Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Joni Praded At Chelsea Green Publishing, where I acquire and develop books, we’ve long understood that the climate issue reaches into every corner of our lives—from the way we structure our local, regional, and national economies and politics to the way we grow our food and feed our families; build, renovate, locate, and power our homes; transport ourselves and our goods; structure our workplaces, communities, our energy grids, industries; and so much more.
A new report by two United Nations human rights experts has rejected the notion that pesticides are necessary in feeding the world, claiming that they undermine “the rights to adequate food and health for present and future generations.” T
Today, it takes a more energy intensive combination of automobiles, trucks and airplanes to do what a single passenger train was able to do in 1950. Furthermore, we lost a level of convenience in our lives that is in some ways unmatched today, and we lost a sense of community that our passenger rail system helped build and hold together
Community energy refers to any kind of power plant using a renewable source of energy, that has been planned, financed and which is owned by a community of people (from the village to the house). And why would these energy communities matter?
The mid-morning office is a sun office and the heart of the workday on a small farm. It is the sweat-of-the-brow, hands-in-the-dirt, muscle-to-the-posthole-digger time of day, the time to get it done and not waste time.
Crude prices rebounded sharply last week erasing nearly half the $7-8 selloff that began in early March. The March price drop came on the consensus that increasing crude inventories and ever higher rig counts would offset the 1.8 million production cut that OPEC was trying to orchestrate.
What is the personal experience of living in a community that wants to change the basic tenets of economic system and work organization? Certainly, each community is different and the individuals living there determine the atmosphere, so my description cannot serve as a base for generalization.
This reframing cannot just be a messaging strategy, but a real change in our approach that aligns a longer-term climate plan with measurable short-term solutions that can make a positive difference to people’s lives.
#OurField is the brainchild of five young women intent on changing farming economics by turning farm ownership on its head. It builds on an earlier Arts Council initiative Field of Wheat. With #OurField, a farmer can share a piece of land with ‘collaborators’ who invest in its crop(s).
Later economists like David Ricardo took the idea of specialisation and refined it into a theory of why free trade would supposedly improve everyone’s welfare because it led to specialisation between countries.
Our work has proven that low-income consumers, regardless of ethnicity or geography, want to feed their families well. If they can’t afford produce, they won’t buy it. But if they can afford it, they will!
How will we meet the challenges of the world’s growing dependence on groundwater? Authors Bill and Rosemary Alley on one of the globe’s most deadly threats.
