3.9 Supplemental Commentary

For over a decade, I have been leading workshops inspiring people to reclaim food sovereignty.  For the past three years, this manifestation came as "The Land of Milk & Honey" which is an introduction to beekeeping, cheesemaking, farming and fermenting.  There is a field trip to an active dairy and farm with chickens, goats and bees.   I personally believe this will help our global sickness and poisoning of the earth while improving individuals health and temperament.  I believe much of the disease in our culture stems from the industrialization of our world.  Microbial cultures bring culture back into our lives and through this workshop we can be more in touch with our food: honey production, fermenting foods, milking livestock, making cheese.  The opportunity/inspiration to document this process while expanding my movies and slideshows to serve a wider audience.

With maximum attention toward documentation, I learned significantly more about bees and cheese this year. Homescale food production offers enormous space for growth within the realm of fermentation, care of bees (locally and globally), and animal husbandry. I am learning a lot. I finally understand the difference between ethanol fermentation and lactofermentation. I learned/realized that I am more a fan of Top Bar Hives than I ever realized. I feel more confident in making brined cheeses like Feta. I feel more confident putting together and displaying keynote presentations. My biggest learning is a synthesis of understanding that most of our modern problems are a function of scale and that we have been making everything bigger since the industrial revolution -- literally fueled by petroleum. That global scale values efficiency hence, mono-cropping, queen rearing, etc. and consequently loses resiliency. The collapse of the bees are the canary in the coal mine informing our own fate if we don't apply good design to our food systems and lives.

The most challenging element of my OP 3 was computer literacy and the challenges of interfacing the computer: mahara, GEL, Dropbox.    I took a pause from Gaia for the bulk of the summer and the GEL site and Mahara were upgraded which meant relearning a changing system coupled with the despair associated with the knowledge that it keeps changing.    In addition to this, getting a keynote presentation into Dropbox and Mahara proved to be challenging.  And even the interface with Mahara often took ten minutes simply to edit a window which I have no rational explanation for how or why.  
As I prepare to submit, I recognize that I spend the bulk of my time on the meat/content of the project and less time on the design aspect.  I intend to spend the bulk of my OP 4 on design and what that means to me and how to design the work that I do.

As I have said, I recognize that I can get content heavy and lose sight of the process, including the design process.   As I look back, I look ahead and I intend to spend the bulk of my next two OP's on design rather than content.  I intend to design my time for the next two projects to engage and document my style of design rather than trying to gather content,.  This awareness around the process is an important  feature of my learning within GaiaU.  I had planned to do Rethinking Energy (OP2) and this project The Land of Milk & Honey (OP3) prior to enrolling in Gaia (when I had only a nebulous sense of what an OP was).  I feel happy with the strides I took in this project personally and professionally.  Certainly, it points me toward accelerating my computer literacy so that I may have an easier time with the rest of my projects and life in the 21st century.