Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I am convinced that the seething cauldron of human thought boils up in the ethereal atmosphere of ideas, a process made more substantive now by electronic communication gone wild, and that more seemingly creative people have taller antennae jutting out from behind their ears to pick up on the latest notions and theories floating around in the great brain hovering over us.
Strength in numbers! More than 3,600 farmers strong gathered for the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin the last weekend in February, and it was an amazing experience. The conference featured keynotes by food policy expert Margaret Krome and Food Corps director Curt Ellis, a cornucopia of training opportunities focused on all aspects of organic farming, and a special “Young Organic Stewards” track for newcomers and beginning farmers with specialized workshops and social events.
In most East African countries access to electricity is very low. Besides electricity, there is a basic need for energy. In Eastern African countries most of the energy consumed is produced from traditional solid biomasses, such as the burning of wood.
The search for combustibles begins early in the morning, includes several hours of walking, and, in cases where no trees are to be found, digging for roots with bare hands; in some regions this activity is accompanied by the constant danger of violent and sexual assaults. In areas where there is no wood left for burning, cow dung or other waste is used for fuel.
America’s movement toward empire was anything but straightforward, not least because of the deep divisions among regional settlement patterns sketched out in last week’s post. Those divisions drove an equally profound split between competing modes of expansion — a split that finally exploded into America’s most costly war. Ironically, the mode that won proceeded to make itself obsolete by running headlong into the limits to growth, and thus set the stage for the push for overseas empire that dominated American history in the 20th century.
This was an important discussion back when I wrote it in 2007, and somehow, I’ve never re-run it (although it does appear in Aaron and my book _A Nation of Farmers_). It is definitely time to talk more about this model, and I’m hoping to enlist many of you in doing an evaluation of the real productivity of our home gardens and farms – using this as a model. So time to run it again, as a starting point for seeing how much progress the local food movement has really made in the years since it began!
Like bread making, about which I wrote a few weeks ago in the beginning of my Yes, You Can…series, fermentation can easily scare the living daylights out of you. Not only does it operate on the presumption that you’re working with the bacterial world (a concept modern people are taught to fear like the Plague itself) but it also requires that element that we’re taught to believe is in ever short supply: Time. In the spirit of not only bucking those fake obstacles, but embracing them with decided exuberance, author Sandor Ellix Katz has created a little masterpiece with his book Wild Fermentation, The Flavor, Nutrition and Craft of Live-Culture Foods.
In our local coffee shops, farmers gather every morning to trade stories. The topic sometimes gets around to scars and then the bull really starts flying. I love to listen, unnoticed, from a far off table.
I’m a great supporter of community energy generation, but I want to talk about another form of energy, one which I consider to be an essential component of our future energy economy, and perhaps more importantly, one which could affect our fundamental sense of wellbeing.
I’m talking about food: human fuel.
This is a post about shopping and a conversation we’ve been having for three years now in my Transition initiatives about relocalising food culture in East Anglia. Because when you’re discussing supermarkets you are really discussing the industrialised food system and the producerist society we live in. It’s a massive topic and one we will return to in our Diet and Environment Week in April, when I’m hoping to write about disentangling ourselves from Big Ag on the micro-level. Right now I’m looking at the macro-level and how there is life after supermarkets. Really.
One man’s trash is another an’s treasure. We’ve all heard this saying before, but John-Paul Maxfield is acting on it. At Waste Farmers, John-Pauls takes city food scraps that were once thrown away, and composts them into top-quality soil amendments for Denver growers.
Yes, I know. Secretary Vilsack called for 100,000 new farmers. The 2008 Farm Bill appropriated $75 million dollars of funds for Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Programs to provide education and training to get new farmers started. And of course, we have Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food and inspiring advocates like USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan leading this movement to get more people farming. Not to mention the growing market and awareness surrounding local foods. And yet, to be actually in it, planning a farm as a born-and-bred city kid without ties to the land (more specifically a specific piece of land), it feels so so so far away.
The dominant focus on advanced technologies and higher-level politics, I argue here, has limited value for understanding crucial elements in processes of technological change that take place in society, therewith touching upon key democratic values. This is illustrated with introduced changes to rice cultivation. Technological change is often associated with innovation.
