Year: 2012

How resilient is the food system?

by

Given industrial food’s dependence on petroleum, it’s easy to conclude that peak oil poses a serious threat to our food supply. And it’s likewise easy, given the importance of food in our lives, to conclude that making food peak-oil-resilient is one of the first things to worry about. So it’s a nice surprise to hear permaculturist extraordinaire Toby Hemenway argue that food is in fact the last thing to worry about.

Free trade or bioregional security?

by

Word reached me yesterday that Colin Hines is writing again about the destructive nature of the global trade system and the need to protect our security of supply. In standard economic theory protectionism is a dirty word, the impulse to be resilient and self-reliant undermining the ability of merchants to achieve arbitrage profits. My own view is closer to that of Gandhi when he said “Any country that exposes itself to unlimited foreign competition can be reduced to starvation and therefore, subjection if the foreigners desire it.”

“Peasant Farming Can Cool Down the Earth”

by

As Chavannes Jean-Baptiste points out in the interview that follows, climate justice and the proliferation of false solutions to the climate crisis, such as “Climate Smart agriculture,” carbon markets, and REDD, are a primary concern for La Via Campesina. La Via promotes food sovereignty, Chavannes says, not only to resolve the food crisis, but also the climate crisis.

Greener Pastures with Lunatic Farmer Joel Salatin

by

Joel Salatin doesn’t mind being called a communist. Though the self-described “Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic farmer” has a penchant for stockpiling adjectives, Salatin actually defies labels left and right…He’s also a veritable celebrity–having been catapulted into the national spotlight thanks to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and dubbed the “High Priest of the Pasture” by the New York Times–but he betrays no bravado as he chats with me over the phone from his home in Swoope, Virginia.

Hail, The Mighty Pocketknife

by

Time was, a farmer would feel naked without a pocketknife in his bibs. Even today, it is the handiest tool of all. There is always a bale twine to cut, a splinter in the skin to remove, a fingernail to trim, a scion to be grafted, a hoof to be cleaned, a pig testicle to be removed, a marshmallow stick to be sharpened, spark plugs to be scraped clean of carbon, an apple to peel, a hide to skin, a seed potato to cut, a lid to pry open, a beer bottle cap to pop off, string holding a sack closed to sever, a hole to be poked in fabric or rubber. It would be fun to hold a contest to see who can come up with the most uses for a pocketknife on the farm.

The Faustian bargain that modern economists never mention

by

What about the Faustian bargain? It remains deeply hidden from view because its exposure by the high priests of modern economics would force us to rethink how we live and why we live this way, as well as what we’re planning to leave for future generations. The Faustian bargain goes something like this: Thanks to the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels, humans (really just a small minority of them) are able to live richer lives today than even the queens and kings of yore could have dreamed of.

Premises for a New Economy

by

There is considerable uncertainty about how tightly ecology constrains planetary growth. Given this uncertainty, prudence dictates a conservative approach that takes limits to growth seriously. In an ecologically constrained world, both the global North and the global South need to consider new obligations and limits. A basic commitment to social justice requires that the claims of the poor, chiefly residing in the South, take precedence over the claims of the rich, chiefly residing in the North. The North may have to accept an actual reduction in conventional measures of standard of living to create ecological space for Southern growth.

The Blood of the Earth, or Pulp Nonfiction

by

Our ability to imagine the future is shaped, and too often limited, by the habitual narratives of our culture. These days the two narratives about the future that have dominated our thinking for centuries–the narratives of progress and apocalypse–do a very poor job of relating to what’s happening around us. There are more useful alternatives, some of them from a very unexpected source. Blowing the dust off an old paperback, the Archdruid explains.

The oil sands and KeystoneXL

by

Albertans love their lands and waters, and they are capable of guarding those assets without our help. Alberta’s government monitors all aspects of oil sands production. The province of Alberta has 147,000 square miles of boreal forest. A total area of 1,850 square miles is set aside for oil sands surface mining.