A few nights ago, Pete and I sat down and reviewed the "Sowing and Growing" event that we had just held at the Waiheke cinema. We talked about the centralised food model versus the local food model and came up with this short video. In it we referred to a website called Ooooby, which you can find at www.ooooby.org and if you visit it you will find a social networking site whose purpose is to connect food growers in your local area,and facilitate the exchange of food, the sharing of knowledge and information, and the offering of an abundance of inspiration, particularly through the expanding library of video.

This is a short 2 min video taken at yesterdays demonstration of how to distill, and then run an engine on, alcohol. The next one (below) shows Gian describing a simple hydrogen/oxygen splitter he uses in an older Suzuki 4X4, which runs on a combination of petrol, hydrogen and oxygen.

It's just 1 minute long, but indicative of how far Transition Towns have come.

Here is an audio file of an interview that Deirdre Kent did in Northland recently. It covers a range of topics from how money is created and the present fractional reserve banking system and helps explain why the present system is now falling down around our ears.

And here is the blog post from John Haines who did the interview, which includes an enlightening video describing the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank.

'I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.'

Thomas Jefferson 1802

Deirdre Kent is a founding member of Living Economies http://www.le.org.nz,  a lifelong social and environmental activist, former city councilor and grandmother. She lives with her husband on an organic fruit and nut small holding in Otaki managed by permaculture principles. She's been my most recent guest on Voices from the North.

I talked with Sion this morning for 45 mins. We spoke via our computers using skype - which even allowed us to talk while seeing each other via small but functional web cameras. while sitting on opposite sides of the world.

Sion was wanting to ask about the community garden project he had visited while on Waiheke a few months ago. Sion was bringing his refined and accurate recording skills and would attend all the meetings of the various food groups on Waiheke, then produce amazing records of our conversation like this one from the Food Hui we had at Piritahi Marae which has since spawned a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Group.

It was hard for him to get his questions in until he told me his laptop battery was getting very low. As he sat in an echo-filled rock-walled library building in an Edinburgh University, I kept quizzing him about his circumstance there in Edinburgh, and asking for pictures of where he lived (the other day he’d mentioned cleaning up dog poo in the downstairs of his tenement building in an email)...

I stumbled across this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8DYF5_J31o) after a friend sent me this url: www.nearbuyme.com - a local-shopping site in Scotland. I had no idea how much The Friends Of the Earth were doing and what they have achieved. If you watch this video here, wait till it's played and see the extra videos that appear across the bottom of the window...

Segment from Geoff Lawton's new DVD on Establishing a Food Forest the Permaculture Way.
Available from www.permaculture.org.au

A video in two parts, about the Awaawaroa Eco Village on Waiheke, by Scott Ewing. It speaks for itself...

If you havent watched this film, here is a short preview...

Greenpeace put this video on their site recently.
Here is the transcript: