Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Traders have to communicate and mediate with all kinds of people. And we have a tradition of “polder politics” because we live in low-lying land (polder) that is always in danger of being flooded if the dykes don’t work. If you live with people in a polder, you have to work things out, or you’ll all drown. You need to talk with everybody. You need to get everybody on board.
When a recent study highlighted generational differences in attitudes to food waste, a large number of media outlets reported the news that millennials are the worst culprits when it comes to throwing away food and contributing to the 7.3 million tonnes of food wasted by UK households each year. The reason? Apparently an obsession with social media, Instagram culture and a ‘live to eat’ attitude are to blame…
Organic agriculture can feed the world. The only question thereby being what “feeding the world” may mean. Today, it basically means high shares of animal products in diets and that a third of production is wasted. Projections for 2050 look similar. Does this make sense? No. And this is the entry point for organic agriculture to play a role in sustainable food systems and for contributing to food security.
Julie Kunen, PhD, oversees conservation activities in 15 countries, from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, as the Vice President of the Americas program for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). With a decades-long career in conservation, academia, and development, she is committed to uniting the worlds of food, sustainability, and conservation.
Bill Parke of Blackview Farm, a pasture-based livestock farm that uses rotational grazing and Holistic Management practices, was nice enough to sit down with me and talk for a bit about the farming life.
There is a notion afoot that our agricultural production can simply migrate toward the poles in the face of climate change as areas in lower latitudes overheat and dry up. Few people contemplate what such a move would entail and whether it would actually be feasible.
Shoshi Parks wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Shoshi is a freelance travel and environment writer and Ph.D. in anthropology. She’s based in San Francisco, where she can be found snuggling dogs and advocating for water security and food justice.
The Crop Trust, the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew, and their partners are confronting this problem on a global level by identifying gaps in the world’s collections of CWRs, supporting the collecting efforts of 24 national programs to fill those gaps, and working with more than 40 institutions to develop pre-breeding materials that will help adapt crops to a changing climate.
Based on the concept “From Plate to Plate,” the Guandu Institute offers environmental solutions for large restaurants and seeks to inspire restoring the planet’s health. How? By composting organic trash, food preparation excess and leftovers, which go to landfills. Composting doesn’t only help to diminish the volume in landfills but it also produces fertilizer, such a fundamental resource for food production.
In this episode Dan Palmer from Making Permaculture Stronger enjoys a wide-ranging conversation with Darren J. Doherty from Regrarians.org.
Safely tucked into the San Miguel mountains northeast of San Luis Obispo, down a long ambling road that leads far away from cities, highways and all of civilization, warm late afternoon light falls and fills the golden hills surrounding Blue Oak Canyon Ranch. The two humble stewards of Blue Oak are Lynn and Jim Moody, who tell me that just a week prior, the grass was still green.
The difficulty, I think, is that the conditions in which it’s feasible to build plausible ‘bottom-up’ anarchist-communist societies are unusual, and their chances of longevity are slight – either because they’re annihilated by the stronger forces of the centralised state (as happened with the Paris Commune), or because they succumb to the internal contradictions of their own somewhat hidden power dynamics. Still, Ross’s analysis raises a lot of interesting questions concerning the course that a free, egalitarian peasant society of the future might take.
