Staff

The Peak Oil Crisis: The Great December Bailout

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So what do we do with Detroit? As now seems likely, its future course will be increasingly controlled by the federal government. Currently the plan is for this control to be exercised by an auto czar tasked with making sure that the multi-billion government loans are not used to pay for excessive executive compensation or dividends on worthless stock, and that the companies move expeditiously to “restructure” so they will not become permanent wards of the state. It is only a matter of time however that, no matter how well intentioned, the government’s involvement in “restructuring” expands to corporate decisions about what to make and how to make it

Guerilla Gardening: Eating The Suburbs

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The Age recently had an article on the emerging practice of “guerilla gardening”, taking a look at the “Gardening guerillas in our midst”. This concept seems to have steadily increased in popularity in recent years (admittedly from a very low base) as the permaculture movement’s ideas have been propagated through the community.

Unlike the usual approach taken when trying to grow food in the suburbs – converting spare land on your own property (as discussed by aeldric previously and, more recently, in Jeff Vail’s series on A Resilient Suburbia) – guerilla gardening involves cultivating any spare patch of urban land that isn’t being used for another purpose, which could provide a substantial addition to the food growing potential of suburbia.