Food & Water

Concerning the unbearable whiteness of urban farming

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Go to where people are at, not where you want them to be. Stay far away from “knowing what is best for people”. If people in your neighborhood don’t care about growing food, don’t force it. Maybe people feel more excited about an after-school program teaching photography to youth? If so, try to integrate your food-based ideas into programs that the community actually wants. Unite your interests with those of whom you work with; don’t patronize.

Can we solve two problems at once – unemployment and preparing for power down?

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The model is simple and has been done before. From 1933 to 1942 the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) provided jobs for younger workers conserving natural resources (e.g. our national parks) in the US. The program was part of a general jobs creation program proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression to provide a stimulus to the economy and, so to speak, kill two birds with one stone. There was a great deal of resource management work that needed to be done, things like building access roads in national parks, and there were millions of unemployed young men who, without meaningful work, would have likely run amuck. It was, in fact, a brilliant idea.

Tea

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As we headed back to the shelter for tea, though, some of the Irish workers did something curious — they gathered wild plants from the meadow as they walked and chatted, arriving at the shelter with arms full. They quickly rinsed the plants, dropped them into a pitcher and poured boiling water over them, and in a few minutes had instant herbal tea.

3 pillars of a food revolution

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A few years ago, I stumbled on a United Nations study that transformed how I think about the climate crisis. In the report, researchers pegged greenhouse gases from the livestock sector at 18 percent of total global emissions. Combine this with other aspects of our food chain—from agricultural chemical production to agribusiness driven deforestation to food waste rotting in landfills—and food and agriculture sector is responsible for nearly one third of the planet’s manmade emissions. Move over Hummer; it’s time to say hello to the hamburger.

Two agricultures, not one

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A great deal of the discussion of post-petroleum food production misses the fact that in societies before oil — and thus arguably in societies after oil — food was produced by two distinct systems. The last century saw the dismantling of one of those; the present century will have to see its reconstruction.

The fruit of sharing

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In our local neighborhood in Los Angeles, for the third year running, we are hosting a group purchase of bare root fruit trees.  It started on a whim.  I was ordering bare root fruit trees for my own yard, and thought perhaps a few others might wish to piggyback on my order.  I posted it on our local Transition email loops and suddenly my order had exploded to 21 trees!  We qualified for extra volume discounts at the supplier, and the box that arrived on my doorstep the following January was so big that it could easily have contained one of the Lakers basketball players!

 

Crop to Cuisine: Garden cocktails, Pakistan flooding, and From Crop to Cup

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This week on Crop To Cuisine, we go into the garden in search of cocktails with Paul Abercrombie, Author of “Organic, Shaken and Stirred”. Pakistan is in the midst of the worst flooding disaster in history. The WFP speaks with us about the realities on the ground and what people can do to help. And our series on the most popular beverage in the world continues, From Crop To Cup. All of that, headlines in food and farming, and more.

The ascent of Middle East food and energy demand

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At the EIA’s International Energy Outlook (IEO) presentation this May the issue of future oil exports from OPEC nations came up, and in an interesting way. Readers may be familiar with the phenomenon of declining net exports, from major oil producing nations, as a result of internal demand from growing, domestic populations.

Throwing away billions of dollars in pet manure

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Not until I was well into writing my new book, Holy Shit: Managing Manure To Save Mankind, which is about how to manage manure for soil enrichment, did I realize that cats, dogs and horses are a very significant source of valuable fertilizer that we are mostly throwing away. Or, as our friends’ cat, Django, indicates in the photo above, flushing it down the toilet.