Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
All those poets who like to sing about the joyous wonders of birthing ought to try barnyard midwifery awhile. How many times I have looked up in the dark and wondered why there couldn’t be a better way. If nature or science or intelligent design is so smart, why can’t we just order calves and lambs from Sears?
In many parts of the world, it is hard to find fresh fish to buy, even if you live next to the ocean. In Halifax, the largest city in Nova Scotia, a Canadian province known for its fishery, it takes at least six days for local fillets to make it from the fishing boats to the supermarket. With almost a week from sea to fork, the fish can hardly be called fresh. Now that’s changing. A group of five fishers have founded Off The Hook in a rebuke to the way fish have been bought and sold in Atlantic Canada. They call it a community supported fishery — a nod to the local food movement’s community-supported agriculture (CSA) direct marketing programs whereby farmers sell directly to customers.
Imagine our cities filled with fruit trees and I don’t mean fruit trees planted by the side of the road dropping fruit on your car once they’re overripe. I mean fruit trees planted in civic spaces—schools, hospitals, parks, businesses, houses of worship, and more.
It is hard as heck to imagine that one of these days, I’ll be longing for a hot day again, and for the fresh food that accompanies it, but it always happens. It is also hard, deep in the dog days, to realize that right now is when you have to start thinking about your fall garden. That’s probably why so many of us start out beautifully, but peter out when the cold comes, running out of fresh things months before we have to.
Here in Ireland, for example, March brought the first hawthorn shoots, along with the first dandelions, cowslips and primroses. A month later linden leaves could be taken right off the tree and chopped for salad, along with daisies, sorrel, parsley, bernard and clover. Then the red lettuces, green lettuces, mizuna and rocket came up, along with herbs like chives, borrage and coriander, and weeds like fat hen and Good King Henry. By June the kohlrabi, carrots and fennel could be uprooted, cleaned and grated. Right now the nasturtium, spinach and cabbages are ready and the dandelions and clover are still coming, and in winter we will turn to chicory and roots, while still growing other vegetables in the greenhouse.
Today, for those seeking out an alternative vision of urban success, with new and innovative ideas about what the city of tomorrow should be, it’s Detroit, not New York, that offers the ultimate arena in which to prove yourself.
Okay, so we all know it’s going to hell in a handbasket. We just don’t know when. And so the question becomes what we do in the meantime – how do we live now, clinging as we all are to the fraying edges of a ‘civilisation’ that is so cut off from anything real that, if it were an individual, it would be diagnosed as clinically insane? To me, in some ways, it’s the only question that matters: the urgent one, the one that requires us to find an answer now, while we’re still living, while we still can. Some people choose to look for the answers in philosophy books or meditation classes; David (my husband) and I look for it in the land, and our relationship to the land. More specifically, we look for it – and find it – in crofting, a very special way of living on the land that is unique to Scotland.
What can a humble loaf of bread tell us about the world? The answer is: far more than you might imagine. For one thing, that loaf can be “read” as if it were a core sample extracted from the heart of a grim global economy. Looked at another way, it reveals some of the crucial fault lines of world politics, including the origins of the Arab spring that has now become a summer of discontent.
Brought up with my teeth to the biting wind, weather was the constant reality, I knew its dangers and terribly resented the fact that I could not be home with my wife and children all the time. Fellow workers in the big building society seemed to have no notion of this kind of concern. I knew I didn’t belong there. Maybe no one did.
A spanish translation of the Post Carbon Institute report ‘The Food and Farming Transition: Toward a Post-Carbon Food System’.El sistema alimentario norteamericano descansa sobre unas bases inestables de insumos de combustible fósil masivos. Ante la disminución de las reservas de combustible el sistema alimentario se debe reinventar. El nuevo utilizará menos energía, y la energía que use vendrá de fuentes renovables. Podemos empezar la transición al nuevo sistema inmediatamente mediante un proceso de cambio planificado, graduado y rápido. La alternativa no planificada –la reconstrucción desde la base tras el colapso- sería caótica y trágica.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to ending world hunger, and the pathways to reform are many. Collaboration between diverse stakeholders, integrating technical innovations, crop-livestock rotations, improving access to markets, pricing ecosystem services and supportive policy developments are all part of the answer.
Today there is widespread awareness of the food challenges posed by a growing global population and exacerbated by ecological problems resulting from the industrialization of the world’s food system and the changing climate. But academics and policymakers are increasingly finding hope in local knowledge, looking to ingenious agricultural systems that reflect a profound relationship with nature and have played a role in the evolution of humankind.
