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.
Food & Water
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.
Relocalizing investment in our local food system
Envisioning a new investment paradigm is difficult theoretical work, but actually implementing a system that directs flows of investment cash into local food systems is even more difficult. As a nascent movement, Slow Money has moved methodically to build a robust infrastructure for implementation. A growing national network of interested people have been considering how local groups or “Slow Money Alliances” would be structured in order to accomplish the work of bringing more investment into local food systems.
The Unintended Impacts of Natural Gas on Food & Transportation: Web chat with David Hughes, Richard Gilbert and Michael Bomford
Read the transcript from our live webchat about natural gas. David Hughes (author of Will Natural Gas Fuel America in the 21st Century?), Michael Bomford and Richard Gilbert answer questions from readers.
Save and grow (report)
To feed a growing world population, we have no option but to intensify crop production. But farmers face unprecedented constraints. In order to grow, agriculture must learn to save.
Planning for higher food and energy prices, and their wider impacts
How do we plan for this new situation, in which food and energy seem likely to again be rising in relationship to incomes, and as a result, living standards quite likely declining? The following are a few of my thoughts.
Simple Homemade Toys
The toys most of us really remember playing with as children weren’t really toys but things we turned into toys. My earliest recollection is a matchbox of multicolored and multisize rubberbands I played with by the hour when I was about two. I don’t know why they fascinated me only that they did. Even the matchbox was a wonder — the way it slid so neatly open and closed.
Monday Mayhem: Local, Organic Government
In an ongoing series called “Monday Mayhem,” radio host with a pragmatic view of tackling the challenges of energy, food, and the local economy at the end of the age of oil goes head-to-head with a radio host who promotes free-market solutions. In this edition, Carl Etnier and Rob Roper discuss what it looks like to apply the principles of local, organic food to the functions of government.
New UNCTAD study charts impact of financial investors on commodity prices
The “financialization” of commodity markets has changed trading behaviour and significantly affects the prices of such basic goods as staple foods, a new UNCTAD study says. The study focuses on how financial investors in commodity markets rely on information related to just a few commonly observable events or on mathematical models, rather than on the physical realities of supply and demand.
