I've been a part of three principal communities in my life so far: the poetry world, the online news/media world, and the tech/social media world.  In each case I can point to a phase where I read and studied and met people and planned and experimented and got completely absorbed, and then my life started to shift. 

There was that moment I got out of college and started working for a poetry non-profit and teaching Poetry in the Schools, then the one where I went from a print journalist at Scholastic to creating one of the first education online communities and one of the first consumer web sites, then the move to Advance and New Jersey Online and then to Netscape and into the product development/tech world.

I feel like am heading to a new place again, but this time the obsessions are making our cities sustainable, food justice, urban homesteading, permaculture and a host of related things, including supporting access to Web 2.0 tools and making sure we have free media and multiple viewpoints online.

What I am doing about this interest right now is reading, thinking, learning, and, slowly, talking to people. Soon, I will also be taking action, as I'm going to do the following:

• Create a composting system in my backyard and build a worm bin to do vermiculture
• Plan a food-focused container garden
• Sheet mulch and remediation plant the dirt beds I do have
• Plant that garden, tend it, and have food to eat/share/put by
• Trade for eggs; try making my own bread, pickles, jam
• Follow more of the eating principles in Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Real Food by Nina Planck; i.e., less industrial protein and more pastured, free-range, grass-fed, all organic eggs, (raw) milk, dairy, no or little soy
• Create a space to grow food in front of my house and see what happens when I plant it
• Work with the Public Media Collaborative and interested people to teach every mission-driven organization in these categories of interest (and others) how to use social media tools to promote their events, campaigns, and programs.

The outcomes I want to have are to be less reliant on the current infrastructure and to get to know my neighbors and make deeper ties with people living around me.
 
So, I am starting a new blog to chronicle this journey.  Oakland Homesteaders starts as a place for me to map my experiences as I move from a newbie to, hopefully, a practitioner.

I may not post here more than once a week, and I have no idea how these plans will turn out, but I'd like to document my learning, my successes and my failures right here.

PS I am open to this being a group blog, both to share knowledge and to create community. If you are in Oakland or the East Bay and interested in posting on a somewhat regular basis on topics of urban homesteading, sustainability, alternative currencies, traditional foods, foraging, food justice, peak oil and so on, let me know.