Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Michael Shuman It’s time to connect the headlines between persistent unemployment in the United States and growing food insecurity. The next Obama stimulus package should focus on how local food can address both simultaneously.
Overwhelmingly history suggests that the psychological trauma of watching your world transformed often strikes men, particularly men of middle age and above, harder than it does women. How do we soften the blow?
Ten years from now, in 2020, when we try to look back, Indian agriculture can be transformed into a healthy and vibrant system where farmer suicides have been relegated to history, where distress and despondency has been replaced by the lost pride in farming, where agriculture becomes sustainable in the long run, and does not add on to global warming.
In this episode we continue with the theme of school gardens and farms. I am joined by Debbie Hillman of the Edible Acre Project, a project in a suburb just outside of Chicago Illinois. Debbie discusses the origins and implementation of the project, the role of a the farm/garden in education, and practical strategies for those looking to develop similar projects in their communities.
Richard Heinberg is an important figure in the world of those interested in the energy crisis and its consequences, and one of the rare few, along with James Kunstler, to have had their work at least partially translated into French…His latest book, Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis, is dedicated to coal, and has aroused considerable interest, and this all the more so because it highlights a problem which had previously only been mentioned in relatively confidential reports: the imminent depletion of coal reserves.
As economist Herman Daly once commented, he would accept the possibility of infinite growth in the economy on the day that one of his economist colleagues could demonstrate that Earth itself could grow at a commensurate rate.
-Care Farming
-Campaign to save tropical forests failed by food giants
-Golf and the great Lao land grab
-Food carts take the curse off Portland’s parking lots
-One quarter of US grain crops fed to cars – not people, new figures show
-Reclaiming Value: An Interview with Raj Patel
-How Cows (Grass-Fed Only) Could Save the Planet
I have run out of room for my tomatoes. Over the last three years, I have placed tomato and pepper plants all throughout my current garden beds, and now I need a new spot to rotate them into to avoid building up diseases in the soil. Thus, last weekend’s activities.
-Past Peak Oil Travelling towards Transition
-Why Transition? Creating a Brighter Future
-The Future of our Food Supply
-‘Peak water’ could flush civilisation
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I went on a visit of the port site in Zeebrugge where the foundations for the Belwind offshore wind farm (the financing of which I worked on) have been stored before their installation and wanted to give you a glimpse of the kind of logistics that entails and what kind of problems can happen (and how they are solved).
For something as critical as food, it is common sense that society should design for resilience. Reliability in food production in the face of change requires a system capable of rapid evolution. Resilience is therefore a core principle of sustainability.
A lot of things started shaking loose last week, and not just in Haiti. The Scott Brown senate seat victory in Massachussetts shook loose a Democratic “super-majority” that only had to be constructed because the US Senate stupidly turned the filibuster into standard operating procedure where it once was a seldom-used procedural dodge employed strictly by villains seeking to paralyze the chamber. Thanks to the new system, the senate is now in a continual state of paralysis.
