Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Jon Steinman Deconstructing Dinner has long been exploring the many ways through which farmers, businesses, organizations and communities are accessing food using new and innovative models. On today’s broadcast we hear more of those examples shared as part of the March 2010 panel – Produce to the People, hosted by the San Francisco based CUESA.
In the search for alternatives to our dead-end industrial agriculture system, Land Institute researchers are pursuing plant breeding programs in Salina, KS that just may be the key to post-oil farming. In late September, the Institute’s 2010 Prairie Festival began with three talks – by poet/novelist Wendell Berry, economist Josh Farley, and biologist Sandra Steingraber. The three were telling the story of how sin brought us to this place, how we must redefine success if we are to atone, and how essential that change is for our own safety. I left the barn that day with one revelation burning in my brain: While evil lurks in many places, it is most concentrated in fossil fuels.
The U.S. has invested billions of dollars trying to create a controlled form of nuclear fusion that could be the energy source for an endless supply of electricity. But as a federal laboratory prepares for a key test of the latest technology, even the project’s most enthusiastic supporters concede an actual pilot fusion plant is at least a decade away.
The technology industry was built by hackers. The change forced on it by high energy costs will be a return to its roots. And it will provoke some real, socially useful innovation.
Reports on talks by Jeff Rubin, Bianca Jagger, Kjell Aleklett, David Rutledge, Robert Hirsch and Nicole Foss (Stoneleigh).
“What you doin’?” asked the three-year-old who lives next door.
I was standing on my front porch wielding a paintbrush.
“Finishing my shelves.” I showed him my brush.
“But I don’t smell anything,” his mother said as they went by.
“Hah!” I thought, exactly the point.
– 10/10/10 day of climate action (photo slideshow)
– Review of the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan
– Oxfordshire town sees human waste used to heat homes
– Transition and Social Enterprise: a short film
– Google Invests in $5bn Wind-Power Superhighway
– Hopkins Interview
For the moment, Beijing’s strategic priority has been to carefully develop a remarkably diverse set of energy-suppliers. If China has so far proven masterly in the way it has played its cards in its Pipelineistan “war”, the U.S. hand — bypass Russia, elbow out China, isolate Iran — may soon be called for what it is: a bluff.
In Tanka village, 50 women have started farming using solar drip irrigation to grow okra, tomatoes, eggplant, and other vegetables, as well as moringa and fruit trees. The women each manage their own plots, but share tools and water—and skills—with one another.
Local food, while spreading like quackgrass, is hardly out of the starting gate. It has many strong seeds. Not all of them will grow but I’m betting a lot will.
Complexity theory argues that simple, complicated, complex and chaotic systems have fundamentally different properties, and therefore different approaches and processes are needed when dealing with issues and challenges in each of these types of systems.
The good news is that natural- and social-science experts agree we have lots of solution paths for adaptation or mitigation to avoid catastrophe. The climate choir needs to turn technical data into social information that allows these solution messages to become “me too!” What we need is a bottom-to-top rethink of how we address climate change, starting in a town near you.
