Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As an ambitious program in Colombia demonstrates, combining grazing and agriculture with tree cultivation can coax more food from each acre, boost farmers’ incomes, restore degraded landscapes, and make farmland more resilient to climate change.
As an environmentalist there’s an awful lot you can get involved in that’s about protesting or campaigning, but it’s quite unusual to have something you can actually do which goes right to the heart of your everyday life and which makes a huge difference.
In essence, Permablitzes are community gatherings where groups of volunteers descend on a site for a weekend to build, implement, teach, and learn Permaculture design through direct action…
Over the winter, Ecocentric interviewed farmers across the country from our Eat Well Guide in an effort to highlight both the challenges and triumphs of sustainable farmers across the country. Join us as we delve in to discover what it means to be a farmer in the 21st century.
I’ve suggested in several previous posts that the peak oil debate may be approaching a turning point—one of those shifts in the collective conversation in which topics that have been shut out for years or decades finally succeed in crashing the party, and other topics that have gotten more than their quota of attention during that time get put out to pasture or sent to the glue factory.
A study of grasslands on six continents suggests a way to counteract the human-made overdose of fertilizer that threatens to permanently alter the biodiversity of the world’s native prairies.
The World Bank, IMF, local and national government etc. already set the rules of the game. These rules have mostly been rigged in favour of globalised corporations.
The ASECO Community Revolving Loan Fund (CRLF) is the first ever small business micro-loan program funded by, managed, and benefiting a time bank.
While the demand for local, organic, grass-fed, and humanely raised meat has grown in recent years, dwindling access to regional slaughtering and processing facilities has created a bottleneck for bringing such meats to market.
Perched along the rolling hills of Coastal Sonoma County, Bloomfield Farms spreads out across 50 acres, close to 40 of which are thick with kale, chard, heirloom tomatoes, summer squash, potatoes and more.
The moral of this story: people in power and bureaucrats seem exceptionally obtuse when it comes to recognizing that the world has changed and the old rules no longer apply.
What are we to make of Monsanto’s sponsoring of organic school gardens? Of local food bike tours made possible by Pepsi?
