Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Charlotte Du Cann No developments evince joy in people. No one celebrates when green fields are torn up, trees are felled, creatures are driven out of their homes, and the little boxes chew up the green hills and shut out the view. No one likes it when Lego land encroaches on the familiar neighbourhoods, brings traffic and supermarkets and alienation in its wake. Although people do go and live in these places, nevertheless.
One of my favorite books is the classic “Farmers of Forty Centuries” by F.H. King, written in 1911. It details the way food was produced in much of Asia for something like four thousand years and still is in many places there. It was, according to King who traveled the area at that time, an amazing kind of small scale agriculture that, without chemical fertilizer or power machinery of any kind was producing more food per acre at the beginning of the 20th century than farming in America then or now. The way the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese returned all organic wastes, including human manure, to the soil was an absolutely triumphant model of sustainable farming.
“If people let governments decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.”
A while back a friend here in Totnes, after learning of my DoctorBike sessions in the market on a Saturday, asked me, “Why do you fix bikes for free?”. Sounds like a simple question, but it isn’t. And behind it is a whole lot of assumptions and prejudices.
What can we, the people, do to create a political movement that has Plan C as its core economic platform? While it is radical, it is not at all difficult to do. Of course it will be opposed by the 1%, but why are we so afraid of that, and so cynical that any political group could stand up to the 1%?
From the beginning, Climate and Capitalism has been devoted to “making the greens more red, and the reds more green.” So it was with great anticipation that I picked up a book that makes “a double appeal upon which the future success of everything depends: to ecologists, to think about social arrangements and power relationships; to those who think about social arrangements, to take the true measure of the ecological crisis and how it relates to justice.”
How can humanity begin to articulate and protect the “global interest” in the face of marauding national and transnational corporate interests, and the decline of state power? That is the problem.
– Elinor Ostrom: Green from the Grassroots
– Reflections From Netroots Nation: Seven Years Later
– America’s Love Affair With the Motor Car Is Running on Empty
– IMF chief Christine Lagarde warns world risks triple crisis (falling incomes, environmental damage and social unrest)
– Remembering Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Laureate
– Elinor Ostrom Outlines Best Strategies for Managing the Commons
– 8 Principles for Managing a Commons
Few international figures have been as consistent in warning about the threat posed by global warming as economist Fatih Birol, of the International Energy Agency. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Birol explains why the situation is worsening and what needs to be done to significantly slow emissions.
The organic and fair-trade industries are booming, Farmers Markets are the new norm, the word “locavore” was added to the Oxford Dictionary, and Michelle Obama even planted a White House garden. But agribusiness continues to consolidate power and profit, small farmers worldwide are being dispossessed in an unprecedented global land grab, over a billion people are going hungry, and agriculture’s contributions to climate change are increasing. It’s not just that change is slow, but we actually seem to be moving in the opposite direction than alternative food movements are trying to take us.
In confusing times one approach that makes sense to me is to put lots of seeds out trying lots of different things. The more approaches that are tried the more likely some are to work. As we are not all approaching the climate problem, and the limits to growth situation, from the same place we do not have the same connections, or the same resources, the same knowledge and ability to apply ourselves to a common unified path. It is inevitable that we try different paths. There’s a metaphor that is commonly used in discussions of spirituality that the view from the top of the mountain is the same. However because we are starting out from different points, the path up the mountain will be different.
