Food & Water

‘The Post Carbon Reader’ at one year old

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This hefty book from a small publisher (and with an even smaller marketing budget) has sold over 10,000 copies, and its chapters have been downloaded over 20,000 times. It’s in classrooms at over 25 different colleges across the United States. People often ask what the story is behind the book. So here it is.

Maybe old tractors do die

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Ethanol in gasoline is not the wonder fuel it has been made out to be. It is causing problems when used in off-road vehicles— lawn motors, chain saws, boat motors, four wheelers, not to mention old tractors. Although I have had no cause to complain yet myself, I first heard rumors of these problems when 10 percent ethanol was added to gasoline (E-10 fuel. Now that the EPA has approved 15 percent ethanol in gasoline (E-15 fuel) the complaints are increasing.

Food & agriculture – Jan 4

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-2012: The Year to Stop Playing Nice
-New Farmer School
-A Punch to the Mouth: Food Price Volatility Hits the World
-China’s Growing Urban Population Sprouts Urban Farms
-Students Say “Occupy Your Plate”, Plan to Converge at Retreat to Grow Food Cooperatives
-Organic Agriculture May Be Outgrowing Its Ideals
-Digging Into Potash Stocks

Entering the fifth zone – 2012

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…In the forest where the passionflower grows, where its leaves have been used as a poultice for thousands of years, the Maya sit in small straw huts and weave patterns of extraordinary complexity, the most beautiful fabrics of the world in all the colours of the quetzal bird. In their imaginations and in their hearts they hold calendars of equal complexity, that rotate at different speeds like the stars around the sun. They have held these complex patterns inside them for thousands of years – patterns of time, of colour, of beauty. They held them before the cities came and after they fell into ruin. The temples did not hold them. The temples never do…

From milk to superfoods: Supping with the devil?

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I’d be surprised if many readers of this blog work for the fracking industry. Those charming people spend a lot on lobbying and public relations, sure – but their main aim in life is to remain obscure. But food and drink? The branding, the packaging, the communications, the stores, the promotions, the trade shows, the hotels, the restaurants? Would I be wrong to guess that 75% of us have worked for a global food enterprise, directly or indirectly, at some point? I know I have: an industry talk here, a futures workshop there, a couple of healthcare events…But two new publications this week have left me sick to the stomach. I just don’t think it’s defensible any more to turn a blind eye to the social and ecological crimes Big Food is committing, in other parts of the world, so that you and I can eat what we damn well feel like.

On Wendell Berry: As farms go, so go the cities

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Those who love Wendell Berry, from homesteaders and Greenhorns (that’s new farmers to you and me) to community gardeners, find inspiration in the plainspoken moral indignation of this latter-day Jeffersonian who won’t be budged from his conviction that the real America is farms and rural towns, not big cities and suburbs.

Wes Jackson: A perennial revolution in agriculture

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After study and reflection, Jackson devised the mission that has fueled his career ever since. He would work to mimic the systems of the natural prairie, with its wide variety of plants growing together. He would focus on developing perennial crops that produced edible seeds, and required far fewer inputs than most of modern agriculture. He would address what he calls “solving the problem of agriculture” by creating new ways to produce grain that drew inspiration from natural energy flows, and did not require annual disruption of the soil.