In the near future, humanity will be challenged by the converging trends of energy depletion and climate change. It will be necessary for us to transition into a culture that consumes drastically less, and to shift away from the paradigm of perpetual material growth.  As part of this transition, the means for securing food, water, energy and waste management must be re-localized into people’s home communities. As currently more than 50 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, it will be critical to make our cities more sustainable.

The book Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A Do-It-Ourselves Guide, written by Stacy Pettigrew and myself (South End Press, 2008), is a collection of skills, tools and technologies usable by urban residents wanting to have more local access and control over life's essential resources. Through practical descriptions and wonderfully vibrant illustrations, the book describes how to build sustainable infrastructure using affordable, simple designs that utilize salvaged and recycled materials. In addition, the book promotes radical sustainability, a philosophy that emphasizes the interconnection between ecological and social justice struggles.

Useful ideas for aspiring sustainable city dwellers include:

Make a duckweed pond: Raise duckweed, a tiny, floating protein rich water plant in a kiddy pool. Using only sunlight and nutrients, duckweed can double its mass every other day. The duckweed can then be harvested and used as a food for humans, chickens and fish, or be used as a “green manure” for building soil fertility. 

Raise edible and medical mushrooms on logs: Many urban spaces don't receive adequate sunlight for gardens. Mushrooms only require indirect light and moisture, making them suitable for marginally sunny spaces such as alleys and shady backyards.

Build a floating trash island: Inspired by a natural phenomena, floating trash islands create habitat for plants and microorganisms to assist in purifying contaminated storm water runoff — a major urban problem. They are made buoyant by floating debris, such as bottles and polystyrene, stuffed into a giant life-ring. Water plants are zip-tied onto the island’s surface, and develop an extensive submerged root network that hosts water cleansing critters.

Cook with an old satellite dish: When the parabolic curve of a satellite dish is lined with a mosaic of mirror shards and aimed at the sun, it can focus the sun’s rays onto a pot of water and bring it to a boil in minutes!

Construct a small scale biogas digester: Using a five gallon bucket, organic matter such as plants, chicken manure and dead leaves can be turned into methane gas. The gas then can then be stored and used for cooking and heating. Why pay money for natural gas when you can make it in your back yard?

Clean up contaminated soil with compost tea: Made with worm castings from a vermicompost box, compost tea can be used to help clean up toxic soils. The multitude of hungry microorganisms in the tea can help speed up the degradation of certain pollutants in city soils.
 
All these systems, plus many others, are described in much further detail in Toolbox for Sustainable City Living. (You can find the book at www.radicalsustainability.org.) 

About the authors:  Stacy and I are co-founders of Austin, Texas’ Rhizome Collective, a non-profit urban sustainability project. Toolbox is a culmination of eight years of research and experimentation at Rhizome. In addition, they are the organizers and teachers of R.U.S.T., The Radical Urban Sustainability Training.

1. Always rake with the wind, and rake downhill whenever possible.

2. Share the wealth with your lawn. When the first leaves alight on a still-green lawn, mulch-mow to return the leaves and grass clippings to the soil. In addition to helping your lawn, it's easier to rake turf areas that have been smoothed over by a good mowing.

3. Use your mower to shred leaves to use as mulch or in compost. Set aside whole leaves in a separate pile, and deal with them later when you have more time.

4. Mix leaf species. Leaf-eating microorganisms that get started on thin maple or dogwood leaves will move on to thicker oak leaves as the mixture decomposes.

5. Don’t pick up leaves unless you must. Instead, collect leaves in a tarp or an old sheet, pick up the corners, and carry or drag the bundle to your piles.

6. Match your rake to your leaves, and to your body. At stores, try rakes on for size before you buy. Rakes with metal tines last longer than plastic ones, but plastic tines may be lighter.

7. Minimize how far you move your leaves. Rake them directly onto nearby beds that won’t be worked until spring. Use shredded leaves as mulch beneath foundation shrubs. Maintain leaf piles in different parts of your yard to reduce how far you must drag or carry tarps full of leaves.

8. Once you have your leaves in piles, stomp through them to keep the leaves from blowing away. If you are using a pen or other enclosure, leave it open on one side until you’re through collecting leaves. That way, you can rake or dump right into the pile without lifting your loads over the sides of the bin, and your pile will be accessible for walk-in stomping.

9. Wear gloves to prevent blisters. Cloth gloves are comfy, but any glove that protects your skin from rubbing on the rake handle will suffice.

10. Wear a dust mask when shredding leaves with your mower, especially if you have allergies or are easily irritated by dust.

11. Watch the noise. When you’re not in the mood to mess with your mower, blower, or other noisemaker, give in to the quiet. Rake. 

12. Work a little at a time, and stop when you’ve had enough. Leaf season will last for several weeks, so you have plenty of time to let yourself enjoy the work.

Do you have other tips to help fellow Mother Earth readers this leaf season? Please post them in the Comments section below.

Moving towards a sustainable lifestyle is becoming more of the norm. Folks are using solar clothes dryers (clotheslines), growing vegetables in their backyard and landscaping with native plants. With the upswing in gas prices, we are seeing more bicycles and scooters on city streets and for sale signs in the windows of SUVs. This is a good thing.

But there are still places where clotheslines, tomato plants and native plantings (weeds?) are not OK. According to a recent article “Let’s Handcuff the Property Cops,” published by the Land Institute in Kansas, “Twenty percent of Americans now live in homes subject to rules set by homeowner associations, or HOAs. These private imitation governments have sweeping powers to dictate almost any aspect of a member's property, from the size of the residence down to changes in trim color and the placement of a basketball hoop.”

Many of the HOA rules extend to clotheslines, vegetable gardens and solar panels. So beware: If you are planning a move, check whether the community you’ve chosen has a homeowners association in place and what that might mean to your sustainable living practices.

Daniel Sheridan, 23, found a way to turn children’s energy into electrical power with just a teeter or totter of a board.  The student of Consumer Product Design at Coventry University in the UK invented a see-saw that generates electricity. 

The idea came to Sheridan while volunteering in Kenya at a school. Riding the see-saw should generate enough electricity to light a classroom for an evening after only five to 10 minutes of use.  While played on, it converts the action of the kids into electrical energy and is then transferred, using an underground cable, to a nearby classroom.

Sheridan recently won about $2,000 for the invention at the Coventry University’s Enterprise Festival, and he plans to use the money to start constructing the design with local supplies in Uganda.  Once the product is introduced to the community, they will have the opportunity to help build and install it.  Sheridan does not intend to make a profit from the product; instead, he just wants to help improve the atmosphere for those working or studying at the school where it will be installed.

Sheridan’s design is not the first to put playground equipment to practical use.  The Gaviotas community invented a see-saw as well that provides enough energy to operate a water pump and wind-mill for their eco-village in Colombia.  Another design is the PlayPump water system, which was made to work as a water pump and a merry-go-round for children to use.

More commercial, but just as environmentally friendly, Sony has recently made five different kinetic devices with different types of power sources.  These five devices, including a video camera, digital camera, photo and video viewer, stereo headphones and solar battery can all be powered by cranking, pulling or spinning them. Or when a child is stuck in a place (like an airplane or train) where they cannot move the product, they can use the solar battery to power it.  

By using children to create energy, the environment can look forward to a less damaging way to light up a school, operate a water pump or power a digital camera. And maybe kids can look forward to more recess.

What if someone could come to your door to sell you organic gardening products and offer demonstrations the same way a make-up sales rep could bring a catalogue and a guide to applying mascara? The Happy Gardener is a three-year-old company that does just that. By giving demonstrations and lectures at community events and garden shows as well as private parties, Happy Gardener distributors do more than just push a product: they inform their customers about the benefits of organic gardening.

This month, the Happy Gardener is a part of the Forbes.com Boost Your Business Contest, which will award $100,000 to one deserving business to help it expand.

Mother Earth Living spoke with Annette Pelliccio, founder of the Happy Gardener, about her (pardon the pun) grass-roots approach to sustainable living and organic gardening education.

Q: The direct sales model of your business (like those used by Avon and the Pampered Chef) facilitates conversation and education between distributor and customer. Why is education so important in organic gardening?

A: Most Americans do not realize that the average product used to fertilize their lawn is detrimental to the groundwater, wild life and community around them. The average person still doesn't know about organic alternatives; why would you change and use something that's more Earth-friendly if you didn't know it was out there? Our distributors can offer that information to their customers.

Q: How can people already practicing organic gardening benefit from your company?

A: We supply people with easy and affordable organics. I've been an organic gardener for 15 years and I used to have to do a lot of mixing and measuring myself; our products eliminate that problem. We also offer instruction in birding and composting, it's not just pest control and gardening. In addition, we offer them a way to have a part-time or full-time career opportunity in a career they're already passionate about.

Q: Why is organic gardening important to you personally?

A: I've always had a big vegetable garden, fruit orchard and have grown herbs. When you have children and pets and you love gardening you really start to wonder about the effects of using conventional products on the food that you growing and, in turn, feeding your family.

The Happy Gardener would use their prize money to expand their customer service department, increase sales representative training, and register their products with OMRI (Organic Measures Research Institute) so that the whole product, not just the ingredients, can be certified organic. Click here to vote for Happy Gardener and help it reach the final round of the Forbes competition. Voting ends Aug. 31.