LifeCycling
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      • Imbolc 2018
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      • Living Off the Land
      • If We Could Just Get Rid of That 'Thing'
      • Follow the Resources
      • Can Capitalism and Socialism Unite for Our Future
      • An Introspective Look at Physical Education
      • Hitchhiking - The Wave of the Future?
      • Kinetic and Potential Energy and Living a Low Cost Lifestyle
      • A Change of Pace
      • Risky Business
      • Exponential Growth: A Blessing or Downfall
  • Traveling by Bicycle or Backpacking
    • Part 1 - The Great Allegheny Passage
    • Part 2 - The C and O Canal
    • Bike Trip Across the Southern Tier >
      • Chapter 1 - California
      • Chapter 2 - Arizona
      • Chapter 3 New Mexico
      • Chapter 4 - Texas-El Paso to Del Rio
      • Chapter 5 Texas-Del Rio to Austin
      • Chapter 6 Texas - Austin to Louisiana
      • Chapter 7 - Louisiana
      • Chapter 8 Mississippi and Alabama
      • Chapter 9 Florida
      • Chapter 10 The Ride Home
      • Our Nashville to New Orleans Trip: Part 1
      • Our Nashville to New Orleans Trip: Part 2
    • Traveling with Backpacks in Ireland and Scotland >
      • Irish Wedding
      • Our Travels In Ireland
      • Moving on to Scotland
      • The Isle of Eigg
      • Highlands and Northeast Scotland
      • Catterline, the Last Leg of Our Trip
    • Hitch Biking
  • Applying Sustainability
    • The True Foundation of Building >
      • The History of the Yurt >
        • Chapter 1
        • Chapter 2
        • Chapter 3
        • Chapter 4
        • Chapter 5
        • Chapter 6
        • Chapter 7
        • Chapter 8
        • A Visit to Our House
    • Education >
      • Let Simple Machines Do The Work
      • Work, Play and Carbon Sequestering
      • Eighth Graders Stack Functions While Building a Stone Wall
      • Footwear, the Foundation of Our Children's Future
      • Movement Education Part 1
      • Movement Education Part 2
    • Education Part 2 >
      • Waldorf School Eighth Grade of 2014 - Building a Hot Water Solar Panel
      • Volunteers for Peace, Part 1 - Hand Hewing and Building a Foundation
      • Volunteers for Peace, Part 2 - Timber-framing and Plastering with Clay
      • Building A Passive Refrigerator
    • Education Part 3 >
      • The Educational Divide
      • Changing the World Through Observation
      • Best of Both Worlds
      • Why Are They Playing With Strings? Shouldn't They Be Working On Mathematics?
    • Passive Water System
    • Holistic Gardening and Landscaping
    • Humanure and Urine >
      • Urine As A Fertilizer
      • Is Composting Human Waste Possible?
  • Principles of Sustainability
    • Paradigm Shift >
      • The Forward Progress of Technology?
      • Moving Towards a New Paradigm?
      • Immovable Belief
      • The Future or Not the Future?
      • Paradigm, Past, Present and Future
      • From Parasitism to Mututalism
      • Old Ideas, New Intentions
      • Freedom to Choose
      • Law of Diminishing Returns
    • Paradigm Shift Part 2 >
      • Intro to Throughput
      • Throughput: An Illustration
      • Argument for a Low Throughput Society
      • Throughput in Action
      • The Culture of Permaculture
      • Cliff Notes on Sustainability
    • Philosophy >
      • Are We Free?
      • Lucifer and Ahriman's Tug of War
      • The Age of the Will
      • Thinking, Feeling, and Willing - A Real Balancing Act
      • The Age of the Consciousness Soul
      • The Paradigm-Etheric Connection
    • Understanding Exponential Growth
    • Environmental Challenges >
      • Environmental Effects of the Clothing Industry
    • Economy >
      • Economy - Part 1
      • Economy - Part 2
      • Economy - Part 3
      • Economy - Part 4
    • Photos & Videos
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Eighth Graders Stack Functions While Building a Stone Wall

             The eighth graders from Orchard Valley Waldorf School came to our homestead to help build a stone retaining wall.  The time they spent here at Lifecycling was full and productive.  The morning started out with Bothmer exercises to get the body moving before heading indoors to explore the background to sustainability (carbon sequestration, throughput, etc.) along with some general physics principles such as momentum, inertia, potential energy, and kinetic energy.  
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                                         Moving first thing in the morning stretches the muscles, gets the blood flowing and stimulates brain activity.

​          Dirt, from the ground where the stone wall was to be built, was shoveled into a wheel barrow and then maneuvered down a short hill, then up a small hill, where it was dumped on top of a future hoogle ( refer to Holistic Gardening and Landscaping).  The physics lessons we explored at the beginning of the day related to the picking, shoveling and moving of the dirt. In other words, actually using the physics principles students learned in the classroom made moving dirt interesting, challenging and fun!  Stones of all sizes were scattered around our homestead and these were hauled to the building site.  Again, it was the principles of physics which were used in the hauling of the stones and moving them into position.  Slowly the wall began to take shape.

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                                                                                                                             Applied physics in action.


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                         Moving the heavy rocks with a wagon and also using chains and a comelong and then fitting them into the wall like a puzzle.
           

    At the end of each day we always had time for a game, usually a form of Ultimate Frisbee.  This was the first time a group played on the new field we had created! When we first moved to this piece of land we thought that since this area was wet it looked like a great pond site.  We dug several holes to see if they would fill with water but by July the whole area was dry so we decided it would make a better playing field. Additionally, several trees had fallen from a big snow storm so those were cut into logs, hewed into beams and used to build an addition on the yurt.
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                               Over the years trees were cleared from the future Frisbee field and turned into beams by hewing the logs.
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                                                                                                      The hewed logs were used in the addition.
               
       Slowly, over a few years, we continued to ad carbon in the form of wood chips from hewed logs, wood debris, leaves,  saw dust and wood chips from a local mill and voila, a field was born.  The eighth grade, in playing Frisbee, pushed the carbon from the wood products into the soil.  Some of the water that once just ran off our property and down the hill will now stay on our property.  At first the idea of playing on such a field was met with resistance but after the game started we were all lost in the fun.

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                                                                                                                               Sequestering carbon sure can be fun.
                If we are to overcome today’s challenges we need to learn about stacking functions.  Each entity in a system should provide as many functions as possible. In this case we are talking about activities; however the concept is the same.  The eighth graders primary goal was to build a retaining wall, however in the process they cleaned up rocks that were laying around and had to be moved, education was involved in learning the actual physics of moving heavy objects, they learned movement skills which incorporated momentum and inertia, they did preliminary gardening in building a hoogle bed which sequesters carbon, and lastly, in playing Frisbee they further developed the playing field.  All throughout the day we had fun and laughter.  If we are to exponentially heal the earth instead of exponentially destroying it, we need to do it in such a way that we all can enjoy what is being done along with enjoying each other and ...
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                                                                                                                          singing and just having fun.
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