Page 46 RAIN Spring 1986 limit to which knowledge and awareness of edge effects can improve a design. Study of edges in nature will improve your understanding and ability to use this principle. 6. Encourage diversity. Diversity here is intended to be diversity of connections between things, and not just a bunch of different plants and animals and structures assembled. A garden with an assortment of different plants randomly arranged will not be nearly as productive as one in which the plants are arranged as co-productive companions. Reciprocity 7. Everything works both ways. If the bank gives you 30 years to pay for your home, you give the bank 30 years of your life in indentured servitude. If energy can come in a window, it can fly out a window. If it takes a lot of heat and time to warm a mass, it will give heat for a long time. Death of the individual is necessary for life to adapt to changes on earth and thereby survive. What goes up must come down. Got it? 8. Love is the harmony between giving and receiving. This is the universal law of gifts. To survive and be well and joyous, we must transform and give away all gifts which come to us. This is how all species in an ecosystem co-exist. I accept the gift of oxygen from the trees and other plants and return it as carbon dioxide. We violate this principle when we accept food from the earth and do not return our urine and feces, but instead use it to contaminate water. To return a gift without transforming it according to your nature is to reject it. It is an affront to the love of the universe, therefore, to waste food or water or our personal power and abilities. I have now come full circle, for I Intend, indeed, to talk in circles. For by this process of examining nature, I have discovered (or rather rediscovered for the n-billionth time in human history) that to love the earth, which is necessary for my being to fulfill its nature and continue its kind, is a special kind of responsibility. It is the responsibility to respectfully and reverently accept all gifts offered to me and to use them such that they are transformed by my nature into other gifts returned to other parts of creation. Any other manner of transformation is perversion. At the same time, I find myself also writing in another circle, for an understanding of the love principle brings us back to my first principle of nature, awareness. A genuine reverence for the gifts offered by nature encourages us to sharpen our awareness of abundance. It is by being aware of abundance and accepting the gifts that are offered that we avoid continuance of the plunder that has deforested our planet, drained and contaminated its waters, fouled its air and thrown its climates into disarray. A system which thinks in terms of creating scarcity and destroying genuine abundance, of “cornering the market,” holding monopolies, manipulating "supply and demand," is not merely an enemy of people. It is an enemy of life itself and the antithesis of the love which binds the living universe together. To me, the best way to respond to such a system is to withdraw my energy from it insofar as possible (one step at a time). My work, and the work of many thousands of people worldwide, is devoted to healing the Earth and rejoicing in her abundance and love, o O ACCESS: Recycling Recycling. For many otherwise enlightened people, this only conjures up images of newspaper drives and aluminum cans. This is now changing. Recycling is beginning to gain the acceptance of public officials as a solution to their garbage disposal problems. Growing awareness of the environmental problems caused by landfills and incinerators has led people to rethink the way garbage is generated and disposed of. The institutions that have led to skyrocketing per-capita waste generation are beginning to be challenged. Waste reduction and recycling are finally being taken seriously. Curbside recycling programs that were previously considered uneconomical are now being seen in terms of "avoided cost," that is, every ton of material recycled saves the cost of collecting and disposing of one ton of “garbage." Seen in this light, many recycling options are now being investigated as means to help reduce the solid waste problems that many local governments are facing today. Multi-material curbside recycling collection programs that mirror the convenience and regularity of garbage collection are springing up all over the country. Another trend has been an emphasis on market development for materials that have traditionally been problems to dispose of. Great strides have been made in tire and plastics recycling, as well as expanding previously lethargic used motor oil collection programs. Addressing this timely issue, the Institute of Local Self Reliance has recently issued several documents dealing with various facets of alternative solid waste (garbage) management. —Jeff Brown Jeff Brown is coordinator of Bellingham Community Recycling in Washington state. A Practical Alternative Solid Waste Management Program for the City of Philadelphia, 1985, inquire for price from: David Cohen, City Council City Hall, Room 588 Philadelphia, PA 19107 Provides an excellent, easily read overview of the problems of various waste disposal technologies, and the potential of recycling. Many of the suggestions presented are directly applicable to other cities. The report also challenges some of the claims made by the large engineering and construction firms that are heavily pushing incinerators as a solution to the growing garbage disposal problem. These incinerators are often the largest capital projects local governments have undertaken, and several of those built have fallen short of their expectations.
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