Michael Bomford

Organics and Sustainability: Reflections on my New York Times Misquote

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This is what I tried to explain to the New York Times reporter as I prepared my squash. Organic agriculture and sustainable agriculture are based on similar principles. They both used to be fuzzy ideas, but that is no longer the case for organic agriculture, which became more cut-and-dried with the introduction of national organic standards. Apparently she heard me say that organic agriculture used to be sustainable, but isn’t always anymore.

The new geography of trade: Globalization’s decline may stimulate local recovery

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It is an article of faith that global trade will be an ever-growing presence in the world. Yet this belief rests on shaky foundations. Global trade depends on cheap, long-distance freight transportation. Freight costs will rise with climate change, the end of cheap oil, and policies to mitigate these two challenges.

Renewable energy standards: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

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When your local utility buys more renewable energy to power your lights and computers, what more do you get besides the power?
You get cleaner air, fewer respiratory health problems, and lower health-care costs.
You get local jobs building and maintaining green power plants and a better foothold in the fast-growing, multi-billion dollar global renewable energy industry.
If you use the power to charge the new plug-in electric vehicles now available, you reduce our imports of foreign oil and increase our energy security.
And finally, you reduce the greenhouse gases that are leading to the severe, threatening weather events spurred by global climate change.

Strategies for mobilizing our workforce towards urban agriculture with Michael Abelman

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How do we catalyze a movement of urban farmers throughout the country and throughout the developed world? Renowned speaker, activist, and urban farmer, Michael Abelman sits down with me to discuss the reasoning and strategy behind encouraging millions of people to become small plot farmers.

The plow and the iPhone: Conservative fantasies about the miracles of the market

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A central doctrine of evangelicals for the “free market” is its capacity for innovation: New ideas, new technologies, new gadgets — all flow not from governments but from individuals and businesses allowed to flourish in the market, we are told….As is often the case in faith-based systems, reconciling doctrine to the facts of history can be tricky. When I read Neeley’s piece, I immediately thought of the long list of modern technological innovations that came directly from government-directed and -financed projects, most notably containerization, satellites, computers, and the Internet.

Institutional Racism: “Africa’s underpolluted?”

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The indifference of the Metropolitan Police to the murder of Stephen Lawrence rightly led to private soul-searching and public examination of procedures, and we have to hope that our country and particularly our police service is better as a result. But there is a more insidious form of racism that goes unquestioned and causes the death of far more people. This is the racism of an economic system that values the lives of the poor differently from the lives of the rich.

You Got to Move – Jan 23

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– New York Times writer Andrew Revkin on climate change: “Occupy wherever you are to help us have a smarter relationship with energy”
– You Got To Move: Stories of Change in the South (documentary on Highlander Folk School)
– My Path To Transition Organizing
– Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

Local Economies for a Global Future

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This article is about a simple, singular idea, yet the significance of the idea to modern society is profound and far-reaching. Here it is: In the near future anything heavy will become intensely local while at the same time the limits to things that are ‘light’, ideas, philosophies, information will travel even further than today—literally and figuratively. This is a new paradigm for humanity and it has huge implications for the complete reordering of society.

Indian villagers’ lives transformed by new energy delivery system

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It’s late December and an icy fog cloaks the northeastern state of Uttar Pradesh. Here, far from the cities, smoke rises in dense, choking spirals from meagre wood fires and scantily-clad children shiver against the cold. These are largely farming families, and their mud huts fortified by the occasional brick wall are for the most part devoid of light, heat or clean water. But it is here in Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s largest and poorest states, far away from the country’s straining power grid, that US-born entrepreneurs Nikhil Jaisinghani and Brian Shaad have started to pioneer a wholly different energy system, designed to meet some of the most basic needs of the poorest.