Food & Water

On destroying my landscape’s ecosystem: a minor elegy in a melancholy key

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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.

Innovation of the week: Participatory analysis for community action

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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.”

31 Books – The Resilient Gardener

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Building up the ‘grain chain’

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Produce has been the low-hanging fruit for many people wishing to eat local. But local dry goods including wheat, the staff of life, is much more difficult to source in British Columbia. As demand grows, however, more farmers are experimenting with wheat production. What’s lacking, they say, is ready infrastructure to process that wheat — which is why clunkers like the Clipper are forced out of retirement.