Window Farm

DIY Window Farm

Window Farms are vertical, hydroponic, modular, low-energy, high-yield edible window gardens built using low-impact or recycled local materials. They can provide fresh vegetables to eat, pretty plants to look at, and yield warmer weather produce during the winter months.

Please Adopt

RESCUE Mickaboo Companion Bird Rescue

Mickaboo is a nonprofit organization located in the San Francisco Bay Area. We rescue companion birds (parrots, parakeets, etc.) who have been neglected, abused, injured, or surrendered to our care.

"Join the flock!?"

Logging Sports

ARTICLE UC Berkeley Has a Logging Sports Team?

Yes, it's true; student loggers chop down about a dozen healthy trees for sport each year, and nobody seems to care. From East Bay Express.

Downsizing

Q&A Downsizing the Prison-Industrial Complex

In California we spend about $50,000 a year per adult; it costs about five times more to keep a youth in 24/7 residential care, and about $75,000 a year to put a youth in a group foster home. Public officials who are trying to reduce huge budget deficits are now asking "what could we buy for a family for $50,000 a year?" If we were to help pay for therapy, counseling, rent — what is called "wrap-around services" — could we get better results for less money?

Nine Billion

EVENT Diversified Farming Systems Roundtable Discussion via The Berkeley Institute of the Environment

The simplest, least sexiest graph ever.

"Feeding 9 Billion with the Challenges of Climate Change: Towards Diversified Ecoagriculture Landscapes"

The challenges for agricultural production over the next few decades will require not marginal changes in response, but fundamental re-thinking of food systems to accommodate large increases in demand in the context of climate change. Adapting and improving crop varieties will be one part of the solution, but re-shaping the agroecosystems and associated markets within which they are grown will be more profound and requires the greater emphasis in research and investment. Mobilizing diversity within agro-ecosystems and across landscapes in highly cost-effective ways that suit both local and global markets will be key. The talk will highlight some of the technical ecological, institutional and policy solutions that are emerging.

Wednesday, May 5th

2:30 – 5:00pm

Sibley Auditorium, Bechtel Engineering Center

Introduction: A.G. Kawamura, Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Sara Scherr, President & CEO of Ecoagriculture Partners

Panelists: Dr. Claire Kremen, Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley;

Dr. Tom Tomich, Director, UC Davis Agricultural Sustainability Institute, Professor of Community Development, Environmental Science & Policy;

Dr. Nathan Sayre, Professor of Environmental and Human Geography, UC Berkeley

TRADE The Exchange

It is basically like a craigslist, but only for the UC Berkeley community, and everything exchanged on the website is free.

Leaf subsides to leaf

POEM Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

- Robert Frost

Digital Nation

MEDIA Frontline: Digital Nation

Within a single generation, digital media and the World Wide Web have transformed virtually every aspect of modern culture, from the way we learn and work to the ways in which we socialize and even conduct war.

"It's not to say that technology is bad -- robots, cell phones, computers, the Web. The much harder work is figuring out what is their place. That turns out to be very complicated. You can't put something in its place unless you really have a set of values that you're working from." - Sherry Turkle, Director of MIT Initiative on Technology and Self