Food & Water

It’s just a phase

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If we could come to accept that our current industrial age is just a phase, ephemeral like all ages, neither a triumph which must be defended in its entirety at all costs, nor a mistake which must be allowed to collapse, nor a system that can be redeemed with just a few adjustments, we could learn to let go of it as it recedes without rejecting aspects of it that might prove to be instructive or useful. We could then move on to our next task, creating a new phase of human existence on planet Earth within limits we can no longer ignore.

Sharon Astyk adapts in place: an exposé

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This is a guest post by writer Mynda Ubis-Ness, a lead reporter from the Canadian Environmental Magazine “Salacious Green.” Mynda writes “I asked Astyk for an interview about her newly released (on store shelves today) book, but it became very clear shortly after I arrived at her farm that there was a much bigger story here – she’s not really what dozens of readers have come to believe she is. The public has a right to know how she’s misleading us!”

Food & agriculture – Sept 1

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Monty Don, new head of UK Soil Assn, calls for wholesale change of food system
Russia’s collective farms: hot capitalist property
China raises, extends fertiliser export duties
Raj Patel on the mystery ingredients in our food

Beyond voting: guerrilla gardeners, outlaw bicyclists & pirate programmers

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This US election year an unprecedented number of voters will likely head to the polls to cast their ballots in an exercise that should take just a few minutes to complete. But what about the rest of the minutes left in the year? Author and activist Chris Carlsson has some suggestions for social change beyond voting in Nowtopia, a new book about modern day rebels who, in his words, “aren’t waiting for an institutional change from on-high but are getting on with building the new world in the shell of the old.”

Slow Food Nation attracts 50,000 — beneath the surface

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“Come to the table,” Slow Food Nation invited. And come to San Francisco over Labor Day weekend they did—around 50,000 people attending perhaps the largest food celebration in American history.
Tables and straw bales appeared in the heart of the city’s Civic Center around a victory garden on about a quarter of an acre that had replaced a lawn. It was surrounded by a huge marketplace, which was like an old-fashioned farmers’ market that gets food directly from the farm to the fork, bypassing corporate super-markets.