Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
…on my little one horse farm, there are 40 tires in use, not counting the ones on the car. And ten percent of them are flat at any given time. This is partly because most of my tires were vulcanized in the late Middle Ages or thereabouts. But it is also because there is something unsustainable and unnatural about riding around on air wrapped in a substance that comes from trees that grow half a million miles away.
-Why Food Is Still Cheap In America
-Vision — Urban Roots: Detroit’s Industrial Collapse Gives Birth to Flourishing City Gardening Movement (video)
-Nourish: Teaching About the Food System
-Food Now on Plate for All Federal Parties
– Canada military report: Oil shortages and environmental decline could create ‘global quagmire’
– ETH Zurich: Unsung bedrock of prosperity (phosphorus)
– Era of ‘tough oil’ won’t deter drillers
– What happens when we run out of water?
Whatever carbon-management system the world adopts, farming methods will need to change, and the efforts of hundreds of millions of people will be necessary to get the carbon out of the air. We, the residents of the world’s industrialized countries, should not expect our lives to continue in much the same way.
Modern agriculture would be inconceivable without phosphate fertilisers – and it needs more and more of them. Experts warn of an imminent phosphorus shortage. But not Roland Scholz from the Institute of Environmental Decisions. For him, the main problems are the open phosphorus cycle and non-sustainable resource management. Scholz considers the ecological and social costs of the unsustainable use of the resource to be more problematic than the peak: ‘The environmental damage caused by the extraction and use of phosphorus is still greatly underestimated.’
Birds and their eggs have been part of our food chain for tens of thousands of years. In hard times, birds and their eggs were survival foods. In the not too distant future, chickens will be a pillar of survival and resiliency as we proceed into what we believe to be a looming energy descent.
Once the property of nobility, then a consecrated sanctuary with questionable links to a common dice game, then a cloister for nuns and a family base for a member of the judiciary, my home of fifteen years now owns me.
Knowledge stands at the beginning of everything purposefully created. It takes knowledge to build farms and machines, to build firearms, or to steward the land. Having knowledge often means having power. Inequalities in access to knowledge often lead to power-inequalities.
-DIY Urban Design, from Guerrilla Gardening to Yarn Bombing (slide show)
-The antidote to apathy (video)
-“Sustainable Development vs Historic Preservation” Is A False Dichotomy
-Projects: Small is Successful (report)
The resilience of our food supply is as much about the quality and diversity of our food sources as it is about how much we produce.
So, icecaps are melting, oil is surging and the economy is still in the tank. You’ve given up on Congress, you’ve lost faith in Obama and you aren’t impressed with what’s coming out of your statehouse these days. Why not plant a garden?
As we dig into history, we discover there is a much deeper answer to “why white rice?” Traders who exported rice demanded that it be shipped as polished white rice–which weighed less and stored longer and hence increased their profits–and further proliferated its consumption. Then, over the decades, the dominant elite culture defined brown rice as “dirty” and fit only for the poor; while white rice was seen as sophisticated and modern.
