Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In a year chock full of surprises, contradictions, warning signs, and increasingly vocal calls for systemic change, it is easy to overlook the many ways that new economic paradigms and practices are cropping up in everyday awareness as an essential vector of the immense transitions underway.
Today, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture released Letters to a Young Farmer, a book which compiles insight from some of the most influential farmers, writers, and leaders in the food system in an anthology of essays and letters.
The sun is going to power up what is now Alberta’s Number One industry — food production, processing and preparation — which was the topic of my keynote speech at an Edmonton conference called Cultivating Connections: Alberta Regional Food System Forum 2017.
I’ve found that teaching resilience and sustainability by these new definitions doesn’t come easily. It’s rarely about teaching information.
And without forests, innumerable other species would perish as well. The only way to save the forests now is to intervene, despite all the myriad risks that human intervention entails.
Whatever we are facing now we need to have a root system embedded in weather patterns, the presences of animals, our dreams, and the ones who came before us. Myth is insistent that when there is a crisis, genius lives on the margins not the centre.
That NEIC was able to finance property cooperatively reflects Minnesota’s deeply cooperative root system, which reaches back more than 100 years to producer-owned cooperatives that invested together in grain elevators, then used those connections to form vast sellers’ cooperatives like Land O’ Lakes.
The “best practice” biking infrastructure designs that have evolved in Copenhagen and other European cities result in high rates of cycling, more just societies and more convivial cities.
Fast forward to 2017. 10 years have flown past in a blur. Transition is now active in thousands of communities around the world, in over 50 countries….It has pioneered innovative approaches to developing a healthy organizational culture, and to the balance of inner and outer Transition.
Our purpose should be to force governments and corporations to do what must be done. There is no other way that this is going to happen.
Over the months I’ve found out about a number of different ideas and models, but one of the most interesting is the Share Farming approach taken by a farm down in the Quantocks…
Likewise, it looks to me like Standing Rock has devolved into an attempt on the part of big business to exterminate a particular kind of consciousness, demoralize it, demonstrate its weakness, and win recruits to a less feeling way of existing in the service of these business entities and the governmental agencies they have co-opted.
