Winter Solstice 2025
The day after the solstice we gain a few more minutes of sunlight. Every new year, every season, every cycle, every brand new twenty four hours is a new beginning. Seize the day.
Food & Water featured
The Hands That Harvest: Resilience and Change in Ghana’s Cocoa Belt
Janet, Racheal, and Joyce illustrate how knowledge, community support, and financial literacy can transform lives. They are building houses, saving money, improving their families’ health, and educating their children.
When Young People and Farmers are Guardians of Soil Health
In the territory of Vojvodina, Serbia, farmers and young people are stepping up to care for the soil. “Guardians of Soil Health” is a citizen science project that teaches participants how to monitor key indicators of soil health, such as organic matter decomposition, pH value, moisture, structure, texture, and microbial activity.
For a Green Peace: Restoring the Small Water Cycles to Save Our Sahara
In a Maghreb growing increasingly thirsty, water is no longer just a resource: it has become a diagnostic tool for our shared vulnerabilities, a marker of regional tensions, and perhaps — if we choose it — the foundation of a new era of ecological cooperation.
Will there be food?
I reiterate my assumption that we will end up with a great degree of simplification in a post-collapse world. My assumption is also that there will be enough steel and energy to forge useful tools for agriculture and that the auxiliary energy needed over and above human muscle power will be a mix of animal traction, biomass, electricity from renewables as well as limited use of fossil fuels, at least where they are regionally available.
Reflections on gratitude
I do think we need this feast to return to its roots, as a potlatch, a bonding redistribution of wealth and full bellies, a rapprochement across the great divides, and a coming together in joy to feed each other. We need something that draws us into community, that builds ties, that creates relationship and memories.
Proposed East Texas water pipeline and the growing thirst for distant water
East Texas farmers and ranchers are finding out to their dismay that water has become a commodity like so many of our daily needs.
The Shutdown proved that the USA needs SNAP
The short, natural experiment we all witnessed reinforces that SNAP is the nation’s first line of defense against hunger and food insecurity and food pantries can only be a secondary and supplemental source of food. Food pantries and food banks cannot substitute for a robust, reliable, government-funded food safety net.
Should We Start Taxing Meat?
The debate continues, but one certainty is that we must make the production and consumption of meat and dairy more sustainable and realign our agricultural systems with planetary boundaries and dietary guidelines.
Beyond Carbon: A Paradigm Shift for Climate Action
We must enforce, fund, and model policies that recognize the forest not merely as a carbon repository, but as the planet’s irreplaceable air conditioning and freshwater generation system.
Tehran contemplates “evacuation” as many cities across the globe face water dilemmas
The world’s cities creep closer to actual water system collapse.
Can a Family Resurrect the American Chestnut Tree in Appalachia?
Virginia tree farmers reintroduce an iconic tree that was decimated by blight.
