Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We’ve forgotten that we are all healers. We don’t have to go to school or memorize names in Latin; we all have access to plants and can comfort ourselves with our plant ancestors, Just as the Intertribal Canoe Journey has revitalized our culture, we hope that plant medicine will be one more pathway to connection and community healing.
In choosing the name of a place, The Chico Flax Project is pointing to more than the location of their farm — they’re highlighting the numerous community members interwoven with the vision to make a Chico-based cloth.
Viewed over centuries, the beneficial role of upland farmers as stewards of both the landscape and their local communities is clear. However, George Monbiot, spoke for rewilding largely from an ideological standpoint.
The farming and gardening section, alone, in my home library contains approximately 300 titles. Here are five titles that inspired me to want to farm.
In the recent debate about beef and it’s impact on the environment there are two views. There are those who view cattle as greenhouse-gas belching planet destroyers, while others depict them as benevolent carbon sequestration machines.
Today, IATP and GRAIN jointly published a first of its kind study that quantifies emissions from 35 of the world’s largest meat and dairy companies and scrutinizes their climate plans. What do these companies intend to do to reduce their share of emissions for the world to avoid climate catastrophe?
A new report on stormwater capture issued by the Pacific Institute – the Oakland, California-based water think tank – looks at regulatory and funding challenges as well as creative solutions and collaborations.
Horton Community Farm is an oasis of green tucked within a side-road off one of bustling Bradford’s busy roads. After a breathless, up-hill walk, entering the green land calms the heart and opens the senses.
To me the most successful approach lies in using the most weakly positive approaches to enhancing plant growth to maximise the effectiveness of limited resources, then applying negative design to shape the vegetation across the landscape.
On social farms, health, social or specialist educational care services for vulnerable people are delivered through structured programmes of farming-related activities. Social farming is established in numerous European countries. Norway currently operates 1,100 social farms, compared to 240 in the UK.
Charles C. Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet, published earlier this year, is a fabulous book. Not a perfect book; sometimes, in order to bulk up this two-pronged thesis, he will throw in supplementary material that threatens to bog down his central investigation. But that investigation comes through loud and clear all the same, and it is one worth looking at closely.
I prefer to spend my money with food enterprises operating with sustainability in mind, that minimise waste, are transparent about their supply chains, take an ethical approach to animal welfare and the environment, and produce food for health and flavour, not shelf life.
