Just a couple days ago I posted about cohousing and today I noticed this story about Manzanita Village in Prescott. They are receiving a matching grant from the Arizona State Land Department to enhance it’s urban forest and to expand it’s networks of information sharing. They are going to achieve this by hosting workshops where they install cisterns to collect rainwater that falls on their common house. They will be using this to water new forest garden catchment basins that they will also be installing at the workshops. On April 26th and 27th Andrew Millison, local permaculture expert, and Prescott College Instructor, and Macrae Nicoll, of High Desert Rain Catchment will lead the workshops at Manzanita Village. For the full story head over to www.readitnews.com.

While skimming the latest headlines this morning I noticed this column in the Arizona Replublic about algae. It was written about ASU Professor Mark Edwards who had just contributed a post to AzSustainably on Tuesday. The republic also published a quote from Edward’s synopsis of his book off this site. So after the initial excitement of seeing AzSustainably.com’s address in the Republic I read the actual article and it was very interesting.

Basically it was about how Algae could help diversify Arizona’s economy by sparking new types of manufacturing here.

While algae won’t replace major sectors, the organisms could help diversify the economy and spark new kinds of manufacturing. Their byproducts, for example, can be used in jet fuel, medicine, makeup, beer and pet food.

A few local companies already are harvesting algae commercially.

“We have a huge competitive advantage here,” said Edwards, a food-marketing expert, who added that Arizona could have a “green gold rush.”
Full Article at azcentral.com

If you’ve been to ASU’s main campus you’ve probably seen all the trees full of fruit and maybe assumed the school was using it in it’s cafeterias around campus. I guess not because I just ran across an article saying that some student groups have begun harvesting the fruit to be used around campus. I think it’s great that they are doing this and I hope it’s something that sticks. It makes sense that you’d use the fruit that growing right here. There is a good variety of trees there, navel, Seville and blood oranges, cumquats, limequats, lemons and pecans which are all organic. Thanks to the student group VegAware for doing all the hard work to make this happen!

Here’s the article about it at eCollege Times

Mark Edwards, PhD, Arizona State University

Burning 100 million tons of our primary food for fuel is unsustainable and wastes non-renewable resources, especially water. Growing massive amounts of corn represents ecological suicide as it drains trillions of gallons of non-replenishable groundwater, spikes food and fuel prices, decimates food exports and threatens millions with starvation from a food cascade.

Biowar I inflicts costs, casualties and catastrophe in a magnitude far greater than a conventional war. Taxpayers are forced to pay $43 B annually to subsidize erosion and pollution of our air and water for a tiny, 2.4%, replacement of foreign oil. America has insufficient disposable cropland, water or energy to waste on a policy that fails its objectives.

Compared with biofuel alternatives:

• Corn requires more water, land, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides

• Severely pollutes air, soils, rivers, lakes and well-water

• Degrades and erodes soils at the rate of 6 tons per acre

• Grows slowly and produces a low energy biomass yield, 3%

Corn ethanol is not sustainable. It consumes too much water, land, fertilizer and energy. The direct and indirect costs of the ethanol industry are neither sustainable nor sensible for farmers, consumers, taxpayers or food support recipients.

Biowar І offers sustainable alternative to corn ethanol, algae which does not compete for food cropland, uses 0.001 as much water and creates an ecologically positive footprint. Algae is over 30 times more productive than corn and can be made into higher value products such as jet fuel and green diesel. The coproducts from algae, proteins and carbohydrates, may have more value for food, medicines, animal feed and low energy input fertilizers than the oils used for making jet fuel. See more about Biowar І at www.biowar1.com .

• Biowar I Summary and FAQ

ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability was profiled on NBC Nightly News last night. Thanks to Danp for sending this story in.