Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Ari LeVaux Letting food sit at room temperature and become colonized by airborne microorganisms runs counter to everything we’re taught about food safety. But without this guided decomposition that we call fermentation there would be no bread, cheese, tequila, or kimchee.
I have not kept it secret that I’m a fan of solar power. Leaving storage hangups aside for now, the fact that the scale of available power is comfortably gigantic, that perfectly efficient technology exists, that it’s hard-over on the reality axis (vs. fantasy: it’s producing electricity on my roof right now), and that it works well almost everywhere—what’s not to like? Did you trip over that last part? Many do. In this post, we’ll look at just how much solar yield one may expect as a function of location within the U.S.
-Avant Gardeners Awake!
-India’s Drought Highlights Challenges of Climate Change Adaptation
-Worst Drought Since 1956 Getting Worse; One-Fifth of U.S. Has Extreme Conditions
-Food Machine
Are you old enough to remember community Work Bees? Or, did you come along after most of the homestead “work” got out-sourced to “professionals?”
I’m old enough to remember Work Bees. And, I’m interested in reintroducing them. We’re living in a period of the Great Forgetting and part of reclaiming resilience is becoming reskilled in many of the practices that were native to our grandparents’ lives.
Maybe it takes us to mid-century to get to a near carbon-neutral society. The point is that it’s not hopeless. As the weather gets worse – the droughts, the storms, the melting ice – the denialists will look sillier and sillier and the pressure for action will rise. And as it does, the solutions will increasingly be in place. So don’t be discouraged if electric car sales are tiny right now, or solar power is a very small fraction of total energy use. This is a long game.
This, a doorway in West Africa’s Elmina Fort, is a Door of No Return. It is the last part of Africa you would touch if you were a slave being led from the dungeon to a waiting ship.
If the logic of the industrial system is based on profit, the logic of real food is founded on respect and balance. Real food isn’t opposed to profit, but it is opposed to profits that aren’t shared fairly with those who work the hardest to feed us. The Door of No Return represents what’s we’re up against: a global industrial food economy 500 years in the making that exploits both people and land.
While the whitetail offers many lessons, this essay focuses on the lesson they offer about diet. No, this is not an essay on being vegan or even vegetarian, it’s much deeper than that. A thoughtful glance at our modern food system suggests we’ve forgotten much of what the whitetail knows about sustainable food systems. My goal in this essay is to start us on a path of remembering, so that we can build an energetically sustainable food system that can feed and nourish us far into the future. We’re far from this ideal today.
To keep from becoming too depressed over the drought, I try to find lessons to learn from it, like trying not to be envious when rain falls on nearby farms but not ours. Two occurrences in my pastures suggest a teeny bit of optimism, but they run contrary to the way I usually think about pasture farming. That is to say, both occurrences involve plants whose names up to now have been hard for me to say out loud without prefixing them with cuss words.
So far 2012 is the fourth most volatile year for oil prices since 1982. The other top three years were 2007, 2008 and 2009. Since the production of oil from conventional sources peaked in 2005 we have reached a new paradigm: highly volatile oil prices.
-Three Cool Inventions For a Greener World
-Take Back Your Gadgets! 6 Reasons To Love DIY
-Innovative Financing Can Help Small Businesses and Nonprofits Invest in Solar Power
It was all so perfect … the only report anyone could ever need to consign Peak Oil to the trash heap; hailed far and wide as the definitive answer. One entire report!
The Great Drought of 2012 has yet to come to an end, but we already know that its consequences will be severe. With more than one-half of America’s counties designated as drought disaster areas, the 2012 harvest of corn, soybeans, and other food staples is guaranteed to fall far short of predictions. This, in turn, will boost food prices domestically and abroad, causing increased misery for farmers and low-income Americans and far greater hardship for poor people in countries that rely on imported U.S. grains. This, however, is just the beginning of the likely consequences: if history is any guide, rising food prices of this sort will also lead to widespread social unrest and violent conflict.
