Solutions & sustainability – Dec 21
New German community models car-free living
Software & community in the early 21st century
Permaculture for the inner landscape
A natural builder creates an ecovillage
Suburban renewal – one backyard at a time
Food & Water
Food & agriculture – Dec 21
Vandana Shiva on farmer suicides & more
Pot becomes top cash crop in US
An organic recipe for development
Federal subsidies turn farms into big business
Inuit diet touted as health tonic
Cuba’s strange path
Cuba has become the poster child for a transition away from an agricultural economy based on fossil fuel inputs and for a society focused on self-sufficiency. Strangely, it may owe much of its success in this regard to its relative backwardness and its isolation from the world community.
Consumption & health – Dec 15
Luxuries of past become necessities
Fattest people on planet
The exhaustion epidemic
Has politics contaminated the food supply?
Vegetarianism: the choice of the ‘more intelligent’ child
Biofuels – Dec 13
Biodevastation, hunger & false carbon credits
Biofuels seen as a luxury China cannot afford
Sun worship – advantages of biomass
South Africa: Biofuels ‘could drive up staple food price’
Solutions & sustainability – Dec 10
How many farmers do we need to change the world?
McKibben On reforming our supersized society
Slow clothing
Food & agriculture – Dec 9
Spending on imported food hits all-time high
Ag crime wave grows in California
Black market in water stolen from farm tanks
Junk food, junk prices
Search for crops that can survive global warming
Experts worry warmer Earth will slash farm yields
Biofuels – Dec 9
Mixed prairie grasses – best source of biofuel
Biofuel skeptic extraordinaire: David Pimentel
Alternative-energy boom roils Asian environments
Soil food web – opening the lid of the black box
As fossil fuels become more expensive, so will chemical agriculture. The emerging science of soil ecology shows ways that food can be grown with less energy and pollution.
Peak oil – Dec 6
Michael Klare: the post-abundance era
ASPO Newsletters for Nov and Dec
Mystery Cassandra
Renewable resources: investment hedge against peak oil
Jeff Vail’s “A Theory of Power”
Rhizome-based structures need to replace hierarchical ones, Vail argues, in all areas of our society — social, political, economic, educational etc. to entrench the power and sustainability of self-sufficient communities and render them invulnerable to re-expropriation of that power by hierarchies.
Food & agriculture – Dec 1
Father of modern arboriculture dies
Pfeiffer’s book on industrial agriculture
Livestock causes 1/5 of human-caused GHGs
BC’s first totally local winter restaurant menu
Ethanol skeptic sees painful realities ahead
