Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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?
A non-profit organization in Oakland, Planting Justice, works to empower youth to resist the corporate-controlled and toxic industrial food system and become young leaders in the burgeoning urban food justice movement…Developing skills in critical thinking, community organizing, public speaking, and ecological entrepreneurship, these youths are changing the way they identify with the food they consume and becoming leaders to other students on their high school campus and in their after school programming.
When I read the passages in the novel describing one of the festivals of The Church of the Almighty Good Food, I imagined a Breughel-like painting, teeming with ordinary folk enjoying one another and sumptuous foods in the midst of a sea of cornstalks. I even imagined a whisper from gently undulating tassels, “Serve it, and they will come.”
History is being made in the corn market and the mainstream press isn’t paying attention. Corn prices hit an all time high last week. As you pull on your boots and head for the garden or fields for spring planting, what are your plans? Are you ready for some seismic changes in food prices? Do you feel too helpless to do anything much but keep on hoeing?
-Nitrogen footprint warning from European agency
-Soil Erosion Far Worse Than Reported In American Farmlands, According To New EWG Report (VIDEO)
-Biofuels targets are ‘unethical’, says Nuffield report
– Family farm in Willamette Valley turns to flax (New)
With contaminated water from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear complex continuing to pour into the Pacific, scientists are concerned about how that radioactivity might affect marine life. Although the ocean’s capacity to dilute radiation is huge, signs are that nuclear isotopes are already moving up the local food chain.
– Waiter, why isn’t there a fly in my soup?
– Britain’s taste for cheap food that’s killing Brazil’s ‘other wilderness’
– Nitrogen pollution ‘costs EU up to £280bn a year’
More than a community garden, this sharing garden provides fresh produce for all who’ve contributed to it, with surplus going to the local food bank. Coordinators Chris Burns and Llyn Peabody note that with one large plot rather than separate plots, Alpine Sharing Garden enables more efficient food production — from watering to optimizing for pollinators.
While supporting small-scale farming in the area seems like a win-win situation all around, says Nazeer, both local residents and the city government still need some convincing. As the population of Cape Town continues to grow, the city government is increasingly interested in buying up pieces of the Philippi Horticulture Area for development, threatening the future of the local farmers, the families living in the illegal settlements, and indigenous wildlife.
Contrary to the belief systems espoused by our culture that devours new product; we must remind ourselves that we are a creative culture, and a DIY culture too.
-TAKE ACTION on conserving home energy (with a sexy helping hand)
-How to Design a Neighborhood for Happiness
-In Africa’s largest slum, a cooker that turns trash into fuel
-A Mad Scientist’s 50 Tools for Sustainable Communities
Food has become – to use an older phrase now being recycled by contemporary activists – the “edible dynamic” at the heart of mainstream economic and environmentalist debates.
