Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I’m not an expert beekeeper; My cousin in County Longford is an expert beekeeper, and I’ve learned a lot from him. I’m a guy who had a beehive, and got some honey once a year. I’m just writing about what it was like to get the hive, so you can avoid some of the same mistakes.
Rather than seeing food sovereignty as a destination, we see it as a pathway made up of everyday acts of resistance and reparation accessible to everyone.
Without doubt, global agriculture output has increased tremendously over the last sixty years. How much, which crops or commodities, how and why are things I will address in a series of articles.
In French, the word for food processing is the same as the word for sweeping social change: transformation. Alex Beaudin dreams of doing both.
The war demonstrated that smallholders can better adapt and survive in extreme conditions by relying on short food chains, alternative farm inputs, mutual help and reciprocity.
As we work for public financing and control, we can join with others around the world who are rejecting the concept of water as a for-profit commodity and organizing to reclaim their access to water as a basic human right.
Black and Indigenous communities increasingly see that creating healing relationships with one another is at the heart of building true transformative power to achieve land justice, with seeds of healing being planted every day.
In this view, small farm society is almost its own welfare system. But, as with every political vision, no doubt the reality falls somewhat short of the ideal. How would people take care of each other in a small farm future?
Colonization, through genocide, land theft, and the imposition of private property, has dispossessed Indigenous and Black peoples of their homelands across the continents for generations.
Succession bridges the gap between generations. The link between the past and the future, it allows us to envisage the future – in continuity or forging new paths – informed by previous failures and successes.
Victoria Collier and Ben Ptashnik are a couple with a vision: they want to teach how to create self-sustaining ecological community where people can grow food, disengage from destructive systems with the use of renewable energy and green building, and create community projects that benefit everyone while raising the quality of life for the next generations.
Nobody owns the land. Nobody has title to create scarcity in order to increase personal wealth. Nobody can take without giving back.
