Food & Water

Water – May 14

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•Water increasingly crucial in energy policies, experts say •Acidification: the latest unknown for stressed Arctic ecosystem •Rivers Carry Away Waste Heat Form Power Plants at a Cost to the Environment •Safe drinking water disappearing fast in Bangladesh •Land O’ Lakes: Melting Glaciers Transform Alpine Landscape •Our Earth Hangout: Clean Water for All

Food & agriculture – May 14

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•Science as Dialogue: What My Garden and I Are Discussing in 2013

•Biofuels a big cause of famine

•Food Price Inflation as Redistribution: Towards a New Analysis of Corporate Power in the World Food System

•Over half the world’s population could rely on food imports by 2050 – study

•Agriculture and Livestock Remain Major Sources of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The global land grab: The new enclosures

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Consider this. It is 1607. The English have been taking lands in Ireland for several centuries. First written down in the 7th century, Irish customary law is sophisticated and still administered by trained traditional magistrates (Brehons). Now rulings in the English courts on Gavelkind (1605) and Tanistry (1607) finally deny that customary law delivers property rights. Family holdings are made tenancies of by now well established Anglo-Irish elites, and the commons, crucial to grazing and hunting, are made more absolutely the property of the elites and new waves of English and Scottish settlers. Irish communities may use the commons at the will of these new owners.

VIDEO: The Great Laws of Nature: Indigenous Organic Agriculture Documentary

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Let’s reconnect with our relatives in nature… The plant beings. Here’s how: A group of First Nations People in Saskatchewan Canada are reclaiming their Indigenous organic and natural agricultural heritage, reconnecting with Nature, learning and observing her natural laws, and getting back on the road to self-reliance.

The future of protein

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We come from a long line of bug eaters. Our earliest primate ancestors were insectivores, and our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, make rudimentary tools to fish termites out of narrow tunnels in their mounds. Among the laws of Leviticus codified by the Israelites millennia ago is permission to eat “the locust after its kind, and the bald locust after its kind, and the cricket after its kind, and the grasshopper after its kind.” Roman naturalist Pliny wrote that beetle grubs were so prized that they were fattened on meal to enhance their flavor. And the German explorer Heinrich Barth wrote in his 1857 Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa that people who ate locusts could “enjoy not only the agreeable flavor of the dish, but also take a pleasant revenge on the ravagers of their fields.”

Eating Rich, Living Poor: DIY Food By Necessity

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It started disastrously. Three bare months before my partner and I moved, at the start of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, I was diagnosed with celiac disease. There was no cure, only a strict diet to be followed. No more gluten, which meant wheat, rye, or barley. Those three ingredients seemed to be in everything. No cookies, no crackers, no soups, no bread, no pasta, no potpies. Nothing. I couldn’t even add soy sauce to my stir fry. It was winter and the cold was already taking a toll on me. Long, cloudy months lowered my spirits. Winter cut through my jacket and bit at my bones.