Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Gardeners like to compete with each other over who has the worst soil. You wouldn’t think we’d be proud of this, but what can I say, we’re a strange bunch. One will argue for his hard clay, baked in the sun, another for her sand, without a trace of organic matter. I’ve got my own candidate for the worst soil ever – the stuff in the beds around my house.
Chicken Tractor Version 1.0 was damaged enough to warrant building an entirely new portable coop. So I broke out the long list of change ideas I had been collecting and designed a new tractor.
For public health professionals, peak oil is significant because it will affect what are commonly called the social, environmental and economic determinants of health. For example, it will significantly affect, and require some reorganization of, our economic, transportation, and food systems. It is also important to public health professionals because it will very likely affect how health services are organized (the use of products and services dependent on petroleum permeates our health care system).
As Brisbane cleans up after the floods, we’re also now hearing about the difficult times ahead. One of the major shortages ahead will be food. Not only have the farms been wiped out, but it’s going to take them years to re-establish crops and plantations. We’ve all heard about the problems at the Rocklea markets, but we haven’t heard about how food supplier, FoodConnect has been faring. Robert Pekin is the Executive Director of the Foodconnect Foundation.
Rising food prices leading to riots, protests, and revolts, mounting oil prices, mammoth worldwide unemployment, and a collapsed recovery — it looks like the perfect set of preconditions for a global tsunami of instability and turmoil. Events in Algeria and Tunisia give us just an inkling of what this maelstrom might look like, but where and how it will next erupt, and in what form, is anyone’s guess.
It’s not surprising then that food and energy experts are beginning to warn that 2011 could be the year of living dangerously — and so could 2012, 2013, and on into the future. Add to the soaring cost of the grains that keep so many impoverished people alive a comparable rise in oil prices — again nearing levels not seen since the peak months of 2008 — and you can already hear the first rumblings about the tenuous economic recovery being in danger of imminent collapse. Think of those rising energy prices as adding further fuel to global discontent.
-Biofuel jatropha falls from wonder-crop pedestal
(references new Friends of the Earth report)
-U.S. okays ethanol boost for more cars
-US offers $650m in loan guarantees for second-generation biofuel
-Court challenges stall new biofuel crops
During a presentation last week a questioner asked me what I thought about predictions that gasoline prices would reach $5 a gallon this summer. I offered this critique. I said that the oil prices implied by $5-a-gallon gas could probably not be attained in such a weak global economy. And, something short of that price would probably send the economy into a tailspin.
-Fueling the Food Revolution: CoFed to train New Generation of Student Leaders
-How Sweden turns human body heat into useful energy
-Vision: 8 Reasons Global Capitalism Makes Our Lives Worse — And How We Can Create a New Kind of Economy
You have seen food prices going up at the local grocery store. That could be just the beginning. According to Lester Brown, a leading expert in both the environment and world agriculture, those bulging supermarket shelves are part of a “food bubble”, which could crash. Brown compares our world food situation to the real estate bubble in the United States.
-The Ultimate Oxymoron: Industrial Civilization And Mental Health
– Nicole Foss: We Need Freedom of Action To Confront Peak Oil (video)
– La Niña as Black Swan – Energy, Food Prices, and Chinese Economy Among Likely Casualites
– The Guardian: The population explosion
– Jerome a Paris: Neo-feudalism and neo-nihilism
In all its forms, [cabbage] remains one of the best crops for the Irish climate, as for similar climates like the Pacific Northwest, but it grows in a wide variety of climates. It’s a famous staple here in many of its forms, the basic vegetable of many dishes. Amazingly, though, few people we know here make sauerkraut or kimchi, methods used in other parts of the world to preserve cabbage, make it easier to digest and to give it flavour. You can make sauerkraut very easily at home, and it will be much tastier and more nutritious than the canned variety.
