Deep thought – June 27
-Back to the Future
-Behaviour change, not technology, is key to cutting vehicle emissions
-The great land grab: India’s war on farmers
Food & Water
Backyard clotheslines and washboard secrets
Friends smile wanly when they see my wife’s corrugated washboard in the sink. They wonder when we are going to go down to the “crick” and pound our clothes on the rocks. This is very funny, of course, but it reveals the modern ignorance about washing clothes that is becoming nearly universal. A washboard is still the cheapest and often the only way to get dirty clothes clean… buy one that is only rough surfaced. The ones that are only smooth-surfaced are no good for dirty clothes… and if the clothes aren’t dirty, well, throw them in the automatic washer. It does a real good job on clean clothes.
Radical homemaking, radically enriching
When I finally got a copy of Hayes’s book, Radical Homemakers, I confess it wasn’t what I expected–rather than a serious, theoretically grounded critique of consumer culture, family life, and the structural obstacles that often stand in the way of adopting a simpler, more communal lifestyle, I found an often sloppily researched but nonetheless impassioned instruction manual-cum-rallying cry.
The nutritional resilience approach to food security
Very few soils have a perfect balance of minerals. As a result, their fertility is limited and the crops grown on them cannot provide all the nutrients people need. As people can get food from elsewhere at present, these local deficiencies do not matter too much. However, if the option of filling one’s plate from all over the world disappears, human health will likely decline unless the missing minerals are applied over the next few years.
Praise be baling wire and binder twine
In fact, the major hazard to life on our farm is old, rusting baling wire that somehow wanders off into the pastures to waylay mowers or end up in the rumens of livestock… my mower loves the stuff and can find a piece even if there is only one little strand in a ten acre field.
Medicine of the Heart
This is a medicine story. And if I could tell you all the medicine stories I heard in my travelling days I would. Because those stories are about how life turns around just as you think it’s about to end. We need more than anything now these stories of restoration and regeneration because they hold an opportunity. If there is one theme that unites them all it is this: the transformation moment comes when you realise it’s not just about you.
African agricultural innovations boost continental food production
In this interview with Voice of America, Nourishing the Planet project director, Danielle Nierenberg, discusses her journey to sub-Saharan Africa, where she unearthed agricultural innovations that can help cope with environmental challenges, while also reducing poverty.
Making wooden kitchen spoons and similar utensils
There are only two little secrets to making spoons, ladles, and forks out of wood. The first is that you don’t carve the spoon from a block of wood; rather, you find a branch with a spoon in it.
Fences of fruit trees
Almost anyone who has a backyard or garden would do well to plant fruit trees for the years ahead. Most fruit trees, though, take more years to mature than most of us have to prepare, and take up more space than most of us have in cities or suburbs. Luckily, only a few centuries ago master gardeners developed a way to cultivate fruit in narrow spaces – one that yields more fruit, more quickly, and perhaps with a longer growing season.
Learning from the community of the land
While recently shoveling aged horse manure around the berry vines on my small organic farm to fertilize them, which gives me great pleasure, I thought about what I have learned about the community of the land by farming over the last two decades.
Learning from the Aquacalypse
There are many lessons about Human Nature to be learned from the aquacalypse—human-caused destruction of animal life in the world’s oceans. I shall pinpoint several of them today.
Stay home and make some real money
We hear a lot about local food these days, but the bankers sure don’t want anyone to take that too literally. If everyone ate at home out of their gardens most of the time, the so-called economy would collapse because it is based on the assumption that the vast majority of people will continue to eat at restaurants, out of necessity or simply because that is the established way of American life.
