Jeff Conant

Back to the Land for the Occupy Movement

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In the scant three weeks that Occupy the Farm persisted as a physical occupation, it expanded the tactics, objectives, and vision of the Occupy Movement; it restored the frontlines of a local struggle to get the University of California to respond to community needs rather than corporate interests; it took an issue that is generally only spoken of in the so-called ‘Third World’ – that of food sovereignty and territorial rights – and dropped it into the heart of the urban San Francisco Bay Area; and, it asserted, in the flesh, a demand that many progressives have spoken of in recent years, but few have had sufficient vision, understanding or bravery to manifest: Occupy the Farm was, and is, a bold, largely unprecedented act of reclaiming the Commons in the most immediate sense – taking land out of private speculation and putting it into community use.

When the experiment fails

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Celebrating Failure is perhaps the least understood ingredient in the book. Because we live in a culture of success. No matter how we talk about losing being part of the game, it’s still losing. Victors take all, stand on the podium crowned with laurels, king of the castle, biggest banker on the block. No one wants to be in the beaten team, on the bottom of the pecking order. But to be in Transition means we have to understand this win-or-lose mindset as an old order we need to transform.

It’s the system, Stupid!

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So the Eurozone is on the brink of slipping back into Recession. The latest growth figures indicate the growing inequality that the single currency is causing between Europe’s countries. The quaterly rates of growth range from -1.3% in Hungary to +1.3% in Finland. Meanwhile, annual rates of growth in 2012 compared with the same quarter in 2011 are truly shocking. Greece is showing a contraction of 6.2%, while the Portuguese economy contracted by 2.2%. The Netherlands shrank by 1.3%, while the UK is registering at zero. In the case of Greece, Spain and the countries that are showing disturbing rates of contraction, the austerity measures are the key cause of this. The failure to understand this appears to be wilful stupidity.

Why such a lack of common sense about dogs?

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The kind of society that thinks its okay to let dogs lick children on the lips is the same society that wants to tell farmers how to raise livestock. Granted that some farm practices are unnecessarily cruel to animals and need to be changed, the kind of mind that allows face-licking dogs should be humble enough to listen to what farmers have to say too about animal care. I have dehorned calves, docked lambs, castrated pigs, scraped maggots out of a sheep’s hide, punctured a hole in a bloated cow with a pocketknife to save its life, and watched my wife sew up animal wounds with darning needle and thread. I will be blistered for saying this, but I must stand by my experience. Animal pain and discomfort is not like what humans feel.

Resilience or death: Preparing our farms for the end of agriculture (…as we know it)

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No civilization has ever faced the agricultural challenges confronting us over the coming decades. Ever. And if we can pull it off – wherever we CAN pull it off – it will necessarily be with an agriculture of maximum resilience; an agriculture that can get knocked down and stagger back up again and again and again. So let’s do this.

On construction, cake, and local economic regeneration: why we should start with the materials

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Could it be that we could create new housing, and new work spaces in such a way that each new development produces houses that lock up a lot of carbon in terms of their materials, generate very little carbon during their inhabitation, which create a diversity of new enterprises and livelihoods, show what deep public consultation in relation to development really looks like, all kinds of trainings, opportunities for people to invest in and benefit from the development, which create a huge sense of excitement and anticipation, invites the local community to get involved at regular stages and which create buildings and developments that feel timeless, rather than bound to a particular short-lived era of architectural fashion? I think so.

Environment – May 16

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– WWF Report: Consumption of Earth’s resources unsustainable
– Monthly Review: Marx’s ecology and the understanding of land cover change
– New report from Club of Rome warns about humanity’s ability to survive without a major change in direction
– The Big Fix: documentary exposes BP, U.S. Gov’t on Gulf disaster/Interview: the Tickells, filmmakers
– James Hansen: Game Over for the Climate

Urban agriculture isn’t new

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In fact, it’s been around since 3,500 BC when Mesopotamian farmers began setting aside plots in their growing cities. In a review of urban agriculture throughout modern history at a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., a diverse set of academics and designers ranging from historians to landscape architects discussed how the practice has evolved over the ages, often been highly ideological, and continues to be loaded with meaning. Organized by professor Dorothee Imbert, ASLA, chair of the master’s of landscape architecture program at Washington University in St. Louis, the conference looked at why urban agriculture is such a hot topic among the public and designers now but also hoped to put the current interest in a broader context. As Imbert said, “the inter-relationship between food and the city has a long history.”

What’s “Rio+20″ and why should we care?

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For those of us working in ecological and economic sustainability, Rio+20 is a big deal, and in our circles, just about everyone knows about it. Yet we have to wonder, what proportion of the general public has even heard of Rio+20, much less knows what it is? It’s a big question for a forum like the Daly News, where we’re all about mainstreaming sustainability. When we mention Rio+20, do we quickly lose readers who vaguely assume it’s some international, esoteric event with little relevance to mainstream society?

Free energy does not occur in nature

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It’s not just that what we generally think of as free energy doesn’t occur in nature, but also that free energy does occur in the everyday lived environments of people in industrial nations, which we might thus say are unnatural. So what are instances of free energy that we experience in our lives, and why do they matter?