Food & Water

Work and ecology: Less is more

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Work, for an individual or a society, begins with the effort required to modify or eradicate the ecology that’s there and replace it with something else. For most of history, this is in fact exactly what was meant by the word work. Even more specifically: in most places it meant cutting down forests and then hoeing, plowing, planting, weeding, and harvesting fields. In another word, farming. That was the first work and it is still the one that is prior to all others.

Why I care about the Koch brothers more than heirloom tomatoes

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“Why do you write about politics so much? Why so negative? Why not more stories on Permaculture?” are questions we sometimes get from readers on Transition Voice. And these are often followed by a statement that Transition is really about “positive actions in the local community.” I’m a fan of community canneries, local currencies and saving energy at City Hall. I’m just not ready yet to join Voltaire’s Candide in withdrawing from the world to cultivate my garden.

Food & agriculture – May 22

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– Why science alone can’t defeat Big Food’s policy stranglehold
– Somalia food aid cut amid UN funding shortfall
– Washington conference on sustainable food: organic ag goes mainstream
– The oceans are emptying fast
– Anton Smedshaug’s Definitive Guide To The Oil-Driven Food Crisis
– Dung loaming: how llamas aided the Inca empire

Book Review: Basics with a Twist

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I’m not one for cookbooks but Basics with a Twist by Kim Sanwald has truly inspired me to transform my cooking with the same zeal and enthusiasm as Julie had when she went through Julia Child’s classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But the book is also an inspiring memoir of the author’s complete change of life after 36 years as a manager of a dental office in the city to become a truck farmer in rural Cloverdale.

The Stockholm Memorandum: tipping the scales towards sustainability

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The jury of Nobel Laureates concluded that humans are now the most significant driver of global change, and that our collective actions could have abrupt and irreversible consequences for human communities and ecological systems. It recommends a suite of urgent and far-reaching actions for decision makers and societies to become active stewards of the planet for future generations

As junk food goes, so goes the planet

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In pondering the reasons for this lack of progress—this potentially cataclysmic failure of progressive argument—I have come to a fairly radical view: that we can never have a sustainable civilization unless we first achieve sustainability as individuals. Billions of us (not just a few million) will need to embrace lower-consumption, more thoughtful, more ecologically conscious lifestyles with the same personal passion that is today wasted on free-market profiteering, religious proselytizing, or yearning for power and control of other humans. And if I had to identify the single most daunting barrier to that kind of embrace, it is our pervasive intellectual and emotional disconnection from the living planet we evolved on.

The medicinal ornamental garden

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Ornamental edible gardening gets a lot of attention right now. Consider a new book _The Edible Front Yard_ by Ivette Soler that The Peak Oil Hausfrau has just reviewed. I did a post a while back on ornamental perennial edibles, and I wanted to do a companion piece on ornamental medicinal herbs.

Innovation of the Week: Researchers find farmers applying rice innovations to their wheat crops

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The System of Rice Intensification SRI) is an innovative method of increasing the productivity of irrigated rice with very simple adjustments to traditional techniques. It involves transplanting younger seedlings into the field with wider spacing in a square pattern, irrigating to keep the roots moist and aerated instead of flooding fields, and increasing organic matter in the soil with compost and manure.

Preserving food to reduce waste

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The Global North and South both waste similar portions of the food they produce, but there is a significant difference between them – the majority of the wastage in the global south comes from lack of ability to preserve food – no refrigeration, no easy way to preserve it on a large scale, and limited market access or long times from harvest to market…In the Global North, the picture is different. We do lose food at harvest, but the majority of all food loss is household and market – supermarkets throwing out lightly dinged cans and crates of produce, households buying food and burying it in the back of their refrigerators – this is the picture of food waste in the Global North.

When The Gumboots Come Marching In

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Why we farm kids of the middle 20th century in Ohio also called them gumboots I do not know. We wore them regularly and so, human beings being what they are, gumboots became a symbol of our country culture and we were ridiculed for wearing them by town brats. Even as a young man who often went to town wearing gumboots, I was teased, usually in good humor, but the barb was always there. The city slickers didn’t realize that gumboots were very fashionable with the British aristocracy in the early nineteen hundreds.