Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-The Right to Retail (report)
-The Business podcast: Are supermarkets too powerful?
-Sustainable ag education loses funding
-Food prices driven up by global warming, study shows
-Many orchards in neglected state, aerial study finds
Three towns in Maine declared earlier this year that direct sales of food to consumers are exempt from inspection and licensing requirements, regardless of what state or federal law requires. Bob St. Peter, one of the organizers, explains the thinking behind the ordinance in this interview with Carl Etnier.
Today mangroves are disappearing fast. Thirty-five percent of mangrove ecosystems disappeared between 1980 and 2000, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Shrimp farms have been a primary cause of mangrove loss, as well as urbanization and agriculture. This is why the message from The Seawater Foundation is of such an importance, as they show how to change and provide hope for the future.
Although food gardening is making a comeback due to concerns about the economy, the health of our families and viability of our food systems, many gardeners won’t consider gardening in their front yard – even when the back yard suffers from excess shade or other problems that make growing food difficult.
Despite what the theorists say, speculators have profited from hunger. And there’s now mounting evidence from some economists that the rush of money into commodity funds is indeed driving prices higher.
With the environmental crisis, we’re now in a situation where we can decide whether biologist Ernst Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we’ll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us.
-On Small Farms, Hoof Power Returns
-Bringing Sustainability Home
-Upcycling: 2011’s greenest decorating trend
-Brixton Windmill reopens after restoration
-EU unveils plans to pay fishermen to catch plastic
-National Trust’s Wimpole Home Farm seeks online farmers
We discuss the state of the economy in Detroit, “ground zero” for the economic downturn in the United States, with civil rights activist and author, Grace Lee Boggs. “I think it’s very difficult for someone who doesn’t live in Detroit to say you can look at a vacant lot and, instead of seeing devastation, see hope,” says Boggs, “see the opportunity to grow your own food, see an opportunity to give young people a sense of process, that’s very difficult in the city, that the vacant lot represents the possibilities for a cultural revolution.”
– Wendell Berry, Tim DeChristopher, and Teri Blanton discuss principled activism
– Bristol burns once more in protests against new Tesco supermarket
– Watch out! You’re leading a movement!
The world’s demographers this week increased their estimates of the world’s population through the coming century. We are now on track to hit 10 billion people by 2100. Today, humanity produces enough food to feed everyone but, because of the way we distribute it, there are still a billion hungry. One doesn’t need to be a frothing Malthusian to worry about how we’ll all get to eat tomorrow. Current predictions place most of the world’s people in Asia, the highest levels of consumption in Europe and North America, and the highest population growth rates in Africa — where the population could triple over the next 90 years.
We must not work or think on a heroic scale. In our age of global industrialism, heroes too likely risk the lives of places and things they do not see. We must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix. There is no justification ever for permanent ecological damage. If this imposes the verdict of guilt upon us all, so be it.
For some reason, no doubt because I am a child of the money economy, my biggest distress was over my billfold. It was covered in yellow slime. I hurried over to the machine shed where I knew some rags were hanging, and commenced to clean up my proud symbol of capitalism. Then I tried to wipe the yokes and white stuff out of the pocket although by now much of it was all sliding lasciviously down my leg.
