Food & Water

Food & agriculture – Feb 18

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-Michael Pollan: Forget Nutrition Charts, Eat What Grandma Said Is Good for You
-Green Eyes On: Is Bees’ Thirst Leading to Their Demise?
-‘Old environmentalists’ are challenging an obsession with land productivity
-More biofuel waste for cows, plus a California beef packer pulls a Toyota
-Perennial Plants from Seed
-Omaha World-Herald: Kenyan farmers persevere despite cultivation challenges

What is collapse, anyway?

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With any reasonably successful blog, you have a conversation going on, often between an author and commenters who have a long history and background, and people coming into the conversation for the first time…Balancing the degree to which you write for the regulars and to those new to you is always an interesting exercise.

Agroinnovations #77: CREAR with Mark Feedman

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Mark Feedman is the founder of CREAR, the Regional Center for the Study of Rural Alternatives, a small agricultural school located in the northern mountains of the Dominican Republic, near the Haitian border. Feedman has been an tireless advocate of sustainable agriculture for 40 years, and in this interview he recounts his struggle to create an educational center in the remote forests of Hispaniola. Topics include rural education, the future of Haiti, and the subject of hope.

Responses & resilience – Feb 16

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-War at Home: The Local Eco-Warriors Making a Big Noise
-Brock Dolman on water: “Basins of relations: reverential rehydration revolution”
-Pathways to Re-Localisation with Joel Salatin
-Die Transition Towns-Bewegung – Städte und Menschen im Wandel
-Environmentalists launch low-carbon ‘churches in transition’
-Could chicken manure help curb climate change?

Viral collapse

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At this juncture in the industrial age, we have two tired, one-armed lifeguards and a handful of victims. All eyes are on Greece — fittingly, the birthplace of western civilization — but Greece, which naturally turned to Goldman Sachs to try to hide its debt, is one tiny canary in a coal mine the size of Earth.

Deconstructing Dinner: Farming in the City XIII (Backyard Chickens X)

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In November 2009, a panel discussion on urban agriculture was hosted by Backyard Bounty and the University of Guelph…This episode hears from two of the panelists who both share innovative urban agriculture projects: the Carrot City exhibition – a collection of conceptual and realized ideas for sustainable urban food production, and the Diggable Communities Collaborative – a community garden initiative that demonstrates the importance of partnerships and the ways in which regional health authorities and local governments can support and implement local food system and urban agriculture planning. Rounding off the show – regular contributor Bucky Buckaw and his Backyard Chicken Broadcast.

Energy Transitions and the Next “Paradigmatic Image of the World”

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The history of modern humankind has undergone two major energy transitions, marked by the invention and development of agriculture and the discovery and exploitation of oil. The two energy transitions partition human history into three phases: hunter-gatherer, agricultural, and industrial. Faber et al. (1996) refer to these phases as “Paradigmatic Images of the World,” because they describe the common structure of societies throughout the world. The most important question is “what is the next paradigmatic image of the world?”