Food & agriculture – Jan 9
– When eating organic was totally uncool (a Hmong childhood)
– How to get your city to allow backyard chickens
– World Food Prices Enter ‘Danger Territory’ to Reach Record High
Food & Water
On destroying my landscape’s ecosystem: a minor elegy in a melancholy key
Lament over the destruction of important fertility systems of my edible landscape about 22 blocks from downtown Oklahoma City, at the behest of code enforcement. … I will increase my already not-so-insubstantial efforts to create alternative structures in the midst of the collapsing ruins of the old. When Oklahoma City hits the ash heap of history, an event that is likely to be sooner rather than later, we will all need such alternative structures.
ODAC Newsletter – Jan 7
2011 blew in with strong echoes 2008 as food and fuel prices rose strongly. The UN warned food prices are reaching “dangerous levels” as the global food index rose above the level that caused widespread rioting three years ago, and the IEA’s Fatih Birol cautioned rising oil prices could derail the economic recovery. WTI is around $88/barrel and Brent crude almost $94.
Extreme weather events help drive food prices to record highs
And so the combination of peak oil and extreme weather is likely to create growing food insecurity this decade, particularly since the nation and the world have decided to take no action to address either problem.
Innovation of the week: Participatory analysis for community action
It started with a conversation among members of a women’s farming group in Affe Tidiane, a small village in the Kaolack region of central Senegal. “The leader of the women’s group said we should have a meeting and ask everyone what they wanted to do,” says Helen Fallat, a Peace Corps volunteer working in the village in 2007 and 2008. “I thought that sounded simple enough.”
Food & agriculture – Jan 6
-World Food Prices Enter ‘Danger Territory’ to Reach Record High
-The city that grows
-How will growing cities eat?
-Peak Fertilizer?
Food & agriculture – Jan 5
– Cattle Network: Peak Fertilizer?
– How Google is like bananas (dangers of monocultures)
– Researchers find “alarming” decline in bumblebees
– Memories of the 1877-8 Chinese Famine
31 Books – The Resilient Gardener
It is rare for me to read a book that does all three things – that fills that middle gap by offering me genuinely new and engaging ideas, is local to its place but thoughtful about how information gleaned in one environment might connect to another, is written by someone who does have limits on time and energy and occasionally desire to do it perfectly, and finally, is conscious of the need to garden in response to difficult times. That’s why Carol Deppe’s _The Resilient Gardener_ is such a gift.
Innovation of the week: Cultivating health, community and solidarity
GardenAfrica, a non-profit organization in southern Africa that helps families and communities establish organic gardens in small private plots, schools, hospitals and other public areas, prefers that its work be described as solidarity rather than charity. “Charity is all too often about externally imposed solutions, solidarity is a partnership of equals,” says its website.
2011 predictions: a savage place
2011 lays the ground for potential conflicts and battles that will be played out unless we get much wiser much faster. The emerging attention to our collective crisis will give some of the movement a jolt of new energy, time and investment in 2011. This will be the positive consequence of all the tough stuff we’re facing.
Acquiring knowledge by accident
We learn our lessons more by chance than by deliberation. Or maybe it is more to the point to say that we learn by living. For sure, what we learn from experience sticks with us longer than what we think we learn in classrooms. I can’t remember how to do algebra problems involving two unknowns but I will never forget what happened when I was dumb enough to touch a frosty piece of iron with my tongue.
The haybox factor
Many of the implications of peak oil can be summed up in one simple if highly unwelcome way: most of us in the industrial world are going to be much poorer for the rest of our lives. That bleak prospect, however, opens up unexpected possibilities; poverty is a familiar condition, and ways to cope with it are within reach. The Archdruid sketches out one option.
