Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
There will be light posting from 20th April to 5th May due to editorial vacations. Regular posting will resume on 8th May. Teaser photo credit: By ClemRutter, Rochester, Kent. – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2163988
For the ecomodernists, the world presents itself predominantly as a set of technical challenges – how to feed the world, how to power it, and so forth. The mood is optimism, the modus operandi is solutionism.
How does resource sharing affect biodiversity? How does knowledge exchange drive community resilience? How is information access—delivered via technologies—an equalizer among the underrepresented, marginalized, and oppressed? How does our ability to feed a growing planet depend on a culture of openness?
Meals on Wheels delivers freshly made, healthy meals to seniors and other homebound persons across the United States. Operating through a network of more than 5,000 local groups, Meals on Wheels is able to provide 218 million meals to over 2.4 million people annually.
By living and grazing on land that is managed with Carbon Farming techniques, Stemple Creek’s wool draws down more carbon out of the atmosphere than is produced in its raising and processing.
Besides deregulation and competition from large-scale agribusinesses, there’s a new factor casting uncertainty over the future of Britain’s small farms: the ‘B’ word. Since the EU referendum in summer 2016, there’s been much uncertainty around what future farming policy will look like.
The food system as commons, a shared interest and shared responsibility, emerges as a competing narrative to food as commodity. Rethinking food as a right, farming as a management system of the planet and the food system as a commons also necessitates the building of new institutions fit for these purposes.
Salvage capitalism, ecological assemblages, and precarity… These are a few concepts that Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing fleshes out in The Mushroom At the End of the World, a genre bending book that tracks the global economy by way of the Matsutake mushroom.
Known as the soil health movement, it is a management philosophy centered around four simple principles: reduce or eliminate tillage, keep plant residues on the soil surface, keep living roots in the ground, and maximize diversity of plants and animals.
The group’s message is that “fresh, nutritious food and a positive environment in which to eat it, is a basic right which all of us should enjoy,” a right that should be legally underpinned, formalising the government’s responsibility to ensure the nation is adequately fed – and potentially leaving it vulnerable to legal challenges if it fails.
I am very excited about the growing recognition of using ecological approaches to growing food, particularly linked to the growing interest in rebuilding local and regional food systems. This not only builds regional economic and cultural vibrancy, but it helps us all stay healthier.
I promised a bonfire of the numbers on my Peasant’s Republic of Wessex project in this post. Well, here goes. We shall also be taking a couple of side trips to the city state of Londinium – which, it turns out, is not without its peasant-like aspects – and to the Principality of Wales. So pour yourself a stiff one, pull up a pew, and get yourself some matches to help me light the flame.
