Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kalie llana Cassel-Feiss A lot of typical agriculture doesn’t work this way or focus on what’s actually happening to the land or paying attention to seeing what’s going on around you. When you have healthy animals and healthy land you also improve healthy wildlife.
L’Atelier Paysan is a French cooperative that works with farmers to design machines and buildings adapted to the specific practices of small farm agroecology. In addition to distributing free plans on its website, L’Atelier Paysan organizes winter self-help training sessions, during which farmers train in metalworking and build tools which they can then use on their own farms.
The veil has been lifted. The administration’s budget proposal for 2018 eviscerates agencies which could have mitigated some of the climate change devastation ahead. We have confirmation that the White House is sawing off the branch on which 99% of Americans sit.
The Paris Agreement’s inclusion of “well below 2°C” and “pursue … 1.5°C” has catalysed fervent activity amongst many within the scientific community keen to understand what this more ambitious objective implies for mitigation.
First of all, we are at a moment when we’re in political crisis, we’re in ecological crisis, and the ability to imagine a different world, to imagine different solutions to the world we’ve created, to imagine different ways of dealing with the problems we have has never been more pressing.
Big data refers to the collection of the ‘digital traces’ that we all leave as a result of our online activity. Essentially everything we do online is recorded, from the websites we browse and the terms we type into Google, to the purchases we make and the posts that we ‘like’ on Facebook or ‘retweet’ on Twitter.
After a quick drop of $3-4 a barrel the week before last, oil prices steadied last week as the markets contemplated just how effective the OPEC/NOPEC production freeze will be in the short term.
One step in front of another and a life of daily cycles becomes a decade, a century, a millennium, a billion years. It’s not for my intelligence to know the duration.
There is nothing inevitable about the demise of rural America. Nothing inevitable, that is, if we turn away from the extractive model of corporate agriculture and the trade deals and subsidies that support it and instead reestablish the small- and medium-scale farming and ranching that can support sustainable prosperity.
If we trim energy use in the manner I’ve described above, we can reduce per capita energy use in the Peasant’s Republic of Wessex by a little more than half its present value – down to around 1.3 kW per capita.
So you’re working on reducing your own oil use but maybe you’re downhearted. Maybe you figure, why bother? I’m just an oily drop in an oily nation. What does it matter if I cut my own oil use if everyone around me wallows in the stuff?
The broad challenge before us then is to create an environmentally and socially sustainable future that provides decent, meaningful work for all. Such meaningful work is about more than just economic sufficiency; to be truly meaningful, work must enable people to unite their heads, their hands, and their hearts.
