Awesome organization, founded by former pro-basketball player and MacArthur genius grant recipient Will Allen:

Growing Power is a national nonprofit organization and land trust supporting people from diverse backgrounds, and the environments in which they live, by helping to provide equal access to healthy, high-quality, safe and affordable food for people in all communities.  Growing Power implements this mission by providing hands-on training, on-the-ground demonstration, outreach and technical assistance through the development of Community Food Systems that help people grow, process, market and distribute food in a sustainable manner.

Info on the organization’s programs, including aquaculture and bees, http://www.growingpower.org/

Yes, despite the prevailing presentation of events, there was a tsunami.

Isla Alejandro Selkirk, one of the Juan Fernandez chain

Robinson Crusoe Island experienced particularly intense and deadly devastation. A group of journalism students from Chile and the U.S., who visited that remote island, have produced a video that gives a window into the culture of the island and the destruction visited by the recent tsunami. You can watch the video below.

Oikonos has set up a relief fund for the Juan Fernandez Islands.You can donate by clicking here.

100% of donations go directly to on the ground island relief efforts.

Tsunami Relief for Robinson Crusoe Island from Más a Tierra on Vimeo.

And here is the post from the journalists:

“In the spring of 2006, as a combined group of American and Chilean journalism students, we traveled together to Robinson Crusoe Island, four hundred miles off the coast of Santiago, Chile, to document life on this small and isolated island.

In the ten days we spent recording and photographing the people of the island, each and every one of us was struck by their unique way of life and the resolve with which they carve out their existence in such a remote place, rich with history but severely lacking in resources that we often take for granted.

And so it was with great sorrow and shock – in the days following the 8.8-magnitude earthquake that shook the Chilean mainland in February 2010 – that we began to hear news trickle in about Robinson Crusoe Island.

According to reports, the island’s emergency warning system failed, and a giant tsunami took the residents by surprise, covering nearly two miles of the island and reaching 300 meters up from the natural coastline. When the ocean retreated, it took with it nearly all of San Juan Bautista, the coastal settlement that the island’s 650 residents call home.

What few community resources that served the people of Robinson Crusoe Island before the tsunami hit are now completely wiped away: the school, community center, fishing boats, supply stores… and many, many homes.

As you can tell from the stories and lives highlighted on this site, the fragile yet resilient community of Robinson Crusoe Island is a special place in this world, and its people need our help in rebuilding their lives. Anything you can give to help these families would be a tremendous help. Oikonos, a 501 c 3 non-profit, has set up a donation fund to directly support the people of Robinson Crusoe Island. All of the money they receive will go specifically to the people of the island, to rebuild their homes, their school and their livelihoods.

Please take a moment to do what you can, and explore this site to learn about the unique and wonderful lives you are helping to rebuild.

We thank you for your open hearts”

Relief Efforts

1. Donate to the cause. Please give what you can. Go straight to oikonos.org/donate.htm and send some tax deductible dollars. 100% of your donation goes to the island.

2. Spread the word. Email your friends, colleagues and family members. Twitter and Facebook the story. Many of you work at major news organizations. Use your connections to get this written about, blogged about and talked about. A little effort goes a long way.

Aerial view of Año Nuevo Island, off the coast of Santa Cruz, California.

Rebar is very excited to be collaborating with Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge, an extraordinary international conservation biology non-profit organization, to design some habitat restoration elements for Año Nuevo Island, a marine environment heavily altered by human intervention, and one of only four island systems off the coast of California.

From 1872 through the 1940s, Año Nuevo Island was an operative Coast Guard lighthouse station, and it seems like it was a pretty cushy gig: In addition to a steel frame lighthouse, island infrastructure included a Victorian mansion, outbuildings, an elaborate non-native garden, a cistern and a rail system. In 1948, an automated buoy replaced the lighthouse, the island was effectively abandoned by humans, and the “natural” world began its inexorable reclamation process. But the island still carries the evidence of successive human interventions: The lighthouse has collapsed into a rusting steel hulk, the cistern has fractured. The Victorian home is actually faring pretty well, under the circumstances.

The Coast Guard lighthouse station, circa 1953.

The house, circa 2008.

The Lighthouse, circa 2008.

The Rhinoceros Auklet. Photo by Frank Balthis.

The current ecological dynamics of the island have substantially degraded the habitat of two burrowing seabirds, both of which are state-listed “species of concern” — the Rhinoceros Auklet and the Cassin’s Auklet. The marine terrace soil that composes the center of the island is rapidly disappearing due to extensive landscape alterations during the “lighthouse” era, natural erosion, and sporadically high California sea lion densities. The approximately 300 breeding Auklets that rear their young in underground burrows depend upon undisturbed soil and soil-stabilizing vegetation. If left untouched, the habitat for these Auklets will degrade further until it is no longer a viable breeding ground. This is where we come in.

Led by Oikonos, a cross-disciplinary team of ecologists, habitat restoration experts, artists, designers and government agencies are collaborating to restore the degraded habitat for these nesting seabirds. Once the habitat has been successfully protected from marine mammal incursion, the team will rehabilitate the native plant community to reduce erosion, provide sustainable Auklet breeding habitat and, ultimately, increase the biodiversity of this unique island ecosystem.

Room for improvement: The current Nest Module design.

The Año Nuevo Island habitat restoration project includes two main design elements. To separate the sizeable sea lion population from critical bird breeding areas, Rebar is designing and constructing a series of Habitat Walls at strategic locations around the island. In addition, to facilitate the seabird species nesting and breeding while the native flora restoration is ongoing, Rebar will develop a system of Nest Modules to replace the current human-made modules, which are constructed from plywood and PVC plastic piping.

To develop the Nest Modules, we are teaching a interdisciplinary design course through the ENGAGE program at the Center for Art and Public Life at the California College of the Arts. The course will be taught through the Ceramics Department with Nathan Lynch, the department chair, a very talented artist and, as you can see by his fine art work, just the perfect artist for a bird habitat project such as this.

We are excited to harness the design talents of CCA students to help solve this challenging design problem. We will also be investigating the role of the artist and designer in helping structure or mediate interpretations of “nature” and “restoration ecology” within a broader framework of the environmental movement, human interactions with natural landscapes, ideas of wilderness, the nature preserve, national parks and so forth. Basically, it’s another look at how human imagination and systems of regulation, organization and control are implemented in the landscape. It’s very Rebar.

We’ll post more as the project develops.

Until then, please check out the Año Nuevo Island Restoration Project website.

Stay tuned!

That said, it seems this year the recession has got more than a few people looking for creative, non-traditional gifts. We figure, why not play along? Here are a few fun ideas that fit our ethos.

The gift that breathes

Kamal Meattle on TED: How to grow your own air

This TED Talk explains how with proper maintenance a few particular plants can vastly improve the air quality of an enclosed space. Sure, seven or eight plants per person sounds like a lot, but most people don’t have a need for completely fabricated air in a sealed-up bubble, just better air in homes and offices that increasingly house more chemical and airborne particulates. Even a few plants will help clear the air, brighten a space, and live well beyond the holiday season.

If you were wondering what to get us as a housewarming gift for our new Rebar studio space, bring on the Money Plants!

The gift that feeds

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is super-trendy right now, and with good reason. Not only does subscribing to a local farm’s yield on a weekly or monthly basis get you a wide range of delicious, interesting fruits and vegetables (or even meats!), it connects you to the land and food supply, and gets you moving in the kitchen. Tough economic times mean more eating at home, but that doesn’t have to mean a return to Ramen and frozen dinners.

Locate a participating farm in your area using Local Harvest’s finder tool.

If you’re intimidated by the task of cooking, consider splitting the box or preparing meals as a group. In other words, build a community around food. It’s one of civilization’s great traditions.

The gift that grows

Charitable gifts are always popular and especially satisfying when you can see your donation make a direct impact in your community. San Francisco’s Friends of the Urban Forest offer just such an opportunity with their Tree Tributes: a $25 donation goes directly toward planting a new street tree in the City, commemorated with a lovely dedicated card.

The fun part is how the City transforms after such a gift, every tree in sight becoming a new friend and inspiring the thought, “Could that be my tree?” And why not? Nothing better than having a friend on every block.

Season’s Greetings!