mullane.

He said the project aimed to find ways to make clean energy more affordable than the alternative and his hope was that it would “catalyse innovation across the property sector.”

Key features will include large scale revegetation of natural habitat, re-establishing wetlands, new walking and cycling tracks, high performance housing, on site power generation, electric vehicles, community gardens and community workspaces. “Somewhere amongst the site will be 220 residential lots.”

Tosh’s recent report by the “Department of Energy Transition, Efficiency and Enoughness” shows a dramatic shift to localised, renewable energy production, made possible by radical improvements in efficiency. One in every three Australian households supplies its own electricity – whether individually, in clusters or small communities.

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Community

Eggs Benedict on a mountain

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I read just the other day about some study “they” did that says people who take pictures of their food and post the pictures on social media MAY have a mental problem… well I am about to prove that I MAY have this problem, dinner tonight was special, something I haven’t made since we moved off-grid over 5 years ago now. Eggs Benedict. I used to make this at least once a month. I wondered if the altitude might be a problem, it sometimes works against me, and sometimes a dish does not work out at all.

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Urban

Sydney discovers off-grid

The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia has been telling its readers about the joys of living off the grid.

Life couldn’t be more different for Remy Sica now that her family has moved to the country.

In Sydney, the teenager would catch the train to and from school, and not arrive home until 5pm. In Armidale, her private girls’ school is 15 minutes from her family’s new farm, and Remy gets to ride her horse every afternoon instead of sitting on a packed train.

“I love riding horses, it’s fantastic,” says Remy, who now has her own 16-year-old warmblood named Lady, which she keeps on the family’s 40-hectare farm.

The Sicas moved to Armidale this year. Dad Remo, a school teacher, says his 14-year-old daughter was a big motivation for the tree change.

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Mobile

Satphone for under $500

SPOTSatellite telephones were the stuff of off-gridders’ fantasies – until now. The new SPOT Global Phone is a portable sat phone that will retail for $499 (solar chargers not included). And it handles data at claimed speeds that are relatively fast, compared to older models.

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Forbes lists off the grid mansions

An advertising feature on Forbes web site lists some $2m off-grid homes

The blurb says it “combed the Multiple Listing Services to find available homes touting self-sustainable energy options capable of going off the grid. “

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Community

Just say NO to GMO

no-gmo Little by little I have been actively working on removing GMO foods from my pantry, to make it more painless I focus on one food or one food group at a time.

I have always been an avid label reader, when my (now grown) son was a child, he had been diagnosed with ADHD, something that is unfortunately all too common, especially in boys. One of the things we did was to modify his diet by removing everything, and I do mean everything that was any sort of sugar, that meant every ingredient that ended in “ose”, the only exception to that was lactose, fortunately that didn’t seem to bother him. Some of the items removed from his diet was sucrose (table sugar), glucose, sucrose, dextrose, fructose, the hardest one was dextrose, that can even be found in table salt! As long as we kept his diet going, he behaved so much better, fortunately I was a prolific and adventurous cook, I had no problems making anything he wanted or needed, my son and the rest of us ate quite well. It’s my son’s birthday today, happy birthday Josh!

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Community

Scorpion season

scorpion2In a recent article, I talked about all the critters that poke, stick, sting and bite, one of those critters we deal with out here are the scorpions, and it’s the beginning of scorpion season now. A few years back, we had a rash of them inside the sky castle, we were killing one and two a night, every night. They become active after dark, coming out to hunt other insects, mostly crickets and such. I wouldn’t mind except for their nasty sting. When we had that bad rash of them, I had been sitting in front of my laptop one evening, it was warm, I was wearing shorts, I felt something on my leg next to my knee, I thought it was a fly and absentmindedly brushed my leg with my hand, that was the first time (and hopefully last time) I got hit by a scorpion, I have to say, it HURTS!

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