Year: 2012

Talking with Fellow Transitioners – Plants and Places

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Growing food inspires all sorts of people and can really capture the imagination. At the Premier Inn site which has been going since last year, it’s rewarding to see how building the garden has deepened friendships, formed new ones and how the combination of Transition and food creates beneficial relationships on so many levels. And all in the corner of a hotel car park! Now we have the Royal Free Permaculture Garden above the hospital car park. It’s much bigger and feels more daring.

Green lanes bring bicycling into the 21st Century

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A few years ago it seemed quixotic to declare city streets as commons belonging to all of us. Cars were the undisputed Kings of the Road. But things are now changing in many places around the U.S. with the rise of Green Lanes — bicycles lanes physically separated from rushing traffic, which makes people feel more safe and secure pedaling around town. Pedestrians and motorists also benefit from this transportation transformation, as bicyclists no longer ride on the sidewalk or take up lanes meant for motor vehicles.

 

Experts tell Congress: Support healthy food system, not big ag

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Seventy leading chefs, authors, food policy experts, nutritionists, CEOs, and environment and health organizations have sent an open letter to Members of Congress urging lawmakers to reinvest federal farm and crop insurance subsidy dollars into programs that feed the hungry, protect the environment and promote the consumption of local, organic and healthy food. The letter comes just days ahead of an expected Senate vote on the 2012 Farm Bill and was initiated by the Environmental Working Group’s Kari Hamerschlag and authors Anna Lappé and Dan Imhoff.

A review of the Localization Reader

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The Localization Reader: Adapting to the Coming Downshift, by Raymond De Young and Thomas Princen, aims at the work and struggle ahead for those who realize that the modern world is arrantly unsustainable. The book is scholarly yet accessible, practical and action oriented. It faces the nitty-gritty issues raised by natural resource depletion, and, overall, the sundry predicaments posed by ecological overshoot that the current social system cannot recognize, let alone address.

Summer Cooking

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Greenpa asked me to talk about how we cook in the summer, and that’s a very good subject to talk about — what does a woman who “dances with wood” and cooks on a wood cookstove all winter long do in the summer?

Do potatoes have free will?

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Philosophers like to argue about whether humans have “free will,” that is the ability to make choices that can at times go against the instincts that rule the rest of the natural world. I think potatoes have free will. They may cooperate with the horticultural rules of conduct most of the time, but don’t depend on it. If they decide to grow where no potato has grown before, they by heaven will do it. You can make for them the loveliest bed of organic soil that J.I. Rodale ever dreamed of, and they will repay your efforts by rolling over and rotting instead of sprouting.

Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush

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Since the birth of the modern peak oil movement in the last years of the 20th century, a great deal of discussion and debate has focused on how to prevent peak oil and its consequences from bringing about the end of the industrial age. That approach has yet to yield much in the way of practical results; as our civilization moves deeper into overshoot, it may be time to consider an alternative approach — and, yes, the Archdruid has one to suggest.