Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
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.
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?
Let’s not confuse “agriculture” with “agrarianism” says Steven McFadden in his new book, The Call of the Land. Then we might think more deeply about our relationship to the earth.
In an interconnected global world, revolutions in far away countries can cause strategic realignments or economic problems that will affect us all.
Watch baker Jen Ownbey whip up a batch of zucchini bread while she talks with Janaia about doing what she loves. Every week, members of her bakery CSA (community supported agriculture) get a handmade, local, mostly organic, and even personalized box of breads and bakery desserts. Jen talks about getting started, selling wholesale and at growers markets, plus the joys, lessons, and challenges of running a solo business.
A very large part of the reason why contemporary American society so often defeats itself by chasing after fantasies of limitless growth is a learned blindness to the behavior of whole systems. It’s hard to think of a challenge more necessary or less popular than learning to measure our expectations against the realities, and especially the limits, of natural systems; the Archdruid suggests some resources for the job.
Two Australian experts in global phosphorus have warned instability in the Middle East and North Africa could threaten world food security, due to the high proportion of global phosphate rock reserves in the region.
Sitting by the woodstove, I am warmed twice when I read that a cord of shagbark hickory equals 250 gallons of No. 2 oil in heat value. I don’t know what heating oil costs right now, or what that equals in gas heat or electric heat, but it sounds like my wood is worth real money today.
Doug Weatherbee, a Soil Foodweb Advisor and owner of SoilDoctor.org, talks about the biodiversity that lies beneath our feet. Soil is alive!
The effort to maintain the world’s biodiversity has taken another hit. In the chaos surrounding the political unrest and public uprising in Egypt, looters have badly damaged the country’s Desert Research Center in El Sheikh Zowaid in North Sinai. The center houses the Egyptian Deserts Gene Bank (EDGB), and—according to the Global Crop Diversity Trust—equipment has been stolen and the cooling system has been damaged.
Both health and food security are fraught with expectations at social, academic, and governmental/regulatory levels. Both are states of mind as well as physical conditions. Absent either, the human organism eventually dies.
