Soil Capital: A ground-level investing opportunity
What would it be like to invest in—not just eat from—the veggie farmers, cheese artisans and ranchers at the local farmers’ market?
Food & Water
Soaring Oil and Food Prices Threaten Affordable Food Supply
The current global food system is highly fuel- and transport-dependent. Fuels will almost certainly become less affordable in the near and medium term, making the current, highly fuel-dependent agricultural production system less secure and food less affordable. It is therefore necessary to promote food self-sufficiency and reduce the need for fuel inputs to the food system at all levels.
Bring it to the table: Creating justice through food
What do we understand by the term food justice? Is it the search for accessible, affordable and healthy food for all? Or is there a role for food in tackling today’s larger-than-self problems?
Occupy the food system
Farmers have been through this before — our lives and livelihoods falling under corporate control. It has been an ongoing process: consolidation of markets; consolidation of seed companies; an ever-widening gap between our costs of production and the prices we receive. Some of us are catching on, getting the picture of the real enemy.
Deep thought – Dec 12
– The empathy of rats, and their urge to liberate companions
– Localization v. Globalization: A False Dichotomy
– Food for Thought: Food Sovereignty in Europe
– The Water, Energy and Food Nexus
– Dan Ariely on Defying Logic (new)
Food and agriculture – December 9
-The New Agtivist: Edith Floyd is making a Detroit urban farm, empty lot by empty lot
-A citizen activist forces New Mexico’s dairies to clean up their act
-Citywatch: Food’s a trip, Actually a Baker’s Dozen of Trips
-Amish Farms to Hippie Co-Ops Fight FDA Inquiry
-Industrial-Sized Rooftop Farm Planned for Berlin
-Small farmers crave horse power
Durban Dollars: Tck Tck Tck Money
For the rural Maya, the community being considered was not merely a single group of humans denoted by geography and culture, but rather the ecological community of all life forms, and generations still to come. What sane economic system would even consider forgetting these, a Mayan might ask. An economist might call what the Mayans are acquiring social, cultural, and ecological capital. To these people, and many others in the intentionally pre-industrial world, they are just good sense.
From the farm to the occupation
This land will live again. It will live in America’s countryside, in her mountains and rivers, as well as in her cities. To me, that’s what the Occupy movement is all about—finding ways for all living things to thrive. And for those of us in the grassfed farming community, that’s what we’re all about too, even if we don’t all agree with protests.
What is worth investing in?
This year … huge sums of money have been invested in keeping banks afloat, and much of the cost is being borne by people who can least afford it.
Meanwhile, a UN report published last week describes a quarter of the planet’s land as ‘highly degraded’ and flagged up loss of soil quality as the area for greatest concern. Today, for many of us, the loss and degradation of soil does not – yet – feature strongly on our agendas or lists of concerns.
What I would like to suggest here, though, is that soil is much more worthy of our investments, of our concern and care, than banks.
Winter gardening, guerilla gardening
With tougher times around the corner, we’ll need to find local sources of fossil-free food year-round. We can grow it, even in the northern USA and Canada. And we can plant food perennials and trees in pubic and private spaces.
Review: The Wealth of Nature by John Michael Greer
Having written extensively on occultism and the esoteric, and himself an adept in ritual magic, John Michael Greer is an eager student of the unexplained. Yet he’s also a sharp observer of the unexamined assumptions that people make about the physical world around them, and how these assumptions have helped land the world in its present crisis. One common presupposition is that nature is independent of the world of human economics, and thus can be treated as a disposable resource. An environmentalist and a devout follower of the druid path, Greer knows better, and he’s written several books seeking to dispel this mistaken dismissal of nature.
Review of FAO Issue Paper, Energy-Smart Food for People and Climate
The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released an interesting document during the UN Conference on Climate Change in Durban last week. Energy Smart Food for People and Climate (ESF, 78 pgs) focuses on the mitigation of food-related carbon emissions. The document argues that mitigation can be achieved through efficiencies behind the farm gate and beyond it. There are several references to risks surrounding the future availability and affordability of oil, but the primary driver of this document and its call for fundamental changes in food production is climate change, not concerns over future oil supply. This is unfortunate, as a dual focus would have brought a greater urgency to the report’s recommendations and perhaps to the Durban conference itself.
