05 Living a Permaculture Lifestyle w/ Kate O’Flaherty

Announcer: Welcome to sustainability now an exploration of technologies and paradigms to shape a world that works design for socially conscious entrepreneurs and individuals interested in responsible stewardship of the planet. Sustainability now covers food, energy, housing, water, waste, economics, and consciousness. Welcome to your community sustainability now with your host Mira Rubin.

Mira Rubin: Welcome everybody to sustainability now technologies and paradigms to shape a world that works. I am so glad that you’re here with us. I’m your host Mira Rubin and I’m really delighted to introduce our guest Kate O’Flaherty. Two years ago, Kate founded Solutions Voyage, a nonprofit organization that builds community around local sustainability solutions in Boulder, Colorado. Solutions Voyage creates educational spaces at fun events like music festivals to empower people through DIY, permaculture education and building community connection. And Kate is actively engineering her sustainable lifestyle by building a tiny home school bus. And she’s exclusively using local and recycled materials. So Kate, there’s all kinds of things you have to share with us. I’m so excited to have you. Welcome. Thanks, Mira. Thanks for having me. So, Kate, just to start off because people might not know what DIY is, especially in the permaculture world. Can you give us some background?

Kate O’Flaherty: DIY stands for do it yourself. And there’s all sorts of different projects that you can embark on to live a more sustainable lifestyle. Something might be like in creating a worm farm for your kitchen, or installing a rain barrel to capture the rainwater off of your roof that feeds your garden, or getting some backyard chickens. So, we bring educators who talk about projects like that, and teach people how to create these things and their own lives.

Mira: So I have to go back to the worm farm in your kitchen, because I don’t know that that’s something that most people would be acclimated to. Can you give us some more background on worm farms?

Kate: Yeah, they’re really simple. You basically can get a plastic bin and drill holes in the bottom and then put another bin underneath to capture extra moisture. And then you get red wiggle or worms. And you just start off with like a little handful of them in the corner and feed them your kitchen scraps about every other day. And you have them covered with shredded newspaper and with the lid on and they build soil for you. I think they eat like two times their body weight every day. So they’re pretty incredible soil builders. And it’s pretty easy, and you can just have it in your kitchen. And then you can feed your garden and grow crops from that.

Mira: I have to ask, what about the smell?

Kate: Usually, if you’re doing it, right, there’s no smell. It

Mira: Really

Kate: Yeah, if you’re over feeding them, you might start to get mold and that would smell, or if the food is rotting, that would smell. But, you kind of just see how many worms you have and over a week or a couple weeks, you can kind of gauge how much to be feeding them at a time. And then you leave shredded newspaper over the top and there should be no smell. You can have projects that go wrong.

My first worm farm I had in my closet when I was in college and I neglected them for about a week. And at that point, they were just breeding and breeding and they overpopulated, and I didn’t feed them for two days. And I came back and it was like a stinky mess. And there were tons of flies.

Mira: Oh my gosh. that was gonna be the other question. What about bugs

Kate: Fruit flies will come if your worms aren’t eating their food fast enough or if you do something like I did, and neglect it for a little bit too long at just the right moment. Generally, they do a pretty good job of self regulating and eating all the food if you’re feeding them in the right proportion.

Mira: And so how long does it take to convert food to soil?

Kate: For worms doesn’t take long at all. You can, you can kind of see where the worm castings are left behind, and it’s like a rich black soil. If you end up being really successful with it, you can start stacking bins, and the worms will crawl upward to eat over time. So it will just leave the rich black soil at the bottom and you can kind of take the soil from the bottom and then restock that been on top.

Mira: Wow.

Kate: Yeah, you can create a whole worm complex if you want.

Mira: Have... Do you have any videos or written material about that that we could make available to people on the sustainabilitynow.global website on the podcast page?

Kate: Yeah, I could dig something up. Definitely.

Mira: That would be great. That would be great. That’s a nice way to be able to get rid of waste.

I understand as far as food waste goes that there are many, many costs associated with it that are way beyond the loss or waste of the food itself: transporting it, getting rid of it. It’s a big labor and financially intensive sort of endeavor. So, composting is a really important thing that we can do to lower our footprint, right?

Kate: Yeah, definitely. I’m a huge proponent of composting. And a couple years before I started solutions voyage, I ran a small organization called Nederland compost, which was a community composting facility based out of Nederland Colorado. We are had about 60/70 customers, and we would bike around town and collect people’s food scraps – kitchen waste - in five gallon buckets. And then we would compost it all in this facility with a couple big Earth Tubs they were called, which is they were like two cubic yard composting units from a company in Vermont. It was very labor intensive. And there wasn’t a lot of money in the composting business. But it really was enriching in terms of being able to see all of that waste being converted into soil to build our community’s soil bank, so it was fulfilling for a good amount of time. And I could definitely envision people working together to create more small scale composting operations like that, where, you know, it’s on a community level and everyone kind of just pools their scraps together, and someone is the steward of the compost pile and washes over it and turns it and then everybody has soil to use.

Mira: That’s a wonderful thing to augment community gardens.

Kate: Absolutely.

Mira: Kate really, Solutions Voyage is very much about education, right? That’s your primary directive?

Kate: It’s about education. And it’s about bringing together the community for support and for networking; and it’s also about community resilience. There were some studies that were done in Japan about resilient communities during tsunamis. And they found that the communities that had the most money weren’t necessarily the most resilient communities. But the communities where people knew each other, where neighbors talked to each other, where there were friends and social networks that were strong, there were less deaths. Or actually, I think there were no deaths in the communities that were really well socially networked. So we bring people together to create that social fabric and to allow new innovations to happen because there’s education involved and creativity. And we just create a space where people feel comfortable sharing and being inspired around sustainability.

Mira: How did you come up with this concept?

Kate: I was largely inspired by a festival that I went to in Oregon called the Oregon Country Fair. There, they have a space that’s pretty similar, where they were demonstrating off grid solar, how to grow mushrooms, they had a little seed bank. And I was just thinking that it was so necessary to bring something like that to the festivals and events that were in Colorado, where I live. And so that was kind of what propelled the mission. And then it’s just sort of evolved from there based on the different communities that have requested us coming in and collaborating and bringing spaces and organizing educational programming.

Mira: You said us. Who else is part of your team?

Kate: Right now, my biggest collaborator’s name is Alex, and she’s a student at CU. She’s the manager of Solutions Voyage right now. It’s always been a small team of community organizers. But when we bring an event together, there’s many, many people who are involved. We’ve got a list of programs for the summer and we’re collaborating with dozens of people, but she’s my main organizing assistant at this moment.

Mira: How do you source the other people or organizations that you’re going to collaborate with to set up these events? And what kinds of organizations do you look for?

Kate: It’s really topics that are relevant; new, appropriate technology, and then people who are kind of like on the forefront of bringing a new industry into this culture and community. So we look for those people and try to create relationships where it benefits them to be sharing what they’re doing, and it’ll benefit the community that it’s serving.

Mira: So what kinds of things would you say are on the forefront, the most exciting things that you’re engaging with these days, or things that you could share with our listeners that might be new information: up and coming stuff?

Kate: Well, right now, in Colorado, I’m really excited about the hemp industry. And there’s a tremendous amount of growth in that industry for medicine, for insulation, fiber, food, and it’s been growing quite a bit; both hemp farming and on the manufacturing side. We’ve been connecting with Evo Hemp who makes hemp bars and food and just started making CBD products. And we’re going to be opening a store with them where we sell hemp stuff. It’s going to be called The Hemp Store and where we also offer different sorts of ecological solutions and demos.

Mira:  This store that you’re opening, it’s a pop up store that you’re going to have for six months, you said, yes? Tell us more about that. That’s pretty exciting.

Kate: It’s an old gas station spot that’s right in the middle of downtown Boulder. And it’s been vacant for a while. And I’m just so excited to move into the spot and to get people engaged there, because it’s an industry that we’re sort of trying to shift away from, fossil fuels, and moving into more regenerative culture and renewable resources. So right next door to The Hemp Store is going to be Farm Stand Collective. So we’re partnering with farmers and taking all kinds of vegetable waste, seconds, things that might not present so well at the bigger stores or the farmers market, or maybe they just have a surplus of cabbage and need to get rid of a pallet of cabbage. This farm stand will create the opportunity for local farmers to come drop off their excess produce and other people in the community will be pickling it or fermenting it and, and just selling it as is. It’s just creates another space for community to network around local farming and food.

Mira: So what kind of growth have you seen in this community? Because you’re local in Boulder, you’ve been doing this for two years, what have you seen in terms of the evolution of community as a result of what you’ve been up to?

Kate: Well, it’s hard for me to go anywhere without recognizing someone.

Mira: I’ll bet.

Kate: It’s hard to be anonymous, but it also feels really good and supportive to see so many familiar faces and know that so many people care and are getting engaged, doing their own, whatever they’re doing. Yeah. And there’s always the opportunity to connect with people on a deeper level or about different things. And it’s felt like it’s a movement that so many people in Boulder support. Of course, Boulder can be sort of like a bubble sometimes. But I think I’ve also seen the effects of what we’re doing rippling out into other communities as well.

Mira: Do you have any kind of program whereby you can support other people that would be interested in creating something like what you’re up to in their own communities?

Kate: I’ve been thinking about that. And right now, we don’t have any sort of organizing documents, but that’s something that I would like to get together. I know of a few resources that can help me pull that together for other people as well. Because I would like to see that. Really, it’s about all of these small communities creating their own networks and just cultivating deeper relationships where everyone is.

Mira: And you’ve really suffered through the growing pains of it and I’m sure have encountered and overcome so many obstacles along the way. We always ask people in your journey, what kinds of obstacles have you encountered, and how have you overcome them?

Well, it seems like every different event, there’s a different thing that comes up. Some of the events that I’ve done, have been thousands and thousands of people. This last summer, I went to Burning Man. It wasn’t necessarily through Solutions Voyage, although it was related. I worked on the Zero Waste crew at Burning Man. And that was quite a trying journey where I lost so many resources, and I just felt physically exhausted. And I think the biggest challenge in this line of work is really learning how to moderate your energy and not burn out. Because a lot of times, you’re in service of the earth and of humanity. And, you know, you can zoom out and see that, but then when you zoom in, you’re like, “Oh, I’m just working myself to the bone. And I don’t have any time or money or anything.” Just maintaining that vision and hope and pulling through on every different event is really gratifying.

Mira: I’ll bet. one of the big things that you focus on is permaculture.

Kate: Mm hmm.

Mira: I’d love to share with our listeners what some of the permaculture principles are, and how they can be applied not only to maintaining the earth directly and our resources, but into social environments as well as business, because we have a lot of social entrepreneurs that are part of our audience.

Kate: Well, permaculture is a different thing to every person who will define it; you’ll learn that. For me, permaculture is a lens to view any sort of social or environmental challenge. And for me personally, it’s also trying to use that lens to guide how I can live more in integrity with what my values are and cultivate healthier interdependent relationships, and a strong network of supportive people. And then it’s also a lot about healing both our environment and healing some of our social traumas. There’s 12 permaculture principles. And do you want to touch on all of them?

Mira: Well, you know what, I think maybe we could just pull a couple out to highlight and maybe look at how it applies to the land and social structure and business. Yeah. How about if we talk about “Use edges and value the marginal.”

Kate:  Using the edges, and valuing the marginal; you can approach it and look at it from sort of like a landscaping perspective and how nature works. For example, where the trees in the forest meet the edge of the prairie is where there’s a lot of different population dynamics at play. There’s both the grasses and those ecologies and the trees and the forest ecology and those two environments are meeting each other. And it’s in those spaces where a lot of the action happens like the hawks will be hunting for the mice there, mountain lions might hang out on the edge of the forest looking for deer. Also in a garden, it’s where those edges where different plants meet are, where they interact. There’s just a greater variance for change.

And then from a social perspective, using the edges and valuing the marginal could mean thinking about where two neighborhoods, meet, and how in that space, there’s a lot of potential for something to happen. And it’s really up to the people who are engaged, the stakeholders. You can think about it in terms of that, or thinking about valuing marginal populations. So, people maybe don’t always have access to healthy food, or have access to these conversations and getting different people involved and valuing populations that aren’t always at the table.

Mira: So we’re looking at those edges really, as points of opportunity and dynamics. Yes?

Kate: Mm hmm. Exactly. And even from a personal standpoint, thinking about going to your edge of uncomfortability. And moving beyond that.

Mira: Exactly. That’s where growth happens.

Kate: Yeah, for sure.

Mira: How about there’s another one here that says, “Use small and slow solutions.” I was interested especially in that, because so much of our culture is about faster, more, better, bigger and use small and slow solutions is very counter culture I think, on the surface. And I’d love to hear how that applies.

Kate: Well, I think when people in general recognize that the way that we’re living as a society, as a culture, is counter to maybe our personal beliefs about what we should be doing, it can seem really overwhelming and can seem like you have to change everything at once in order to be living the life that you believe that you should be living, recognizing that each action that we’re taking has an impact. But

it makes sense and it’s more realistic to just think about all the little things that you can do. For example, maybe you can bring your own bag to the grocery store, or use a recycled water bottle, or have a worm farm in your kitchen. And just taking those little baby steps is what you can do in your daily life to really make a change. And if the large amount of people do those little things, it really does create difference. And that’s how we change culture. It doesn’t all happen at once. It’s slowly, slowly integrating all those lessons and new practices into our daily lives.

Mira: Yeah, that’s wonderful. I’m wondering if you might be able to compile a list or identify a list of simple things like that, that people can do that will incrementally move them toward greater sustainability? Would you be able to do that?

Kate: Yeah, sure.

Mira: That’d be great. Very cool. So you’re kind of a visionary, Kate That’s what I see. And one of the things that you said, you’re working to live within the context and in alignment with your values. It sounds like you have very clearly defined values that you’re very conscious of. And the reason I’m bringing this up is because I think that so many people suffer as a result of not having clarity around their values in life. They end up in circumstances of work or social connection that has a deep misalignment for them and they’re not even aware of where their pain is coming from, because they’re not connected to that discordance. So, have you always been a person who’s been clear on your values, and in alignment with them?

Kate: I would say, I’ve been clear on my values. My parents raised me in a way where they were always encouraging connection with nature, and family and friends. And, I’ve always had the awareness that I care generally about the planet. But then I grew up in kind of a mainstream sort of situation. And so, for me it’s been slowly learning how to alter my lifestyle to really recognize the impacts of all the choices that I’m making, and try to make the best choices that I’m capable of. So it’s been a slow process. I was just going to say, a big thing that I’ve recognized is just learning to take responsibility also for my actions and, and for the choices that I’m making, and not making excuses, not placing blame. Because I think it’s easy to say, “Oh, I would do that. But blah, blah, blah, blah.” It’s been kind of a slow journey. And one thing that I realized that is kind of inevitable is that to live and exist in this culture, you have to participate in the capitalist system, which is inherently... Well, you don’t have to, I should say, but we’re largely guided into participating in the capitalist system, which is kind of a destructive system, and doesn’t take into account the effects of extracting resources and exploiting labor and that sort of thing. And so everything that I can try to do to shift myself away from being reliant on that system by using trade in my life and saying, “I can offer you this service or product if you can give me this.” That’s been really effective in feeling like I am living much more in alignment with what I truly believe. It brings the local economy much closer and creates like a real tangible feeling of, of a local vibrant economic system and social network.

Mira: What would you say is the one thing that can help people move toward the permaculture lifestyle, because it really is a whole lifestyle. It’s sort of principles for living, wouldn’t you say?

Kate: I would say that thinking about where your food comes from, and just thinking about the next time you plan to go to the grocery store, maybe thinking about whether there are alternatives like going to the farmers market, or planting some kale in your front yard, or seeing those systems and deciding where you want to participate. One of those basic things that’s a necessity for everyone, which is why I recommend thinking about that. And it’s, it’s a global system right now. And it’s something that we all can be empowered to make a more vibrant local economy by supporting local food systems.

Mira: Are there any particular resources you would recommend for folks for permaculture to get a foundation or expand their knowledge around it?

Kate: I would say Gaia’s Garden is a really good one. There’s one that’s called Sustainable Cities.

Mira: Okay, we’re gonna have links on our website for all the resources that you mentioned. And I have to ask you about your tiny home.

Kate: Yep, it’s been a work in progress. And it’s been a fun project and very humbling. And I’m learning all sorts of new skills, how to install solar. I’ve been using reclaimed wood for flooring, old flooring that was pulled out of a different house, and I’m milling my own wood that’s from a wood miller up in the mountains to create siding for the the inside of the space. And it’s an old school bus that I’m converting into a little tiny home for myself.

Mira: What inspired that?

Kate: In a fun project.

Mira: I’ll bet it has what inspired it?

Kate: Well, just thinking about my, personally, how I want to live in the world. And I love traveling. I got sick of paying rent, and I wanted to be able to create my own space and have the freedom to be where I want to be, and to be independent and interdependent, and really kind of forge my own way. So this has been a really great experiment in that. Prior to that I usually lived in community which was also really nice. And now I’m kind of... It’s always a tricky off, you know; any, any decision that you make, you’re choosing that over something else. So I sort of do miss living in community like I did before. I always had a bunch of housemates and we could collaborate on a bunch of projects. But it’s also really cool to create my own space and think about what thriving looks like to me and what sort of space I want to be in.

Mira: Kate, if people want to get in touch with you, how can they reach you?

Kate: We have a website it’s called SolutionsVoyage.org. And my email address is also SolutionsVoyage@gmail.com.

Mira: Great, it gave us all kinds of goodies. And I’m wondering if there’s anything that you’d like to conclude with.

Kate: I just want to thank you for having me. And I’m really excited to see the rest of the interviews and connect with this network.

Mira: That’s great. And that’s actually one of our intentions is to be broadening the community and actually build a movement with Sustainability Now, and you’ve got your hands and so many wonderful things, I want to put out there that you may be collaborating with us and contributing on our website. And we welcome that. And I would love to have our listeners just keep an eye out for good things from you. Maybe you can post some of your progress on your bus and who knows what else. That would be wonderful.

Kate: Cool. I was just going to say we have a new media person, and I think she’ll be happy to spread the word and share some stuff with you.

Mira: That would be great. Some updates. Perfect, cool. Perfect. So last but not least, is there a way that our listeners can support Solutions Voyage?

Kate: Eventually, we’re going to be having another campaign to go on the road and to create events around music and libraries and DIY spaces. And so at that point, we will be fundraising for that. And currently, you can just do, take every action that you can take to improve the life around you.

Mira: Beautiful, Kate, I want to thank you so much for being with us. This was wonderful and I’m excited to have you be a contributing member of Sustainability Now as well and to be supporting Solutions Voyage in any way that we’re able.

And I just want to thank our audience for listening and being with us and building the community. They’re the ones that are making it happen. And that’s it for now. I’m your host Mira Rubin. Until next time, live your best life, love the world around you and together we can save the world.

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