Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
But Fair Food… is not a book primarily about the problems of our broken food system,” says Hesterman. “It is a book primarily about the solutions.” It serves as a guide to changing not only what we eat, but also how our food is grown, packaged, delivered, marketed, and sold. The book starts by outlining the nuances of our food system, how it evolved the way it did, and why it is failing us.
The Obama administration is making its biggest decisions yet on our energy future and those decisions are intimately tied to this continent’s geography. Remember those old maps from your high-school textbooks that showed each state and province’s prime economic activities? A sheaf of wheat for farm country? A little steel mill for manufacturing? These days in North America what you want to look for are the pickaxes that mean mining, and the derricks that stand for oil.
Proponents of a steady state economy could get a boost from religious congregations…Religious communities are good places to look for allies because, over the past 15 years, many congregations have developed an interest in exploring human duties to creation. The concept of stewardship of creation is gaining widespread support among those who believe in God as the creator of the universe.
World-renowned conservation scientist Gary Nabhan is an author and farmer at Patagonia, Arizona along the Mexican border, raising sheep, heritage grains, and orchard fruits…When asked his definition of sustainable, he said, “What’s just? What’s right? What’s healing? Leave the land in better shape than we got it.”
-Does engagement with Transition make people happier and healthier?
-The New-Economy Movement
-Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.
In this interview for CSSC Encounters, Dr. Vandana Shiva gives the history of her engagement and explains the situation we are in now, facing a new fascism as corporations and governments merge. Still, she is always using an optimistic tone, in spite of corporate grabs of our common heritage, the natural world — a world caught in a system where the ecology and the economy are fierce enemies, when they should have been best friends. How to reunite them? Vandana gives the answer, through true community! (plus two more talks).
Yet for all the success, the 52-year-old Tipton-Martin is a woman haunted, not by traumatic memories from her own life but by Aunt Jemima. Not just by the Aunt Jemima caricature — the commercial persona for the “Mammy” figure from plantation life that has sold pancake mix and syrup — but by the real African-American women in kitchens through the centuries, during and after slavery, whose work and wisdom has been ignored.
For more than fifty years there has been gradually accumulating an overwhelming case that the global predicament is a) far too deep to be remedied without abandoning the fundamental structures, systems, world views and values of consumer-capitalist society, b) is being generated by those foundational structures and commitments, and therefore c) can only be solved by transition to a very different kind of society…
Perhaps the route to real change, long-lasting and deep change, isn’t through deepening polarity, but through a re-weaving of what has been torn apart, a seeking of common ground, an appeal to universal values, creating a safe space where people can sit together and not feel judged, and through the creation of viable, nurturing and life-affirming alternatives that have a strong and broad sense of ownership.
Botanist, seedsman, and landscape architect Gabriel Howearth talks about his life with plants. Howearth, co-founder of Seeds of Change, and Buena Fortuna Botanical Garden, spoke with Jill Cloutier at the 2008 Southern California Permaculture Convergence at Quail Springs Learning Oasis and Permaculture Farm.
For a long time we have been able to be the audience to history, to live our lives theoretically. We can watch everything on our screens, at arm’s length. But now history is coming into our streets and into our lives and we need to know how to act, or support those who act on our behalf. If we cheer for those bold protesters in Tahrir Square, in Wisconsin, for the thousands of campaign groups that Paul Hawken wrote about in Blessed Unrest, we need also to cheer for those who occupy Fortnum and Masons and the Royal Bank of Scotland, who protest against the corporations who threaten those fragile eco-systems on which we depend.
I am currently reading Carl Sagan’s excellent book “The Demon-haunted World: science as a candle in the dark”, which I picked up for a song in a second hand bookshop when I was last in London. Here he sets out what not to do when trying to assess the validity of an argument, and common ways that people make flawed arguments. One of those is creating a straw man, which he defines as “caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack”. Having spent Monday morning debating on ABC Radio in Australia with someone who has done just this, I wanted to offer a few thoughts on being a straw man.
