Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth is to stop thinking there’s a single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, or that bang for your buck metrics of this kind are helpful in formulating how best to live.
Do you want to live in a world in which artificial food is produced by intelligent robots and corporations that put profits before people? Or one where agroecological innovations ensure we can nourish ourselves and our communities in a fair, ecologically regenerative, and culturally rich way?
The more food we can access nearby, the more our communities can be prepared for whatever the future brings—not to mention keeping transportation costs lower and bolstering our local economies.
For the last four years, The SFT has been working on the Global Farm Metric (GFM) – a harmonised measure of sustainability that has the potential to unite food system stakeholders, such as farmers, retailers and banks across the globe and re-situate agriculture as a solution to climate change, biodiversity loss and declining public health.
There are Black Swans that you can’t do anything about because you don’t know they’re going to happen; but the Grey Swans are predictable – not in their dimensions or timing exactly; but we know there’s going to be another food price crisis, a catastrophic climactic moment of some sort, or energy problems: things like this are going to happen.
I don’t really want to go looking for arguments with anyone working broadly within alternative agriculture, permaculture or human-centred economics – though I’ve learned the hard way that people have different judgements about the boundary between ‘looking for discussion’ and ‘looking for arguments’.
Welcome back to Part Two of a conversation with permaculture co-originator David Holmgren, in which David continues sharing significant milestones from his many decades as a practicing permaculture designer.
“Innovation” is ubiquitous as a way to describe beneficial societal change. Yet, the innovation language is deeply tied to a technology-centric and top-down ways of thinking that shackles the imagination and limits the pathways for change.
As communities become more complex and the number of challenges they face increases, it is important to create a foundation of support that residents can lean on at any time: Enter little free fridge or pantrys.
Civilisations have tried to dominate chaos with order for centuries, in a false dichotomy of biblical proportions. Greater diversity wants to exist. Perhaps our role is not to impose order, but to steward complexity.
What is the value of a life? What is the consequence of a death? Is there a right way to kill? What is the best way to live?
It is agribusiness that most aggressively alleges that all other forms of agriculture are inadequate. This Malthusian spectre is a good story, it’s had a tremendous run, but it’s just not true.
