Inspiration

Paul Willis

At Niman Ranch, “We’re Doing Something Special” Raising Pigs Humanely

By Danielle Nierenberg, Food Tank

On “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg,” Paul Willis, founder of Niman Ranch Pork Company, and Elle Gadient, intern at Niman Ranch, talk about their love for humanely treated, free-range pigs and the farmers that raise them. “When we talked about free-range pigs the first time, it sounded odd to even say that,” says Willis. Before industrial practices became popular, says Willis, “pasture pigs were the norm; there were many hog operations, almost all pasture type, in those days. There were no confinement buildings.” “I had been raising outdoor pigs, and selling them at the commodity market. We were being squeezed out. The price was getting worse when I met Bill Niman. He’s the first person to ever ask me what I wanted for my pigs,” says Willis. In 1995, Willis and Niman partnered to expand sustainable and humane hog farming methods across the Midwest, now including more than 720 family farmers....

  • September 24, 2018
radical cities

How Radical Municipalism can Go Beyond the Local

By Aaron Vansintjan, Mason Herson-Ford, Uneven Earth

Climate change, global finance, the neoliberal state: today’s crises require action on a big scale. And yet fighting for local democracy is – perhaps counter-intuitively – the best chance we’ve got. Throughout this series, we’ve argued that the best way to address today’s ecological, social, and political crises is to get people together where they live and work to provide resources that people need – eventually building up an alternative political and economic system that can replace the present, failing system. We need to build a democratic, just, and ecological world in the shell of the old. In the previous installment, we argued that organising on the level of the neighborhood, town, and city is the most strategic approach to this today. The rise of loneliness worldwide, the centrality of real estate speculation for global economic growth, and the breakdown of many large-scale factories that helped to bring workers together mean that we...

  • September 24, 2018
K

‘The Creativity Crisis’

By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

If climate change is anything, it must be the greatest failure  of the imagination in the history of the world.  Perhaps K’s paper might offer some illumination as to why our response isn’t happening fast enough?

  • September 24, 2018
Fabricating permaculture design

Bringing it All Together in Just. One. Diagram. Part Three

By Dan Palmer, Making Permaculture Stronger

Now here’s the thing. Adaptation cannot be fabricated or master planned, period. I believe it to be an essential truth that adapted systems can only emerge or be generated iteratively, in an ongoing dance between a system’s form and its context.

  • September 21, 2018
hummingbird

Be the Hummingbird. Be the Bear

By Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth Island Journal

Protecting the children is a formidable responsibility. But it is our responsibility, and we bring to the task a formidable set of powers, honed, sharpened, and passed down mother-to-daughter over generations.

  • September 21, 2018
Tractor

Improving Air Quality with Clover

By Honor May Eldridge, Sustainable Food Trust

Greater action to address the root causes of air pollution from the agricultural sector is needed. To face the growing environmental crisis caused by nitrogen pollution there needs to be a fundamental shift in the way that we produce food.

  • September 20, 2018
Book cover

There is an Alternative to Neoliberalism – in Britain and Beyond

By Laurie Macfarlane, openDemocracy

'New Thinking for the British Economy' – a new eBook published today by openDemocracy – brings together leading thinkers to outline the broad pillars of a new post-neoliberal agenda, and the type of policies that are needed to get us there.

  • September 20, 2018
food system

What Public Banks Can Do for Food Systems

By Matt Stannard, Shareable

A public bank is a government-run financial institution that takes banks' power to create value through lending and turns that power into a public utility, lending at low interest to meet public needs.

  • September 19, 2018
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