Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In the small town of Newton Abbot, England sits a cafe on Sherborne Road. No Limits Community Café & Hub is an restaurant offering quality locally-sourced food at an affordable price. What makes them special is that they also help to change lives and empower communities by employing those with disabilities and additional needs.
With a wide range of commodities in limited supply, various regions of the world are now behaving as if they are engaged in simultaneous games of musical chairs when it comes to commodity shortages.
The games differ by commodity and by region, but they all share one characteristic: As in a game of musical chairs, someone will have to go without.
I have often wondered if reincarnation is actually that curious mid-life phenomenon whereby a person – after decades of youthful non-conformity – overnight turns into their parent. Suddenly they are anxious and unhappy, and convinced the next generation is going to ruin.
I fear it will be too little and too late in the face of larger forces, but this is part of my answer to those I was debating yesterday who criticize Miranda Whelehan and Just Stop Oil for having no vision for a post-oil world. The part of the vision that they’re helping to supply is a new non-state politics of care. And that’s important.
UK-based smallholder Chris Smaje speaks with Seán and Caroline. Topics covered include agroecology, the need to balance different forms of property ownership, and the globalism/localism debate.
Despite a lack of tools, knowledge, infrastructure and support, woefully few routes to market, and suffocating restrictions on production and use of the crop, meet the British hemp growers who are ploughing ahead. Now a campaign of civil disobedience hopes to provoke policymakers to rethink regulations.
Agroecological processes, like the ones promoted by this exemplary project, are an essential part of the reconstruction of a local, balanced, fair and sustainable economy, which will keep young people in the region and contribute to a transformation of the countryside where the values of sustainability and food sovereignty prevail over an extractivist tradition that has wreaked havoc in the region for too long.
This year marks my seventh season as a farm share member of Missoula Grain and Vegetable Co. (MGVC), a relationship that began on a street corner on a warm spring evening in 2015.
Three years ago, Jorge Palacios, David Roper and Josh Placeres came together with a shared vision to make a better world for communities of color in Miami. They wanted to create a space where Black and Brown families can access fresh produce and learn how to live a healthy lifestyle.
What we don’t know how to do is give collective organisations the means to emerge and not just follow the political funding. We must have the capacity to make time to think out the structure collectively without losing the political thinking.
At this point in history, war is inevitable as long as nations are determined to grow their economies. Economic growth starts at the trophic base; that is, with agricultural surplus. In other words, a bigger economy requires more lebensraum.
Recognising the damage caused by synthetic fertiliser, the SFT and others in the sustainable farming sector have long been advocating a switch toward more agroecological farming systems.
