Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Men are best connected through kinship to a caring household (so are women, but that seems to be easier to achieve), and households in turn are best connected to wider networks of social institutions.
Providing sufficient access to affordable food for its population is an underpinning prerequisite for any properly functioning society, and given the clear risks posed by the UK’s current heavy reliance on imports, far more domestic – particularly locally based – food production must be established as a matter of urgency, i.e. before people begin to go hungry.
Stéphane loves numbers, and it’s a formula for the success of the six-hectare horticulture farm, GAEC Le Jardin des Pierres Bleues, that he runs together with three associates and one employee in Vay, north-west France.
If positive feedbacks can be the way we describe how the world unravels and declines, perhaps it’s time we started using them as a way of describing what is so evident in Wellington: that self-reinforcing expansion of confidence and sense of what’s possible that comes from seeing real people creating real change on the ground.
Demand for renewables and carbon storage could bring wealth to rural Britain — but who will benefit? Time for an update to our Rural Manifesto.
Ever since it launched its first audacious land occupations in the mid-1980s, in which groups of impoverished farmers took over unused estates in Southern Brazil and turned them into cooperative farms, the Landless Workers Movement has stood as one of the most innovative and inspiring social movements in the world.
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.
