Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
How can we engage in effective knowledge mobilization in wider processes of change working towards greater social justice and sustainability? To what extent can researchers play a role in co-producing and mobilizing knowledge in these processes of change with social movements and communities?
Now we were planting the seeds of a different kind of trade. A different kind of economy. One built on the mutual trust of nature and human. An interdependent relationship woven with seeds and soil, water and sweat. One founded on the ecological processes of life, not the profit margins of an economic system of death. We built gardens and we healed the land that week. We sang and linked arms and we shut down empire together. We cried, we planted, and we stood our ground for a thriving world; and the seeds of change took root.
Most of us eat grains every day – in bread, cereals, biscuits or pasta. In recent years, with gluten intolerance on the rise, wheat has been getting bad press. But how much do you know about this grain that forms such a significant part of our diet, and how has the wheat we eat changed over the centuries?
The Sustainable Cotton Project began in 1996 and has concentrated on creating a high-quality cotton fiber in the US that’s free of the most toxic pesticides and herbicides. Though not certified organic, it’s eliminated the most dangerous chemicals, and helped farmers connect with manufacturers under the Cleaner Cotton™ branding.
Re-discovering how to cook and eat heritage barley – especially in the world’s biggest barley-growing nations of Europe, Australia and North America – could encourage farmers to grow special landrace heritage varieties. These could be grown in marginal climates and make a substantial contribution to ensuring global food security in the face of climate change.
I made a decision: Upon returning home I would upend the way that I had been cultured to consume and wear textiles, and as a function of this change, I would allow myself and my body to become the center of an experiment.
The organic, no-till movement is gaining traction around the world, which is a very hopeful thing. It has a long way to go, however, mostly because of the stubborn belief in the primacy of the plow, which borders on the religious among many farmers. After all, we’ve been using it for nearly 5000 years!
The modern food movement took the shape it retains today during those 15 years from 1995 to 2010. Food movements were among the first to embrace the understanding that knowledge and wisdom had to move from narrow fields of specialization to comprehensive and open-ended searching.
I call this place-based textile system a fibershed. Similar to a local watershed or a foodshed, a fibershed is focused on the source of the raw material, the transparency with which it is converted into clothing, and the connectivity among all parts, from soil to skin and back to soil.
What we’re finding, and what European scientists are finally figuring out, is that human beings are meant to be a keystone species. And a keystone species is a species that if you take it out, the whole thing unravels.
This year marks the sesquicentennial of explorer Powell’s expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers in 1869. Perhaps more than any other man of his time, he comprehended the limits of Western geography, and suggested that inhabiting the land would require a far different set of rhythms than those we had cultivated up to that point. He questioned the entire orthodoxy shaping the West during his age—an orthodoxy that is shaping it still.
In many parts of the world, we are now feeding ourselves through intensive, large-scale agriculture. But the price of this kind of agriculture might be too high. It is the price of losing our most precious good, fertile soil and an intact environment. We can do better than that.
