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Lisa has lived in Flagstaff, Arizona since 1987.
Lisa has a 1991 Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Resource
Interpretation from Northern Arizona University. She is a graduate of
the 1993 Black Mesa Permaculture Project's Design Certification Course
and 1994 Coconino County Master Gardener Program. In 2008 Lisa won the
Martin-Springer Institute Moral Courage Award and the Friends of
Flagstaff's Future Livable Community Award.
She writes books with permaculture and
Transition themes related to food
and fiber. She is the coordinator for the
Juniper Street Community Garden where she has gardened
since 2004. She also gardens at her
home, both in small plots around her house, on balconies, and indoors.
The daughter of a chemist and
a biologist, Lisa Rayner
has long had an interest in the natural world. As a young girl she was
an avid collector of sea shells, rocks, bird feathers and more. The evidence can be found in every room of
her house. She spent much of her time exploring the
forest around her
Delaware
home. Her mother introduced her to weaving on a floor loom at a young
age.
Lisa is a self-directed person who enjoys her solitude and a few good
friends. One exasperated teacher wrote in her second grade report card,
"Lisa tends to play with little books, paper, yarn, etc. and rushes
through assignments."
When she is not writing or gardening, she can be found grinding flour,
baking, cooking, canning, spinning yarn, knitting, and designing, weaving
and sewing her own clothing. She is also a political activist who has
attended many city council meetings and written many letters to the
editor of the local newspaper. She has volunteered much of her time for
non-profit organizations that exemplify her values.
Lisa
hated cooking growing up. Then, in 1985 she became vegetarian, and soon
after, vegan. She spent the next year-and-a-half teaching herself to
cook and in the process discovered she enjoyed it. Lisa's reasons for
being vegan include animal welfare and factory farms, world hunger and
environmental sustainability. In 1993 she was teaching a vegetarian cooking class when she realized that she wanted
to learn about which foods grew in her cool, dry mountain home. She
began to learn all she could about growing and cooking bioregionally-appropriate foods.
In 1996 Lisa obtained a word
processor while dumpster-diving and wrote the first edition of
Growing Food
in the Southwest
Mountains:
A Permaculture Approach to Gardening Above 6,500 Feet in
Arizona,
New Mexico, Southern Colorado and
Southern Utah.
The fourth edition of the book is scheduled for publication in spring
2013.
Also in 1996, Lisa got to know her future husband Dan
Frazier at monthly vegetarian EarthSave potlucks. From 2000 to
2002, Lisa and Dan published a small progressive newspaper that advocated for the protection of
northern Arizona's environmental riches, the preservation of Flagstaff's small-town
charm, and social justice issues. During this time, Lisa also ran a community currency program called Flagstaff Neighborly
Notes.
During this time, Lisa's interest in geology revived with the gathering
momentum of the peak oil movement, which later morphed into the
Transition Movement. Her
lifelong interests in do-it-yourself urban homesteading tie in perfectly
with the need to economically relocalize and downsize this century. She
coordinates the Transition Action Team for the local non-profit Friends
of Flagstaff's Future.Lisa has been a solar cook since 1995. She
started her solar cooking adventures with a used cardboard CooKitTM
panel cooker from
Solar Cookers International bought for $10 and later
purchased the
Sun OvenTM she currently cooks with on her
south-facing townhome balcony. She published her second book
The Sunny Side of Cooking: Solar
cooking and other ecologically friendly cooking methods for the 21st
century
in 2007.
Lisa has baked her own bread with a sourdough
culture since 1995. In 2009, she published
Wild Bread - Hand-baked sourdough artisan bread in your own kitchen.
A canner since 2003, Lisa was unsatisfied with most
canning books because they did not explain the principles behind safe
canning methods. She also wanted to can with only natural,
sustainably-produced ingredients. She ended up writing the book for
which she had been searching,
The
Natural Canning Resource Book: A guide to home canning with
locally-grown, sustainably-produced and fair trade foods. Lisa and
Dan published that book in 2010.
In 2011, Lisa added spinning and knitting to her do-it-yourself
repertoire. When she was 12, she bought a Navajo spindle in Tuba City,
Arizona but did not have the opportunity to learn how to use it. Lisa
met fellow spinners at gatherings of the Flagstaff Fiber Arts Guild. She
re-started a spinning gathering at her local yarn store, Purl in the
Pines twice a month. Lisa enjoys spinning white and naturally-colored cotton on an Indian/Pakistani charkha
spindle wheel and spins humanely-sourced wool, alpaca and llama fibers
on a Schacht Ladybug flyer and bobbin spinning wheel. Sock knitting has
become somewhat of an obsession. She is also learning to dye plant and
animal fibers with natural, non-toxic dyes like indigo. A book on
textiles for Transition is already in the works. It's working title is
"The Post Petroleum Sock."
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