Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Riots and toppling governments in the Middle East, states taking drastic measures to balance their budgets, oil and food prices rising. The implications of all this turmoil are enough to make me start breathing into a paper sack. I can’t affect what happens in Libya or Wisconsin, but I can take action where I am, not only on my (semi-) urban homestead but also in my neighborhood and city.
Egypt faces daunting challenges as it prepares for broad presidential and parliamentary elections within a year. Ongoing volatility in global food prices will strain resources during this critical transitional period. As the world’s largest importer of wheat, Egypt is acutely vulnerable to any surge in food prices. Wheat prices have risen 47 percent over the last year and other staples are rapidly approaching dangerously high levels.
Maybe western leaders are afraid that, having seen what it is like when a people dictate to their government what it should do for them, rather than the reverse, we might start to take our own rights back, wholesale.
As elsewhere in the region, the main foreign powers involved — France, Spain, and the US — don’t seem to care much as long as the oil and gas flows, the country implements World Bank/IMF structural adjustment programs to modernize the oil industry to increase output, and their ‘strategic interests’ are protected. As long as these things happen, the country can go to hell in a hand basket – as it has. None of them have lifted a finger in protest to government practices and corruption.
Libya is one of the smaller oil exporters in OPEC. They were producing 1.65 million barrels per day in 2010 (through October) according to EIA data. However, the very serious political upheaval in this North African country poses a genuine threat to that production.
-Mexico goes back to the land
-Corn’s Domino Effect
-Stop the global land grab
-From Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty: The Challenge of Social Movements
-Revolutions could rob Opec of its ability to manipulate supply
-IEA sees oil price danger, ready to use stockpiles
-Saudi Denial Not What it Seems
-Judge Tells Government to Resume Permits for Drilling
-Gulf spill’s effects ‘may not be seen for a decade’
In early February, 2011, Jules Dervaes of the Dervaes Institute, released letters saying that he had secured trademarks for the terms urban homestead and urban homesteading, roiling the larger community or urban homesteaders, from actual businesses and organizations to folks who do it just for fun. Fighting what they consider an injustice, the group set up petitions and a day of action to fight back. We covered the fracas last week, and now follow up with news on the origins of urban homesteading and profiles of two prominent city dwelling farmers.
Life is up to something. It is becoming more diverse and more complex. Not always, and not in every place, but as an average across all of time from the beginning of life. Life may not have a goal, but the trend is unmistakable. The first principle that organizes reality has been with us all along.
This, we are told, is part of “the war on the middle class.” But a way of seeing is a way of not seeing, and when we hear this phrase over and over again, we are turning away from the longer and more violent war on the poor.
We live by the grace of invertebrates. They work around the clock, collect and dispose of our waste, replenish the soil, feed animals above them on the food chain and allow plants to return each spring. This time of year, as those of us in the northern hemisphere plan our gardens and sow our first seeds, we must remember to devote part of our garden to reimbursing the armies that work for us.
Oil prices are going through the roof today, and gasoline prices at the pump will follow, as we get the first regime-rattling news in a major oil-producing state. What’s happening is that the sketchy news out of Libya makes the country look like it’s on fire – Col. Muammar Qaddafi may be spending his last days in power. And even though no oil supplies have been disrupted, traders are engaging in some casino behavior and bidding up prices to new two-year highs.
