Green Gal

"Every issue that's out there is your opportunity to step up," shared Amigo Bob Cantisano, one of the founders of the EcoFarm Conference, in his welcome address at EcoFarm 2017 on Wednesday evening. I was in the audience as a first-time attendee of EcoFarm, an annual conference celebrating its 37th year this past week at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, across the road from the glorious Pacific Ocean. The Ecological Farming Association that hosts this conference has a mission "to nurture healthy, just, and ecologically sustainable farms, food systems, and communities by bringing people together for education, alliance building, advocacy, and celebration." I am so grateful I had the opportunity to participate in the conference this year! I was able to do so with the help of my good friend David Shaw , who recently started a permaculture business called Santa Cruz Permaculture . He invited me to table with him for his business in the exhibit...

I'm filled to the brim with inspiration this afternoon after a delightful chat over coffee with my friend Cain at a cool little coffee shop in downtown San Jose called Social Policy (part of the Bellano "family of coffee lovers" ). (If you live in SJ, you may have seen Cain cranking down the street on his red cargo bike hauling huge boxes of awesome stuff for Cowgirl Bike Courier !) We discussed an upcoming bike/art event he is planning, a bike-to-farms ride that I'm planning, San Jose bicycle news and issues, Viva Calle SJ promotion, and more. Last evening, I also connected with friends at my house to plan our bike-to-farms ride. We had a potluck feast of homemade, vegetarian yumminess, and then we identified next steps for turning our vision into a reality. And the night before last, I attended a bike coalition meeting where I saw plans for putting bidirectional contraflow lanes around the SJSU campus and heard the good news that the Willow Glen Road Diet has overa...

Maps fascinate me. Anyone who's ever used a map knows that it's basic function is to show us the geographical and spatial relationships between physical places, which provides us with useful knowledge for getting from one place to another. In today's modern world of smartphones and computers, most people interact with maps in a very different way than people have for millennia. We can type in or tell Siri our destination and starting point and then be told--without even looking at the map ourselves--how to utilize the streetscape of our world to get to our destination in the most direct route. This is useful, sure, but we miss something when we let Siri tell us the way, and that something is the very thing about maps that fascinates me most. When we pull out a paper map or zoom out on Google Maps to view more than just where the GPS reminds us we are at that moment, we can learn so much about a place through its spatial organization. Culture, history, natural features, po...

At 11 AM on Saturday, September 19, two of my friends and I set out on an adventure to visit some of the urban farms, chicken coops, and gardens of San Jose through the self-guided Silicon Valley Tour de Coop , an annual event organized by Slow Food South Bay in which owners of chicken coops, gardens, and farms submit their homes or farms for entry into the tour. The organizers compile them all together with photos and descriptions and post them on a website for those who have registered for the free event. Participants select which coops they want to visit, which are scattered throughout the entire Silicon Valley area. I had gone through the coops in San Jose and selected my own route, but the organizers also provided possible routes. Our trusty steeds were our bicycles, and our route was written out on index cards that I had prepared that morning since I don't have a smart phone. Throughout the day, we encountered tomatoes, chickens, eggplants, compost piles, and even ducks an...