Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Staff -The Only Thing That Will Stop Global Warming Is A Massive Economic Downturn
-Plant study flags dangers of warming world
-An Inconvenient Lawsuit: Teenagers Take Global Warming to the Courts
-Bonn talks aim to build on “Durban Platform”
The Swiss Broadcasting Corporation interviews the chairman of ASPO-Switzerland and a representative of the Swiss oil industry. Both agree we are close to peak oil.
Innovative farmer Joel Salatin says sustainable agriculture requires both perennials (like native grasses) and herbivores (like cattle) to build soil. Mimicking patterns from nature, this maverick Virginia farmer rotates cattle followed by chickens into short-term pasture enclosures, where their poop fertilizes the earth. His new book Folks, This Ain’t Normal is a critique of the industrial food system, and envisions a future where humans are participants in a regenerative, sustaining community of abundance
If you were personally faced with betting on complicated nonsense with your own money, you’d never do it. But JPMorgan was betting with other people’s money, with deposits, with INSURED deposits no less. Now, JPMorgan traders thought they understood the risks. Obviously, they didn’t. And, probably they couldn’t. They pretended to be able to understand the world through models that simply cannot account for unquantifiable risks, risks in the real world.
Fermented foods are a huge part of food preservation, a bigger part that most of us know. I think sometimes we underestimate fermenting as a means of keeping things alive because it doesn’t hold foods entirely in seeming stasis as canning or freezing do (yes, canned and frozen foods degrade too), which is what many of us really want. But what fermented foods do really well is work with the seasons to keep food cyclically – they are the ultimate preservers gift for people who want to be regularly engaged with their dinner.
Sandor Katz’s new book The Art of Fermenation is astonishingly comprehensive and fascinating. Besides the incredible history, recipes, cool pics of the microorganisms you are playing with, ideas for experimentation and socio-culture of food, there is Katz’s basic manifesto – we are not better off, safer, healthier or happier when we hand off the tools of food production and preservation to others.
If you are invisible as a producer in the GDP, you are invisible in the distribution of benefits in the economic framework of the national budget. As feminists we must embrace an ecological model if we are to transform economic power, and the market and commodification must be seen as the servants of such an approach.
Fears of a new phase in the European debt crisis, a decline in oil imports to China in April, and the prospect of a new round of international talks on Iran’s nuclear programme have seen oil prices drop back from recent highs in the past two weeks. Despite all this however, and reports from OPEC that it bolstered supply by 320,000 barrels in April, Brent oil still stands around $112/barrel.
Much of what we believe, and much of what we are trying to change, is rooted in the terminology, the language we use to discuss it. If we want to change our own ideas, beliefs and worldviews, we need to stop using that terminology, because it leaves us anchored in the paradigm we are trying to escape.
After 13 weeks of exploring the problems and opportunities of a sustainable Vancouver by 2050, what did 17 University of British Columbia students and three teachers come up with? Were they able to find a way to make housing affordable, our streets livable, and our burden on the planet much much lighter? Did they find a hopeful way forward, against the odds, to an equitable, affordable, sustainable, and economically vibrant city?
Wendell Berry has said that eating is an agricultural act, but what about drinking beer? A thirst for fermented beverages may have inspired the world’s first farmers to plant crops some 13,000 years ago, yet today beer is rarely part of the larger conversation about where our food comes from.
Visualize gasoline-powered civilization arising as if by some maniacally accelerated evolutionary process. It all began so recently, in the mid-nineteenth century, and spread across the globe in mere decades. Automobiles mutated and competed for dominance on vast networks of roads built to accommodate them. Shopping malls and parking garages sprang up to attract and hold them. And powering it all was an ever-widening but mostly invisible river of gasoline–the poisonous blood of 700 million dinosaur-like machines that now dot landscapes around the world.
– Dutch ‘Repair Cafes’ keep stuff out of the trash by fixing it for free
– Food Fundamentals – interview with food security writer Lolo Houbein (Australia)
– Don’t Throw Away Your Wealth (John Robb on biogas digesters)
– Methane Biodigester – How To Video (The Urban Farming Guys)
