Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Sowing content
Digging deep to find your radical planter within. Be prepared to get your hands dirty
Maya Khankhoje, rabble.ca
Book Review: Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto, by David Tracey (New Society Publishers, 2007; $23.95)
…Guerrilla gardening can be summarily defined as gardening in public urban spaces with or without permission. Gardening by the citizens, that is, by urban guerrillas intent, not on destroying the status quo as such but on restoring the web of life that the status quo has been destroying so wantonly. Why do these citizens feel such a sense of urgency? Consider the following:
The earth is cultivated more than ever before…swamps are drying up and cities are springing up at an unprecedented scale. We have become a burden to our planet. Resources are becoming scarce and soon nature will no longer be able to satisfy our needs.
This pressing concern was voiced by Quintus Septimus Tertullian more than 2,200 years ago. This is the very same concern that has spurred urban guerrillas of a gentler, albeit no less radical bend of mind than armed guerrillas, to engage in urban gardening tactics, risking fines and imprisonment. These include fly-by-night plantings in urban wastelands, lobbing “seed grenades” into fenced-off empty lots, planting trees in the middle of nowhere, covering traffic circles with native ground cover, sowing edible plants in school-yards, draping lamp posts with decorative creepers, developing community gardens and empowering disaffected youth by reintroducing them to the joys of dirtying one’s hands in the soil. The list is as boundless as any warrior’s imagination.
The police, supermarkets, developers and constipated city councillors are often not amused. Some, however, are ultimately inducted into the process.
…David Tracey, a journalist and environmental designer based in Vancouver, speaks from hands-on experience as executive director of Tree City, an engaged ecology group helping citizens plant and care for the urban forest. In his excellent manualfesto – both political and practical as the name implies – he traces the history of this movement and offers practical guidelines on how to join it, even as a lone planter of the Johnny Appleseed ilk. He does, however, caution readers that loners might get a task done very efficiently but seldom generate greater group participation. This is why he advocates organized group action.
(no date. ? September 2007)
Lunch With Alice Waters, Food Revolutionary
Kim Severson, New York Times
…her forthcoming book, “The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons and Recipes From a Delicious Revolution” (Clarkson Potter, October).
The book is more to Ms. Waters than an instructional guide. It is her attempt, through recipes, to save the American food supply. She wrote it because she still believes a plate of delicious food can change everything.
“We’re trying to educate young people and show them how to use that lens of ingredients as a way to change their lives,” she said. “Otherwise, it would be just another cookbook.”
The book is Ms. Waters’s ninth since she started Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., 36 years ago. Unlike the others, the new book does not use the name of the restaurant. It reads more like an organic “Joy of Cooking,” designed to instruct novices on how to make a perfect vinaigrette but also intended to be as essential to experienced cooks as the final Harry Potter installment was to 12-year-olds.
“Food can be very transformational and it can be more than just about a dish,” she said. “That’s what happened to me when I first went to France. I fell in love. And if you fall in love, well, then everything is easy.”
(Currently, Ms. Waters is not in love, though she longs for “a good pal to be in the world with.”)
By all measures, Ms. Waters should be relaxing at this point in her life. She is 63. She has held court with princes and presidents. A year ago, with some prodding from her partners at the restaurant, she pulled back from the daily work at Chez Panisse. Now she is trying to become better at leveraging her role as the high priestess of the local, sustainable food revolution.
Although she is enthusiastically mocked in some circles for the impossible goals she articulates in a wispy cadence, chefs who once sniffed that her methods were more about shopping than cooking now agree that the heart of great food is selecting the best ingredients.
So why does Ms. Waters still seem so restless, so unsatisfied, so unrelentingly demanding that she can’t show up at someone’s house and trust that they might have the right olive oil?
Because true, radical change – a country full of people who eat food that is good for them, good for the people who grow it and good for the earth – is simply not coming fast enough.
She is dismayed by the presidential candidates and said she has vowed not to vote for anyone who does not talk about the awful state of the food system.
(19 September 2007)
Recommended by Tom Philpott at Gristmill.
Eat (Less) to Live (Longer)
New study reveals why restricting calories may lead to longevity
Nikhil Swaminathan, Scientific American
Scientists have known for more than 70 years that the one surefire way to extend the lives of animals was to cut calories by an average of 30 to 40 percent. The question was: Why?
Now a new study begins to unravel the mystery and the mechanism by which reducing food intake protects cells against aging and age-related diseases.
Researchers report in the journal Cell that the phenomenon is likely linked to two enzymes-SIRT3 and SIRT4-in mitochondria (the cell’s powerhouse that, among other tasks, converts nutrients to energy). They found that a cascade of reactions triggered by lower caloric intake raises the levels of these enzymes, leading to an increase in the strength and efficiency of the cellular batteries. By invigorating the mitochondria, SIRT3 and SIRT4 extend the life of cells, by preventing flagging mitochondria from developing tiny holes (or pores) in their membranes that allow proteins that trigger apoptosis, or cell death, to seep out into the rest of the cell.
“We didn’t expect that the most important part of this pathway was in the mitochondria,” says David Sinclair, an assistant professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and a study co-author. “We think that we’ve possibly found regulators of aging.”
(20 September 2007)
The Peasant in Present day India
Girish Mishra, ZNet
Looking around, we find a great deal of confusion in present day India, especially in Hindi press, as regards ‘peasant’. Quite often it is used interchangeably with ‘farmer’. Technically, these two are different concepts with connotations of their own.
While ‘peasant’ has been in existence ever since agriculture began, ‘farmer’ has come into being only with the advent of capitalism when profit became the main motive of agricultural work. Strictly speaking, a peasant is one who has the right to cultivate the piece of land he has in his possession. He works and grows crops on this plot with the help of his and his family’s labour. The main aim of production is to satisfy the needs of his and his family, to have sufficient cattle-feed and to provide seeds for the next sowing. Since he cannot produce all the requisite goods and services to meet all his needs, he has to sell a portion of his produce to get money in order to buy goods and services he needs so that his consumption is enriched Thus he indulges in simple commodity production and the formula for this is commodity-money-commodity. The function of money and market here is just to facilitate exchange. Normally, he does not produce anything that he does not consume. In India, a peasant, for ages, has been getting the services of barber, washer man, carpenter, blacksmith, potter, priest, etc. on the basis of jajmani, i.e., giving a share in the produce fixed by tradition and custom.
From time immemorial, peasant had been paying rent to feudal lord or some other representative of the supreme ruler in the form of a fixed proportion of the produce. In India, it had been known as Bhawli (produce rent). Before the introduction of new land systems by the British, cash rent was not prevalent at all. As a result of the prevalence of Bhawali rent, the state was also made to bear risks arising from drought, excess rains, floods, earth quake, attacks by locusts, etc. In old records one finds that the ruler was under obligation to provide irrigation and other requisite facilities to peasants.
As peasant’s activities remained confined to his village, his mental horizon was extremely limited. He was rarely aware of the happenings outside his locality. He used to go only to local markets, not very far from his village and, a few times, on pilgrimage. Most of his relatives were in or around his village. Obviously, his outlook and values of life remained narrow.
(20 September 2007)
A reminder that almost all of historical civilization has been built on the backs of peasant farmers. Modern-day farming for profit is something new and perhaps ephemeral. -BA
A Chicken on Every Plot, a Coop in Every Backyard
Catherine Price, New York Times
…Raising chickens for meat or eggs may not be unusual in farm country. But Ms. Carpenter, a writer, does not live on a farm. She and her boyfriend rent an apartment a block from Interstate 980 in Oakland, Calif., next to an abandoned lot that they have appropriated as a garden.
City dwellers who raise chickens are springing up around the country. Groups organized on the Internet in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin, Tex., are host to chicken-centric social events, and there are dozens of books – a whole new form of chick lit – on raising chickens, including Barbara Kilarski’s “Keep Chickens! Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs and Other Small Spaces,” and related titles like “Anyone Can Build a Tub-Style Mechanical Chicken Plucker,” by Herrick Kimball.
Backyard Poultry, a magazine founded in 2006, caters to the urban segment of its audience with articles like “Chickens in the City.” Two magazines with a broader readership, New York and The New Yorker, recently published articles by writers whose attempts to eat an all-local diet involved city-bred birds.
On the Internet, thecitychicken.com offers tips to urban owners on how to keep chickens on a high-rise terrace and what to do if your chickens try to attack you. (“I’m afraid to go into my backyard,” one reader wrote. “Have you ever heard of this?”)
(19 September 2007)
Amazon farmers grow grain and save the forest
Andrew Downie, The Christian Science Monitor
Santarem, Brazil – You might call it the greening of Chicken McNuggets.
At first glance, there seems little common ground between fast-food giant McDonald’s, US commodities multinational Cargill, and The Nature Conservancy, an environmental group.
But here in the Brazilian Amazon, all three are working together to help soy farmers produce grains without cutting down the forest.
In fact, under the Responsible Soy Project, farmers in two municipalities in the northern Amazon can only sell soy to Cargill if they promise to plant trees on denuded land. McDonald’s, which buys chicken fed with Brazilian soy, set that condition after pressure from environmental groups and consumers. The Nature Conservancy, with $390,000 from Cargill, assists all sides and oversees compliance.
It is, conservationists say, a potential model for sustainable development not just in the Amazon but all over Brazil, home to the world’s largest rain forest.
(18 September 2007)
