We’re Dumb about Exponential Growth. That’s Proving Lethal
Gradually, and then suddenly. That’s how exponential growth can ruin your day, undo your family, evaporate your economy, destroy your climate, crush an empire and destabilize a planet.
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We are Doomed if, in the Post-Covid-19 World, We Cannot Abandon Non-Essentials
If there is one lesson all of us should have learnt during the Covid-19 crisis, it is about how to separate the ‘essential’ from the ‘non-essential’.
This is the Year to Save Seed! Here’s How
If ever there was a year to learn to save seed, I think this is it. So many people planted coronavirus gardens this spring that many seed sources ran out.
Growing 50 Acres of Hemp in North Carolina: Field Notes from the One Acre Exchange
Any farm project considering the integration of industrial hemp as a market crop should be prepared for a 5-10 year incubation period in determination of crop yield and profitability. On the fiber side, a few acres of the crop will be processed into hurd-free, long staple fiber following best practices learned and iterated over the previous four years.
Four Reasons Civilization Won’t Decline: It Will Collapse
The eventual outcome of this great implosion is up for grabs. Will we overcome denial and despair; kick our addiction to petroleum; and pull together to break the grip of corporate power over our lives?
Thinking Outside the Ring
I grant that at this moment in our converging health, societal, and economic crises—including the equivalent of a 32.9 percent annual decline in GDP—words discouraging economic activity probably come as unwelcome (especially from the jewelry store owners and the malls that lease them space).
The Regenerative Grower’s Guide to Garden Amendments: Excerpt
Rediscoveries of forgotten or discarded ideas about plant growth—such as that truly healthy plants can thwart soilborne and airborne pathogens, as well as insect pests, and provide significantly higher levels of nutritional value—are the inspiration for a new model for tending gardens and farm fields.
E-communitarian Democracy: What is it?
We consider democracy especially in its direct, participatory and/or representative forms, and for the satisfaction of individual needs (within the ecological frugality prescribed by the third fundamental norm of ethics, and respect for interculturality).
Could Cover Crops Help Fight Global Food Insecurity?
The use of cover crops allows farmers to protect their soil before and after they harvest annual crops so that the ground is always covered. Cover crops are a sustainable technique, as they build healthy soil and conserve water, but could they help fight food insecurity?
In Tackling the Global Climate Crisis, Doom and Optimism are Both Dangerous Traps
The popular discourse around the climate emergency all too often highlights fringe voices that predict the end of the world or suggest that there is little to worry about. But as the climatologist Steven Schneider presciently remarked a decade ago, when it comes to the climate “the end of the world” and “good for us” are probably the two least likely outcomes.
I’m Sian, and I’m a fossil fuel addict: on paradox, disavowal and (im)possibility in changing climate change
In the famous 12-steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and associated programmes, the first step is to recognise that you are indeed addicted. That you are bound to a substance over which you do not have control, such that this substance has become your ‘higher power’, its material qualities and structures of access determining one’s activities and choices in the world.
Schumacher – a 21st Century Druid College?
But a college that finds spiritual expression in service to the others with whom we live (human or other-than-human) and to the land beneath our feet, that scrutinises and decolonises itself without fragility, that privileges listening before speaking, and that acts mindfully and soulfully in the world, would be a college that meets the needs of the time.
