Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The authors of Apocalypse Chow have combined skills and with their experience weathering Florida hurricanes, put together a book on emergency prep that is a real find. Since most people have not acquired the long haul skills of canning their own home-grown produce or cooking dried beans in a solar oven, this book most replicates the resources of your average urban household.
To be able to get the president of the United States to laugh like that in front of the whole world in these awful times… well, that’s a real accomplishment. I am not surprised, however. If you know Wendell [Berry], he can make very funny remarks at the most unexpected times. I asked him what he whispered to the president but he’s not talking. Says he can’t remember.
His message, now and always, is that society is ignoring and abandoning ecological and economic common sense and we will pay for it. Is he right? Look around you.
Gardening in the forest requires a much different approach than vegetable or landscape gardening…Unlike a vegetable garden or a flower garden or a field of wheat or corn, a forest garden can provide all the necessities of a human economy, especially at the small scale of a homestead or village. History confirms this. But to reap these harvests requires an economy that is in most of its features the opposite of the economy that we have now and that organizes our world.
I think it’s this sudden growth of biofuels that is the main shock to the global food system that has led to a reversal of the decades long fall in prices, and in fact price spikes in the last five years.
The local organic farmers with whom we have been spending time in the Philippines and elsewhere are less affected by these price swings precisely because they consume much of what they harvest, and they sell the rest to local markets. These farmers have achieved at the household level what Frances Moore Lappé terms “food democracy,” and what the small farmer coalition, Via Campesina, calls “food sovereignty” at a national level.
All caveats aside, you can see the main point here: biofuels are much much larger than Russian weather fluctuations as a total factor affecting cereal supply for food. This is not to deny any role for the Russian harvest change in the current food price spike. It was an unexpected negative shock, and I’m sure it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. But should we blame the straw, or instead focus on the fact that the camel was already loaded to the breaking point?
Koichi Yamashita’s four objectives for farming: (1) Be lazy. Save labor by cutting corners and not doing unnecessary work. (2) Be stingy. Don’t spend any money. Forget about the economic system. (3) Be safe. Don’t use poisons on your food. (4) Don’t be greedy with the soil. Determine its actual fertility and don’t try to get a bigger harvest than you ought to by using too much fertilizer. If you understand what your soil can really produce, you will have a stable harvest from year to year.
What is not hoarding? It isn’t building up a reasonable supply of goods before a crisis point (this is only prudent), nor is it attempting to survive and protect the basic health of your family when there is no system of fair distribution. This last is a very important point.
The one thing that I’ve learned living in the woods is that trees can take care of themselves. All we puny humans need to do to help them is to stop the bulldozers from removing them in favor of more asphalt and corn. But since my inclination is to worry too much about almost everything, learning that trees know what they are doing has not been easy.
Analyst, author and founder of the Earth Policy Institute Lester Brown discusses how unprepared the world really is for the growing effects of climate change. “Economists doing supply and demand projections are largely unaware” of the scale of the resource crises facing the world, Brown says, and “food is going to be the weak link for our civilization as it was for so many earlier civilizations.”
The Urban Homestead is the essential handbook for a fast-growing new movement: urbanites are becoming gardeners and farmers. Rejecting both end-times hand wringing and dewy-eyed faith that technology will save us from ourselves, urban homesteaders choose instead to act. By growing their own food and harnessing natural energy, they are planting seeds for the future of our cities.
– Quinoa’s Global Success Creates Quandary at Home (Bolivia)
– Ethiopia at centre of global farmland rush
– Perennial Crops, Sustainable Agriculture: A 21st Century Green Revolution (Wes Jackson)
– Can poor Kenyan fishermen can improve themselves without destroying local coral reefs? (audio)
– Nunavut plans to promote local foods
