Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Returning home from a new farmers’ market in Wooster, Ohio last Saturday (Nov. 21), I passed a scene in a farm field that might have said more about where farming is headed than any economist’s prediction I have seen lately. Out in a clover field stood a big yellow school bus full of chickens.
Unless and until we mobilize a mass movement to take down and transform the U.S. legal, political and economic systems upholding the fiction that corporations possess the same constitutional rights as individuals, along with other hallmarks of corporate power, it is fruitless to blame green consumers for the failure to spur large-scale meaningful change.
Today’s episode features segments from Agroinnovations featuring well-known figures like Paul Stamets – a mycologist (aka mushroom specialist) from Olympia, Washington, the U.K’s Rob Hopkins who has popularized the Transition Town Movement and Montana journalist and author Richard Manning, who possesses a keen interest in the history and future of the American prairie and agriculture.
-Swiftboating the Climate Scientists
-Countdown to Copenhagen: A change in the political climate on emissions
-Deforestation emissions should be shared between producer and consumer, argues study
-H2OIL
-Paul Ehrlich interview
-What is Land For?
-Sustainability and spirituality
-The Hubbert Peak Theory of Rock, or, Why We’re All Out of Good Songs
It’s all about community. The age of cheap fossil fuels allowed us to forget that. But communities are making a comeback, and we’ll need strong ones if we’re to get through the years ahead with minimal human suffering. We’ll also need tremendous doses of compassion, creativity, and courage.
During the month of October, CBC Radio’s political affairs show, The House, ran a four-part mini-series on peak oil, called “Going Local.” The third episode examined the implications of peak oil for the Canadian agri-food sector and was chosen as a CBC “Editor’s Choice” item. The episode includes interviews with two farmers near Ottawa, Ontario and a discussion with Rick Munroe, the energy security analyst for Canada’s National Farmers Union.
If I had waited until this week to gather the food, I’d be in trouble. It took myself and a group of eight people at the wilderness skills school TrackersNW more than a day to turn a few buckets of acorns into flour in September. We had to crack the shells with a hammer, extract the nutmeat with our fingernails, grind it, boil it twice in a big vat to get the bitter astringent properties out, and then strain it and dry it.
Finding news about how our food is grown or raised in the mainstream media can be difficult. Enter Nicolette Hahn Niman and her new book, The Righteous Porkchop.
-Female farmers find goats a good, but busy choice
-Chickens come home to roost in backyards around the USA
-Bite-Sized: Small cattle make big impression
-Saving The Bed-Stuy Farm: Choose Better Nutrition, Not Demolition
Woody Tasch has thought a lot about money: what it does, how it moves, and how to connect people who have it with people who need it…But he found that even socially responsible investing couldn’t do much to fix an economy that focused too much on extraction and consumption and too little on preservation and restoration.
At one point in this book, I was moved to say—almost blurt out, if one can speak of writing as blurting—that all art is about sex. I made that statement in reaction to Mississippi John Hurt’s remark that all music was about human sexual relationships.
