Food & Water

Community supported agriculture

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Wellington’s CSA offers a new model as a multi-stakeholder cooperative: it is currently the only New Zealand cooperative that exists for the mutual benefit of both consumers and producers. For growers, it seeks to create a return to help grow the farm, provide better farming resources, expand its own coverage, improve distribution mechanisms and promote the health values of producing food in this manner. The consumers appreciate the availability of nutritious healthy food, produced without leeching and destroying the land as modern industrial farming does, as well as the social benefits of working together voluntarily at the tasks involved in running their cooperative.

Skill sharing as a way of life

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Engaging in the reskilling/skillsharing aspect of transition has revolutionised my whole attitude towards life. As I say, I didn’t really notice it at first. It’s been cumulative and all-pervasive. Paying attention to my own skills and those of fellows-in-transition, which are dismissed or ignored in the mainstream discourse: the ability to hold a meeting where everyone’s included; communicating the experience of downshifting; learning to cook and eat differently; making space so solutions can emerge in the face of energy and financial constraints, using a chainsaw, making a rocket stove at the Transition Camp!

Ending “Farmer’s Wife” Syndrome

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We have used language to write women out of agriculture – out of its history, out of its present, engaging in the “housewifization” of real agricultural work. The implication that the farmer’s wife is not a farmer, and is thus knowledgeable about only kitchens and babies (as important as those things are) is a diminuation, an act of linguistic violence that erases the multiple competences of farm women, partnered or not.

From mountain to sea: A vision for the rebuilding of Tohoku

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Why would a fisher care about the forest? The person to ask is Shigeatsu Hatakeyama, an oyster farmer from Kesennuma in Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture. We can learn a great deal from Hatakeyama. He is one of those rare types of people who can see beyond the day-to-day preoccupation of how to make a living — in his case, with an oyster farm — and instead embrace the world around them.

At last, the plowgirl has arrived

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The most obvious and promising sign of the new agriculture is the leadership that women are taking in the movement. Women have always played the key role in farming but at least in the last two centuries in America, they have rarely gotten credit for it.

connecting with our roots – a plants for life talk

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But to connect with the plants is to connect with the rhythm of the year, to locate yourself in time and space. It is to connect with the neighbourhood you find yourself in and discover, that even though your world has apparently shrunk because of economics and peak oil, it has in fact grown hugely. It has by your attention to detail, brought memory, fragrance, belonging back into your life, as you notice the limes in the churchyard, the sage in the library garden, the butterburr along the highway. Each plant a small universe with its own story to tell, its own medicine to bequeath.

Resilient people, resilient planet: a future worth choosing

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Now more than ever, leaders need to focus on what matters most – the long-term resilience of people and the planet – the High-level Panel on Global Sustainability urged in its report presented today to UN Secretary-General BAN Ki-moon in Addis Ababa.

The 22-member Panel, established by the Secretary-General in August 2010 to formulate a new blueprint for sustainable development and low-carbon prosperity, was co-chaired by the presidents of Finland and South Africa. The final report contains 56 recommendations to put sustainable development into practice and to mainstream it into economic policy as quickly as possible.

(excerpts from the final report)

Revitalising socio-ecological production landscapes

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For millennia, humans have been interacting closely with nature and building up a wealth of knowledge about effective use and management of local resources critical for securing food, clothing and shelter. As a result, sustainable production systems have emerged over history in many parts of the world, forming so-called “socio-ecological production landscapes” (SEPLs). These landscapes embody many aspects of the green economy concept and provide not only useful indications of how humans and nature have harmoniously interacted in the past, but also guidance on how to transition to sustainable societies built on green economies.

My prices are not too high: A farmer fires back

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Every week during the growing season, my husband and I cart our family’s grassfed meats to market. We sell pork chops for $11 a pound; ground beef goes for $7.50. Every week, we meet someone who tells us the prices are too high. In fact, at those prices, the average net income for our family members has maxed out at $10 per hour. But part of our job is to hold our chins up and accept weekly admonishment for our inability to produce food as cheaply as it can be found in the grocery store.