Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-World hunger best cured by small-scale agriculture: report
-The futility of trying to fight these food and energy price shocks
-Transylvania: could this ‘lost in time’ land be the future of European agriculture?
-Can We Feed 9 Billion People?
-EU organic food push hailed by African farmers
-Best practices for organic gardeners
-The Great Food Crisis of 2011
“Peak oil has arrived,” says economist Paul Krugman in one of his columns late last month—a watershed moment, since it makes him one of the most widely read people to have uttered such words.
Hospitals,” says McAllister, “lend themselves to strong garden projects. They have high walls and guards to protect the plants, and hundreds of people are coming and going every day. It’s also a unique opportunity to help people learn the connection between what they eat and their own health.”
“Painting the choice as a harsh dichotomy between your current standard of living and something resembling that of a prisoner on Devil’s Island is a blown meme. Stick a fork in that. The future will be one of more conscientious design: more food with net carbon and fertility soil gains; warmth, light, mobility and other energy services based on solar income, not distilled dinosaurs.”
On the lists of guests no one ever wants to invite to well…not eat dinner, the food crisis is probably number one, but it has a way of continuing to intrude. The thing about food is that it is both simple and complicated – very simple, in that when people don’t have enough to eat, they die. Very simple in that just because we in the west became preoccupied with our own fiscal troubles doesn’t mean that hungry kids stopped being hungry. Complicated, in the sense that food system responds to a great number of events – and we can expect it to keep on responding.
The events of a single day in three continents are a lesson in the interlocking crises that will define the decade.
For all those who dismissed bike sharing as a woolly-headed European idea that would never work on the mean streets of U.S. cities, the success of the first season of MinneapolisNice Ride bike program will come as a surprise.
In spite of the recent consultation over access to the countryside in England, there is little serious linkage between land ownerhship, sustainability, and food security in the English shires. By constrast, what is happening in the newly devolved territories of Scotland and Wales may be the beginnings of a revolution.
-What’s So Green About Doing it Yourself? Ownership & Knowledge
-The Forest As Garden: Visions of Plenty
-Post-Carbon Politics III: The Ends of Freedom
-Earth System Science – the science of the whole Earth system
Naturally you are asking: what is this box I need to get outside of? That’s easy to answer and hard to answer at the same time.
At the end of my visit, I came away feeling that Detroit has quite a bit to teach the rest of us about how to build a local economy from the ground up.
In one of the last entries for 2010 on Transition Culture Rob Hopkins posts his interview with Christopher Alexander, a discussion of the links between A Pattern Language and the new Transition ingredients. At some point the architect and writer’s wife, Maggie enters the conversation: “If Transition was successful, what the community would feel – it would feel like home. Simple. Everyone can feel that feeling. You know it when you see it; it just feels like home…
