…Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago…

…Inspired by a design exhibit about the creative, cultural and economic benefits of repairing and recycling, she decided that helping people fix things was a practical way to prevent unnecessary waste….(more)…http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/world/europe/amsterdam-tries-to-change-culture-with-repair-cafes.html?_r=1

Organic agriculture generally comes at a cost of smaller harvests compared with conventional agriculture, but that gap can be narrowed with careful selection of crop type, growing conditions and management techniques, according a new study.

Organic farming has been touted by supporters as a more environmentally sustainable method of farming that’s better for consumers because crops contain fewer man-made chemicals. But without the high-nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides often employed in conventional agriculture, it’s also less efficient.

“The organic-versus-conventional debate is very emotional, very heated, and it’s not really informed sufficiently by scientific evidence,” said Verena Seufert, a geographer at McGill University in Montreal and lead author of the study…(more)…http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-organic-farming-20120426,0,896912.story

The 30-year-long effort of Jadav Payeng, known among local people as ‘Mulai’, to grow the woods, stretching over an area of 550 hectares, has been hailed by the Assam Forest Department as ‘examplary’.

Mulai began work on the forest in 1980 when the social forestry division of Golaghat district launched a scheme of tree plantation on 200 hectares at Aruna Chapori situated at a distance of five KMs from Kokilamukh in Jorhat district…(more)…http://www.asianage.com/india/man-creates-forest-single-handedly-brahmaputra-sand-bar-972

The project stitches together more than 50,000 photos to give viewers a virtual tour of the Rio Negro region. It allows people to float up the Amazon, visit villages, and walk trails through the rainforest all from the comfort of their desk….

For video and street views of the Amazon see:  http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/google-street-view-maps-amazon.html

China recycles, big time (Image: View China Photo/Rex Features)

Don’t throw out that broken toaster: it’s key to our prosperity. Redesigning the economy so that all waste is reused or recycled would be good for business, according to two new reports.

For centuries the global economy has been linear. Companies extract resources from the environment, turn them into products and sell them to consumers – who eventually throw them out. As a result we are burning through Earth’s natural resources and wasting useful materials.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, says Felix Preston of think tank Chatham House in London. Instead, we could have a circular economy in which waste from one product is used in another…(more)…http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21532-nowaste-circular-economy-is-good-business–ask-china.html

One full acre will be devoted to large chestnuts and walnuts in the overstory. There’ll be full-sized fruit trees in the understory, and berry shrubs, climbing vines, herbaceous plants, and vegetables closer to the ground…

…The entire project will be built around the concept of permaculture — an ecological design system, philosophy, and set of ethics and principles used to create perennial, self-sustaining landscapes…(more)…http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2012/02/beacon_hill_will_soon_boast_th.php

Kittel is also planning to build houses in “village” groupings.  ”I believe in the compound concept  which everyone else has done for centuries — where we have a common central house, we have a big kitchen, we don’t have redundant facilities all over.  We take on acre of land and put 10 tiny houses on it.”  There would be areas designed as commons, but with the small individual homes,  ”I can go back to my space and play Beethoven and you can go to yours and play rock and roll.”

He has “37 acres on the side of the highway [where] we’re going to set up several different villages. Like a musicians’ village, an elderly village, a village for our people that are coming down to do seminars to show not only that we can build houses but that we can build villages — sustainable sub-zero carbon footprint villages that are not only off the grid electrically, but that are also off the grid financially.”

Kittel sees his “pure salvage living” as part of the larger movement for more sustainable living, and he also advocates establishing community resource banks and turning to a barter system…( more)…http://www.truth-out.org/brad-kittel-builds-tiny-texas-houses/1330310543

The R.E.I. storefront in Mountain View, California. Yes, R.E.I. is a coop.

Think you know what big business looks like? Think again. According to Charles Gould, Director-General of the International Cooperative Alliance, cooperatives are poised to be the fastest growing business model by 2020.

Values-based, community-supported and member-controlled, modern cooperatives have grown steadily since their inception in the late 1800s. Today, the top 300 cooperatives, or Global 300, generate as much revenue as the world’s ninth largest economy, or the economy of Spain. Meanwhile, new research shows that cooperatives worldwide have three times as many members as traditional businesses have shareholders — and provide 20% more jobs…(more… http://www.shareable.net/blog/co-ops-are-big-business-charles-gould-interview )

…The words “wild” and “farming” may seem at odds. In the last century, with the development of petroleum-based pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, farms were increasingly modeled on industry. “Fencerow to fencerow,” mono-crop farming emphasized high production and minimized the importance of biodiversity. Farmers ripped out vegetation, cut down forests, shot predators, and filled in wetlands and streams. Today, agriculture is a major cause of the habitat loss that puts endangered species at risk.

Practitioners of wild farming, also called conservation-based agriculture, seek to reverse industrial agriculture’s devastating effects on wildlife by adopting farming methods that support nature. They envision a landscape where farms meld into the environment and mimic the natural processes that surround them. If wild farming sounds like organic farming, that’s because both are based on a similar vision: that farms should be managed as natural systems. Most wild farmers employ organic practices, like nontoxic pest management, composting, and crop rotation, all of which encourage biodiversity…(more)…