Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“What you doin’?” asked the three-year-old who lives next door.
I was standing on my front porch wielding a paintbrush.
“Finishing my shelves.” I showed him my brush.
“But I don’t smell anything,” his mother said as they went by.
“Hah!” I thought, exactly the point.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil production
-Climate talks
-The global food situation
-Iraq
– Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery
– Wes Jackson On The Need To Reinvent Agriculture
– It Pays Not to Cultivate GM Crops, Survey Finds
– Chaco deforestation by Christian sect puts Paraguayan land under threat
Indigenous movements have inserted concepts like ecosocialist and degrowth into the formal constitutions of the Bolivian and Ecuadorian states. Some call this movement the “Pachakuti”, a term taken from the Quechua “pacha”, meaning time and space or the world, and “kuti”, meaning upheaval or revolution. Put together, Pachakuti can be interpreted to symbolize a re-balancing of the world through a tumultuous turn of events that could be a catastrophe or a renovation.
– Costa Rica will pay the price for cheap fruit
– Farm-to-School’s Teachable Moment
– Ellen Thrives On Pinkerton and Hopkins’ ‘Local Food’
– Haitian Farmers: Growing Strength to Grow Food
Carol has stories to tell about picking blackberries. For her family in Kentucky, wild blackberries were a cash crop. Her mother would sally forth into the puckerbrush with her children every summer to pick them by the gallon. They sold the berries along with other produce from garden and orchard at local farm markets. The blackberry money was used to buy new school shoes.
Seed swaps are lots of fun. People gather to exchange seeds, but at the same time they swap garden stories, garden tips, and generally connect with each other around food gardening.
– Drinking your garden with EB founder Adam Grubb
– One in Five Plant Species Face Extinction
– $5,000,000,000,000: The Cost Each Year of Vanishing Rainforest
– French towns swap rubbish trucks for horse-drawn carts
– Swiss Solar boat heads on around-the-world voyage
– Zero Emissions Race – 30 days around the world using renewables
– Does (European) Social-Democracy Have a Future?
– The Soot Road: Travelling along one of most polluted energy corridors on Earth
A steady state economy would move away from control of food by transnational corporations and toward an increased number and diversity of small and medium-sized farms, and healthy rural communities.
“A thing is right when it tends to strengthen the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
– Human Impact on World’s Rivers ‘Threatens Water Security of 5 Billion’
– Groundwater Depletion Raises Likelihood of Global Food Crises
– NYT: Water Use in Southwest Heads for a Day of Reckoning
– Sharon Astyk: The Water Fountain
