Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
…an old remedy for internal parasites in livestock is to soak black walnut hulls in their drinking water. If you think that sounds far-fetched, a much publicized control for internal parasites in humans is black walnut tincture, made from soaking particles of black walnut hull in vodka. Think I’m kidding, don’t you. Google it.
Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Economics of the University of Missouri at Columbia John Ikerd argues that humans cannot wait much longer to address the reality that economic growth is unsustainable—because the world is running out of energy resources. “We simply can’t continue to grow at the rate we’ve been growing in the past.”
Permaculturists are the emergency planetary technicians, and bioremediation is our bailiwick.
The principle of a hedgerow is simple, but laying them was a respected skill in traditional Ireland and England, one that took years to learn. Every year farmers would take a few days out to maintain their hundreds of metres of hedge, re-weaving or pruning the new growth, and each area had its own style and method. Ireland has hedge-laying groups, festivals and specialists, and some take pride in maintaining the same hedges that have existed for decades.
In 2004 I was an idealistic young college graduate who hoped to change the world. I was convinced that the prospect of declining worldwide oil production loomed, and that people must heed my calls for energy conservation and radically-relocalized living. The world didn’t seem to change, but to my surprise, something else did—my hometown.
