Food & Water

Ingredients of Transition: Strategic thinking

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Creating an Energy Descent Action Plan and/or the intentional relocalisation of a community will raise a lot of questions. How much arable land surrounds the settlement, how much food, fuel and fibre might it produce, what productive role might back gardens, allotments and new urban market gardens play? How much energy infrastructure is needed, and how much could realistically be installed? Failing to ask these questions will hamper attempts to think strategically about relocalisation.

Using traditional strategies to address water problems

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Global warming has likely already caused changes in the world’s climate by delaying monsoon seasons, causing less summer precipitation and creating longer breaks between rainy periods. One group of women in southern India is turning to traditional farming practices for immediate and sustainable answers to address these water problems.

In field and for food, the return of structural adjustment

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Africa is being measured for its land profitability potential. So are other regions in the political South. This process is part of the new structural agri-food adjustment programmes that are already in place in the developing South. It includes agri-investor friendly new industrial policies, the disinvestment by and withdrawal of government equity in profitable public sector enterprises, financial sector ‘reform’ that ushers in private banking and asset management.

Food: Getting fossil fuels off the plate

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My grubby little town was full of young men in big trucks and muscle cars who had come north to make their fortunes in the oil fields. During oil booms they kept the bars hopping and the hookers busy, dropping hundred dollar bills like candy…When the wells ran dry the young men disappeared, shops shuttered their windows, and the town shrank. New oil discoveries brought them back, with all of the goldrush excitement and disarray that accompanied them.

The Middle East rises – Feb 28

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– Protests in Oman Spread
– The Price of Food is at the Heart of This Wave of Revolutions
– The Arab Democratic Revolt
– Gorbachev: The US Must Take Blame for Fanning Islamic Fundamentalism
– The destiny of this pageant lies in the Kingdom of Oil
– Saudi Arabia: A Brief Guide to its Politics and Problems

A liberating (but damned uncomfortable) conversion

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What do we economists have to learn from Wendell Berry? Many things, but here I will mention only two. First is a definitional correction regarding the basic nature of our subject matter—exactly what reality matters most to our economic life and why? Second, what mode of thinking does this reality require of us in order to understand it as well as possible, without seducing us into spurious substitutes for honest ignorance?

The backyard frontier

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This then represents the end of the historical epoch I have chosen to call the Age of Frontiers, which we can date from 1492 to 2006. Although there are still other, smaller frontiers that will continue to be exploited, none is large enough or expanding quickly enough to offset the effects of the closing of the oil frontier. We are in a new age now, one for which we don’t have a map or blueprint, and for which the assumptions about how the world works that we have taken for granted all our lives will be inadequate.