The Age recently had an article on the emerging practice of "guerilla gardening", taking a look at the "Gardening guerillas in our midst". This concept seems to have steadily increased in popularity in recent years (admittedly from a very low base) as the permaculture movement's ideas have been propagated through the community.

Unlike the usual approach taken when trying to grow food in the suburbs - converting spare land on your own property (as discussed by aeldric previously and, more recently, in Jeff Vail's series on A Resilient Suburbia) - guerilla gardening involves cultivating any spare patch of urban land that isn't being used for another purpose, which could provide a substantial addition to the food growing potential of suburbia.

This is a guest post from Jim Dunlap (Wyoming) about his experience as a new farmer in Virginia and is part of our Wed pm/Sat pm TOD: Campfire series, where we will post articles more related to personal, local and social responses to our resource and environmental predicaments.

Like many posters on The Oil Drum (TOD) I find the subject of how we are going to feed ourselves in our future world of constrained energy supplies and climate change fascinating and complex. Partly by design and partly by happenstance I am living a version of the kind of life some believe will become not only the norm but required of large numbers of people in our future world. This post is an attempt to describe some of my experiences growing food on an 11 acre farm during 2008. Earlier TOD discussions, involving such posters as Jason Bradford, Wisdom from Pakistan and others on carrying capacity, minimum food requirements, production possibilities and other aspects of small scale agriculture, led me to think that a description of the effort and results of one farmer, at the small end of the farming spectrum, would be interesting information for many on TOD and might generate meaningful discussion. So here goes.

I have only been growing my own vegetables and preserving them for a few years now. The first thing I thought of was heat canning, and have spent a number of hours getting water to boil. This was not entirely satisfactory to me, however, because it just didn't seem very efficient. Heat intensive processes are inefficient at small scale, such as my kitchen.

So this year I ditched the water canning and decided to try other methods.

This is a guest post by Hank Weiss of the University of Pittsburgh. Hank is an affiliate of Dan Bednarz, and was instrumental in setting up Health After Oil, where this article was previously published.

The U.S. presently spends an estimated 16 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care, compared with 8 to 10 percent in most other major industrialized nations. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) projects that growth in health spending should continue to outpace GDP over the next 10 years [The Commonwealth Fund, January 2007]. But can this really happen in an era of energy and resource limitations? What are the ramifications to health care and sustainability if it cannot?

From an energy perspective, health care buildings account for 11 percent of all commercial energy consumption, using a total of 561 trillion Btu’s of combined site electricity, natural gas, fuel oil, and steam or hot water.[EIA] Health care facilities are the fourth highest consumer of total energy of all building types and have an energy intensity (Btu/square foot) that is the second highest among all commercial building types.[EIA] Many medical products, few of which are designed to be recycled, are petroleum based; including gloves, syringes, IV and dialysis tubing, tablets, gels, ointments, antihistamines, and many antibiotics and antibacterial medications. None of these energy estimates accounts for the huge energy and material costs for the manufacture and transportation of goods, services, personnel and patients that enable these energy intensive facilities to perform their myriad and complex functions.