Food & Water

Low-Input seed starting

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Which is all just a reminder of how seed starting, as most of us do it, is a heavily energy intensive process. It can involve lights, heating mats, plastic containers, lots of purchased seed starting mixes and various liquid substances that make your house smell vaguely of rotting fish for a week after you use them. All of these substances have to be transported to you. How do you get along without all those things, either if you have to or if you want to? How do you use less of them, at least?

Crop to Cuisine: Food in Egypt, feeding the birds, and food advertising

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Crop To Cuisine discusses food in Egypt, as the standoff between protesters and government continues. The World Food Programme’s Abeer Etefa joins us over the phone from Cairo. We hear from Carol O’Meara on feeding the birds this season. And we turn food advertising on its head. All of that, headlines in food and farming from around the world, and more.

The Power of the Permablitz

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The permablitz is a short but intense transfer of beneficial energy where members of the community come together to implement a project or landscape installation designed to provide more resources or energy than it consumes, commonly a permaculture design. Operating on a give-help-and-then-be-helped basis, these fun-filled and informative events overcome many of the pronounced barriers facing individuals for implementing regenerative designs and structures.

Review: Localisation and Resilience by Rob Hopkins

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The dissertation is a case study of the first official Transition Town, the English market town of Totnes, long a popular tourist destination known for its alternative culture. Using interviews, focus groups, questionnaire surveys and other social science research methods, the study examines the degree to which the Transition ideals of localization and resilience have become a reality in Totnes. (Transitioners endorse a number of upbeat definitions of a resilient community, a popular one being “[a] culture based on its ability to function indefinitely and to live within its own limits, and able to thrive for having done so.”*)

Food & agriculture – Feb 7

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– Mark Bittman in NYT: A Food Manifesto for the Future
– ‘The Soil Solution’ Film Preview
– Global Food Prices Hit New Record High
– Obesity Has Nearly Doubled Worldwide Since 1980: Report
– Oysters disappearing worldwide: study
– Peak cocoa

The fibershed project- Living one year in locally grown clothes

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Rebecca Burgess is an ecological restoration educator, author, and textile artist.  Burgess is the founder of the Fibershed Project; a year-long challenge to live in clothes made from fibers sourced within 150 miles from her home.  In this interview, Burgess explains what a fibershed is, talks about the hidden environmental costs of the textile industry, and shares with listeners some of her favorite natural fabrics.

Small is beautiful. Big is necessary.

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To Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of BRAC—formerly Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee—“Small is beautiful, but big is necessary.” It is a reference to the book Small is Beautiful by economist E.F. Schumacher, which criticizes western economics and hails small, local economies that empower people and their communities.

A patch of somewhere else

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When people list history’s most world-changing inventions, they usually include fire, or guns, or computers. Rarely do people mention something so ubiquitous to us that it has become, literally, invisible – glass and transparent plastic. In the Renaissance, though, when glass began to be sheeted and shaped in quantity and with skill, it created a boom in civilisation; microscopes and telescopes opened up the breadth of the world to science, spectacles doubled men’s intellectual lifetime, and windows allowed for the creation of the first greenhouses.

Bringing wilderness home

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We are cultivating a hunter-gatherer garden, modifying but not eradicating the forest ecology. Not so different from what the Wampanoag and Narragansett did, but more suited to our greater numbers. We are growing wildlife and insects and biological diversity. We are bringing wilderness home. We buy less food. We need fewer fields. Who will say to us or our children or our grandchildren in 50 years that this place isn’t wilderness?