Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Picture a hot summer day in California farm country, say 112 degrees. In the tiny community of Tooleville, surrounded by olive trees and orange groves, there’s one thing you won’t see here that you’d see almost anywhere else in the sunny state—kids splashing in backyard pools.
-Matt Simmons: Oil shortage spills into water
-Photographer Burtynsky recent focus on water rooted in political power, control
-Water and the War on Terror
A growing number of young people are finishing college and resisting the pressure to plunk down in a cube behind a computer. Others skip college altogether—given the spiraling costs involved, it’s hard to blame them—and yearn for meaningful, hands-on work.
Many of us need nothing in the world so much as more time. Adding new projects is exhausting – and stressful. And yet, we know that there are things we want to change – for example, most of us would like to grow a garden with our kids, or make sure that we know where our food comes from. We’d like to live in communities with a greater measure of food security, we’d like to know more about what we’re eating. We’d like to have more contact with nature, we’d like to be more self-sufficient. We’d like to have better food at lower cost, we’d like to have a reserve for an emergency or to share. We’d like to do more in our community and to eat with one another. We’d like to sit down to a home cooked meal more often.
We cannot build what we cannot envision. Our imagination, along with our ability to form our images into words to communicate to others, are perhaps the most powerful tools that humans possess. This article in a 4-part series gives a short history of “community” — how humankind lost it, and how we might regain it.
When I started volunteering this winter as a garden science teacher with Washington Youth Garden, entering one 3rd-grade classroom every week to help instill knowledge and enthusiasm by the children for the wonders of nature, I had no idea that this experience would inspire me to initiate a national call for Universal School Gardens.
What if future leaders became sensitive to local environmental and social issues before stepping into leadership roles? Tanya Narath describes nine day-long events in the Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy’s program: Students visit a watershed for ecological context; tour an organic farm (sustainable agriculture); take a walking tour from which students’ urban design ideas are presented to the mayor; explore social issues like racial injustice, homelessness, and poverty; consider water ecology, local economy, transportation and land use. (www.ecoleader.org).
-The Spotless Garden
-Seed trends – food gardening, pickling
-Impressed by a Possible Future
Every year, I try to transform more of my property from unproductive Bermuda grass to productive fruits and veggies. This year, I want to transform the desolate, wind-swept, 7 x 40 grass strip between our driveways (mine and my neighbors) into a luscious food forest…
-Health: the challenge of improving nutrition
-Small family farms in tropics can feed the hungry and preserve biodiversity
-Jonathan Safran Foer: the truth about fish farming
-Scientists unite to combat water scarcity; solutions yield more crop per drop in drylands
-Potatoes, Not Just Pistons, Take Root in Detroit
-She Farms
-New Investments in Agriculture Likely to Fail Without Sharp Focus on Small-Scale ‘Mixed’ Farmer
Last week I attended the annual conference of the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA), spending the day signing and selling books and gabbing with people. Those of us who remember the early days of OEFFA were stunned and jubilant at the overflow crowd. … There was something electric in the air. I could feel it. At meetings of industrial farmers these days, the talk is fairly bleak, but here, among new farmers and gardeners with a hundred new ways to produce food and sell it locally, the people just seemed to glow with optimism.
At the recent Soil Association conference in Birmingham a couple of weeks ago I cornered Mike Small of the Fife Diet and asked him a few questions about what is happening in Fife. Their work has huge implications for Transition, as well as offering some fascinating insights into the practicalities of the relocalisation of the food system.
