Paula Garcia

Occupy the food supply: Construction or protest?

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This February 27 [was] “Occupy the Food Supply” day. It reflects a longstanding call from food activists nationwide to “fix our broken food system.” With 50 million food insecure people in the US, an epidemic of diet-related diseases, a “dead zone” the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico (caused by fertilizer runoff) and a steady stream of E.coli outbreaks from industrialized food, “fixing” the food system seems a reasonable–and urgent—demand.

Goodby Supermarkets!

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Today, in Lewes, we spend about fifty million pounds a year on food and drink and most of that – at least forty million – is spent in our three supermarkets: Tesco, Waitrose and Aldi. In those hundred years – and especially the last fifty years since I was born – we’ve managed to let all this natural capital be diverted into the hands of a few multinational corporations. Our local food economies have dried up; local money no longer circulates around and about the town, building wealth and relationships as it goes. A tenner spent locally multiplies many times over as it circulates. Spent in a supermarket, that tenner goes straight out of town and into the hands of Tesco and co, and its shareholders.

Review: Petroplague by Amy Rogers

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We have a brand-new entrant to the oil-eating-bug-runs-amok tradition: the self-published novel Petroplague. It’s a Crichton-esque thriller written by microbiology professor-turned author Amy Rogers, who says she aims to “blur the line between fact and fiction so well that you need a Ph.D. to figure out where one ends and the other begins.” The plot involves a batch of experimental, oil-hungry bacteria inadvertently loosed upon Los Angeles, which proceed to wreak a near biblical swath of destruction. Part ecology lesson and part cautionary tale, Petroplague is an entertaining entrée into the subject of oil depletion and its implications for society, human health and the environment.

This hugely hopeful moment

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Even though there is huge fear, dislocation, unemployment and suffering powering through Europe and America just as it has been powering through so many other parts of the world for so long. Even when it becomes absolutely clear that in the current system, in order to keep those at the top ‘safe’’, everyone else is being pulverised as the financiers and their professional and political accomplices are rescued with the money of the rest of us. Even though that financial crisis is fast becoming a sovereign debt crisis and the free market’s gun is being held to country after country’s heads in Europe just as the IMF has done for decades elsewhere. Even though the oil tanker of economic growth is fast developing huge holes that no billions of dollars can plug. Even though, or should we say, because of this: we are living in a hugely hopeful moment.

Pilot lights are evil

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My personal journey into home energy reduction began with taking stock of past energy use as reported on my utility bills. I quickly migrated toward reading the meters directly to gauge the impact of particular activities. What I learned from our gas meter shocked me, and ultimately led to our single-biggest energy-saving behavioral shift. I’ve already ruined any hope of suspense in the title of the post, but just how bad does something have to be before I’ll resort to a word like “evil? And how bad are your own demons? Ah—now you can’t wait to find out!

Why high oil prices are now affecting Europe more than the US

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This time around, Europe, and in particular the Eurozone, is the area of the world getting hit the hardest by high oil prices. Part of this has to do with the relative level of the Euro and the US dollar.

In the end, it may not matter which countries were first and most affected by limited oil supply and high oil prices. It will be all of us that feel the impact.

Solo In The Silo

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Farmers like to sing while they work because they think no one can hear them. They especially like to sing on the tractor where the motor noise improves their singing by drowning out the raw edges of their voices. They also think the motor drowns out their renditions from the neighbors’ ears but just the opposite is true. Their hearty wails carry better than the motor noise and scare cows and neighbors several hundred acres downwind.

The peak oil crisis: East Coast refineries redux

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Last week, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a detailed report on what could happen to the availability of oil and prices in the event the third and largest of the three Philadelphia refineries in question be forced to close down this coming July. Given enough time, the markets and the infrastructure will rebalance, but for now it looks as if the Northeast may be in for some abnormally high gasoline and diesel prices in comparison to the rest of the country.