Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
When my partners and I embarked on this project, nearly three years ago, I could barely distinguish between a screwdriver and a zucchini. Now I’ve hammered, drilled, sawed, plumbed, tiled, and constructed. And grown, in ways I could not have imagined. Kurt Vonnegut’s mythical writer, Kilgore Trout, comes to mind: “How the hell did I do that?”
Vermont officials are serving up a new plan to boost the state’s food and farm economy. The Vermont Farm to Plate Investment Program was created in 2009. Its goal is to improve the state’s food system and make it easier to get healthy local food. The Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund has spent the past 18 months developing a strategic 10-year plan which they say will meet those goals. They’ll release it to lawmakers today.
This week saw the release of the full report by the National Commission into the Deepwater Horizon Spill and Offshore Drilling. Last week’s pre-release of Chapter 4 saw blame for the disaster attributed to a culture of complacency around safety both in the industry and its regulators. This week’s full report included the commission’s recommendations…
“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.
Most cities in the U.S. have operated on the assumption that growth is inherently beneficial and that more and faster growth will benefit local residents economically. Local growth is often cited as the cure for urban ailments, especially the need for local jobs. But where is the empirical evidence that growth is providing these benefits?
For decades, economists (Cornucopians or optimists) have been at odds with natural scientists (Malthusians or pessimists) when it comes to the scarcity of natural resources.
La afirmación central de este libro es tan simple como sorprendente: El crecimiento económico tal como lo hemos conocido ha terminado. El “crecimiento” así como se ha venido llamando, consiste en la expansión permanente de la economía global, con cada vez más personas atendidas, más dinero cambiando de manos, y mayores cantidades de energía y bienes materiales fluyendo a través de ellas. [Spanish translation of an excerpt from Richard Heinberg’s new book with the working title ‘The End of Growth’ which is set for publication in July 2011.]
-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
The project of transforming society to use less resources, have less environmental impact, or emit less carbon, does not necessarily have anything to do with the project of making society more equal. Environmentalism != Socialism, to reduce it to a bumper sticker.
“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.
