Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The promise of conservation agriculture to bring life back to the land and support biodiversity both above and belowground should appeal to environmentalists and farmers alike. For like it or not, a large part of nature will be what lives on farms, because we now use more than a third of the world’s ice-free land area for growing crops and raising animals.
We must eat. But the land sacrifices so that we may live; the land ethic asks that we live in ways that show we are responsible citizens of the land community; and the law of reciprocity asks what we are giving back in return for that gift of life.
In Teaching History for the Common Good, Keith C. Barton and Linda S. Levstik recognize that the past can be used “in a variety of ways, and for a variety of purposes.” One of these is to use history’s “potential to prepare students for participation in a pluralist democracy.”
In the everyday work of my farm, most of the decisions I make, in one way or another, are driven by the goal of continuing to grow and protect soil.
In the 11 years I have been farming, all I can claim credit for is making the conditions right (and sometimes, admittedly, very wrong) for food and flowers to grow.
Through deliberative pedagogy, students are prepared to participate in solving problems important to them and their communities.
Soil is not dirt. It is not a pile of fine-ground rock and biological detritus. It is not even a home for mycelium and microorganisms, annelids and insects, roots and burrowing chordates. It is the sum of all those things living together.
As the hyper-local landscape transformations prove themselves over time, though, perhaps the Miyawaki Method will become a centerpiece of Paris’s ostensibly biodiversity-sensitive landscaping strategy.
Whether in family, school, work, or politics, we’re all immersed in the pathologies of power. If we’re lucky, we learn to navigate these waters without being harmed irreparably, and without harming others. Many are not so fortunate.
The literal heart of Dixie (the U.S. Deep South) is the very last place one might expect to see a community rallying around the idea of acceptance and inclusivity—especially if the community is a small town in Alabama declaring itself a safe, nurturing, and inviting space for LGBTQ+ individuals.
I needed to speak to people whose ancestors had experienced the slaughter of their bison herds, the enslavement of their entire family, the brutal exploitation of migratory farm work, or incarceration at the hands of their own government while their crops were left to rot.
This excerpt from the second edition explores some of the lessons learned in the contemporary sustainable food movement, a movement that – although incomplete and imperfect – has devoted considerable effort to understanding what it means to feed ourselves without harm to land, people and community.
