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Eating locally in Willits
Mike A’Dair, The Willits News
Jason and Kristin Bradford have fulfilled their pledge to eat only locally grown food during the month of October. Both are feeling well and are pleased that they were able to “eat locally for the month of October” without any major negative health impacts.
“The positive side is, I loved it. I had a great time doing it, and I ate better than I ever have in my life,” said Jason Bradford.
Kristin too added that she felt “great” and noted that she had actually gained a pound.
“The whole point of it for me was raising awareness and learning what’s available,” said Kristin. “And also stimulating discussion around what’s available locally. I had lots of people stopping me and asking about what we were doing and why we were doing it.”
To a large extent, the “locovore” movement created here in Willits by the Bradfords and by others, especially by members of the Willits Economic Localization Group (WELL), is spurred into action by the awareness that the American Way of Life, as we have come to know it since the Second World War, may be coming to an end as world oil production peaks and the economic system that is dependant upon cheap oil, cheap and plentiful energy and cheap transportation collapses.
Asked if he still believed that Peak Oil was going to happen and if he still believed that diminishing oil production was going to force people to “re-localize,” Bradford was emphatic that it was not a matter of belief.
“This is not a philosophical issue at all,” he said. “This is the laws of physics. Our food system has to have the ability to produce more energy than we are putting into it. The only way we can keep eating something in the future is if the act of growing, storing and cooking food uses less energy than you get out of the food. And right now, it is way skewed.”
“So the laws of physics, as related to Peak Oil and Climate Change, tell us that, if we’re going to eat in the future, it’s because we are going to have to have a local food system. This is not a matter of ideology or philosophy. This is a matter of, what is going to need to happen if we are going to eat, period.
“This has huge implications for our transportation system, our market system, our patterns of land use, our employment patterns, our dietary system. They are all going to alter, not necessarily because I argue that we ought to do this. They are going to alter because, if we don’t do them, we are not going to eat.
“The positive side is, I loved it. I had a great time doing it. I ate better than I ever have in my life. That’s the positive side.
(8 Nov 2006)
Jason Bradford has online photographs and journal of all the local meals they ate during the month: Meals report.
Coming to Learn How the Desert Bloomed
Nissan Ratzlav-Katz, Arutz 7
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is this week hosting a major international conference on combating desertification, with experts coming to study Israel’s successes in “making the desert bloom.”
The conference, entitled “Deserts and Desertification: Challenges and Opportunities,” is sponsored by the Blaustein Institute of Desert Research (BIDR), Ben-Gurion University, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With the exception of several field tours into Israel’s reclaimed and existing desert areas, the daily lectures will be taking place on the S’dei Boker campus of Ben-Gurion University. The conference is focusing on how to confront and ameliorate factors leading to desertification, with much emphasis on the Israeli experience and its lessons for other nations.
The approximately 300 attendees hail from 20 countries spread over five continents. Keynote speakers include: Amb. Hama Arba Diallo, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification; Dr. David A. Mouat, Chairman of the experts group of the UNCCD Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada; Dr. Vandana Shiva, Founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in New Delhi, India; Professor Wangarai Maathai, Deputy Minister of the Environment of Kenya and a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.
The conference is part of international activities marking 2006 as the International Year of Deserts and Desertification, as declared by the United Nations. The UN designation was made in recognition of the acute problem of desertification, or land degradation, worldwide. Desertification, according to the BIDR’s conference website, is responsible for the loss of agricultural productivity, famine and population displacement, as well as the escalation of poverty; it affects about four hundred million people in developing regions, especially in Africa.
Israel was selected as a unique and uniquely appropriate venue for the desertification conference due to its rich history of rolling back the desert through innovation and tenacity. When the state was established in 1948, much of its semi-arid regions were degraded and the Negev desert had expanded northward all the way to the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem corridor. Since that time, a combination of intensive drylands agriculture, afforestation and economic initiatives reclaimed tens of thousands of hectares for farming, residential construction and industrial parks.
(7 Nov 2006)
Contributor Bat-Tzion Benjaminson writes:
Israel’s unique successes with sustainable desert agriculture can provide useful models even in non-desert areas with depleted acquifers – i.e. Kansas! See www.desertagriculture.org for examples of food / tree crops that require very little water.
Secret shame: I can’t ride a bike
(Original: Finding midlife balance – on two wheels)
Peter Zheutlin, Christian Science Monitor
From Harvard scholar to Caribbean islander, many adults share an embarrassing secret: They can’t ride a bike.
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SOMERVILLE, MASS. – Tucked away behind a three-story house on a quiet street here is a big red barn filled with bicycles, bicycle tires, helmets, knee and elbow pads, and lots and lots of bicycle parts. This is the home of the Bicycle Riding School where, for more than 20 years, Susan McLucas has taught nearly 2,000 adults how to ride a bicycle.
On a golden Indian summer day last month, seven students, ages 24 to 56, meet for the first of four Sunday sessions in front of Ms. McLucas’s barn, each nervous and self-conscious. Cycling, for most, is a skill learned in childhood and never forgotten. But cycling eludes people for various reasons – a fear-inducing fall at an early age is a common one – and for many who never learned to ride, there’s a secret shame.
When friends invite Janaki Thomas to join them riding on Cape Cod, she has always had an excuse, but she never shared the real reason – that she didn’t know how.
The composition of this group is typical of her classes, says McLucas: six women and one man, four were born abroad.
…Fear of falling and embarrassing themselves in front of others are the major obstacles for most adults just learning to ride. One of McLucas’s former students is Laurence Tribe, the famed constitutional scholar and Harvard law professor who has argued dozens of cases before the US Supreme Court.
“I’m anxious and nervous before each one,” says the sixty-something Mr. Tribe, “but in many ways I was more nervous about learning to ride a bicycle.”
(8 Nov 2006)
Slide show of the bike-ridiing class is online.
A Growing Trend: Small, Local and Organic
Michael S. Rosenwald, Washington Post
Popularity of Farmers Markets, Natural Grocery Stores Helps Cultivate a Rise in Niche Farms
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… [Farmer Michael] Pappas has, on this hilly field, created what few people thought was possible in the age of industrial farming: a small organic operation that is both environmentally and economically sustainable. Like dozens of other farmers across the region, he has leveraged the grass-roots-turned-mainstream popularity of farmers markets to expand the market for locally grown produce to restaurants, caterers, grocery stores and even college dining halls. Pappas, who is single and has no children, typically can’t afford to eat at Citronelle, but he says he’s making a nice living.
It’s not just nostalgia for a quaint notion of local farming — or fear of E. coli in spinach — that drives Pappas’s success, though those are important components. He’s also benefiting from the heightened sophistication of Whole Foods customers and their ilk, people who want to feed both their bodies and their social consciences, and who ask themselves, “What good is eating organic if it’s been trucked 3,000 gas-guzzling miles across the country?”
“The whole trend for the past 100 years was to get bigger or get out, but in the 1970s and ’80s people started to get smaller,” said Lynn Byczynski, editor of the Growing for Market newsletter, whose 5,000 subscribers are mostly small farmers. “Now it’s about attention to detail, about getting retail pricing and having relationships with customers. People are making a livelihood out of this.”
(6 Nov 2006)
