Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
We no longer think of food as medicine, or expect it to be medicine. We are more often concerned about the negative aspects, avoiding the unhealthy foods we shouldn’t eat. Plants have provided our medicine for most of human history.
A recent report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems identifies these five mechanisms whereby the current food system makes people sick. The report calls for a reform of the food and farming systems to be made on the grounds of protecting human health. Many of the most severe health are caused by core industrial food and farming practices, such as chemical-intensive agriculture; intensive livestock production and the mass production and mass marketing of ultra-processed foods. They are in turn stimulated by the deregulated global trade.
Healthy soil is so important for life on earth yet so poorly understood or appreciated. Science and technology brought us the “green revolution”; chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, supersized tractors, genetically modified crops adapted to life drenched with agricultural chemicals. What is rarely apparent to most agricultural specialists is the damage this is causing the soil, basically turning it into ‘dirt’.
As Günther and his cows wove their way through Laatsch, a beeping horn stopped him. He turned around, spreading his arms to slow the bovine promenade behind him, and let the car slip by before he and his cows stepped back into the main thoroughfare for their jaunt from the barn to pasture. The driver had Swiss plates and a business suit. Someone in a rush to make money, he surmised, while he headed out to his fields to seal his own financial fate in several plastic bags.
It’s safe to say that life would not be the same without trees. In fact, all human civilisation is dependent upon them. Not only as a source of valuable resources, but also for the ecological benefits they provide – called ecosystem services. We all know trees are awesome, but most people don’t quite understand all the important things they do.
Welcome to community-owned Huxhams Cross Farm set on the rolling hills of south Devon on the edge of the Dartington Hall estate. Secured by the Biodynamic Land Trust (of which more later), its 34-acres exemplifies human-scale farming in a world increasingly dominated by industrial farming.
The 19th century ended as it began with many of the world’s people working primarily as small-scale, self-providing cultivators under the weaker or stronger suzerainty of large empires whose rise predated capitalism. But things weren’t the same at century’s end as at the beginning – a globalising capitalist economy had thoroughly penetrated the existing order and dominated it politically through direct or indirect colonial rule.
What happens when you eat the wrong food over and over again? We call it “leakage.” Leakage is when capital exits the economy rather than remaining in it. Our current food system as designed (or left un-designed) is a constant source of leakage for our cities and a missed opportunity for urban planners.
