Sustainability

I'm starting a new category of post here in the sustainability section. A lot of the work I do is theory and a some of the work I do imvolves things no one really wants to try out at home (see In apartment home composting). However, I find occasionally trying things out that really anyone can do.

I can't help but feel that a large portion of my generation is suffering from lack of purpose. There seems to be an innate knowledge that 'things aren't good'. Most everyone I know is not happy with the state of the world. These feelings are delivered by an entire regiment on unaddressable woes. We are at war in Iraq. An 8 sq.

So, some people have asked about how the composting is done. Here are some pictures of how I did id. This no doubt isn't the only way.
Before we start, here is the finished deal:
Three drawers for composting, one as a catch basin. I just happened to have plastic Ikea drawers lying around, maybe you have something else that will work as well. Basically, the top drawer is always the 'active' drawer that you put things in. When it is full, move it down and put an empty drawer in the top slot. By the time you fill three drawers, the first will be ready for dumping in the garden (depending on the rate you produce compost).
The top three drawers need a drainage mechanism:
However, since plastic doesn't do the biodegrading part so well, you'll want to be careful to get all the plastic bits shaved out of there:
You can add almost all organic matter, no meat, no dairy. Eggshells, paper towels vegetable scraps, biodegradable packing peanuts, old bread (rip it apart though), apple cores - all work great. And start it off with 5 lbs of potting soil to give the worms some grist for digestion:
Add some worms - red wrigglers are ideal:
Wait.
Get Compost:
Get fruit flies.
Get Fruitfly traps:
Now, if you can do all this outside - do that. This is a system designed for indoors, because I live in Brooklyn and there is no outdoors area that is suitable. I do keep it isolated to a room, where I also have the planters for the garden and the beer brewing setup. So, thats nice anyway.
But yes, its pretty simple, just leveraging how nature works anyway. Closes the loop some.

The home experiment continues. I've been through a few full rotations of the bin, and have gathered in the vicinity of 30lbs of good potting soil after its left my kitchen and gone through the worms.

Some basic observations:

This has been kicking around in my head for quite some time now. It was eating at me for roughly the first 8 months of last year and then I thought through it, and came to my own conclusions, and shelved these concepts, only to be brought out and dusted off during political rants and such.

Once upon a time I was in a discussion with a group of friends who were contending that 'the way things worked' had changed so much, particularly in the past 25-30 years such as to warrant a new set of progressive rules. Non-specific things like corporate power, exploitation of the 'little guy', and various other liberal soapboxes.