Building Community

Profiles in urban homesteading

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In early February, 2011, Jules Dervaes of the Dervaes Institute, released letters saying that he had secured trademarks for the terms urban homestead and urban homesteading, roiling the larger community or urban homesteaders, from actual businesses and organizations to folks who do it just for fun. Fighting what they consider an injustice, the group set up petitions and a day of action to fight back. We covered the fracas last week, and now follow up with news on the origins of urban homesteading and profiles of two prominent city dwelling farmers.

This is my farm: From the city to the country and back again

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We may not be able to reverse the tide of urbanization, in the nearer term. We simply don’t have enough land to allow every single person on earth an agrarian life on many acres. But how do we keep the link between city and country? It is a link that is important to both parties – the exploitation of farmers who are underpaid and disregarded is only possible when you don’t know any farmers, when you don’t care what they have to do to make your dinner. And urbanites who have lost touch with natural rhythyms need to get in touch with them, to have access to the best food on a reasonable budget, to have the knowledge to meet their own needs.

Bee fodder

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We live by the grace of invertebrates. They work around the clock, collect and dispose of our waste, replenish the soil, feed animals above them on the food chain and allow plants to return each spring. This time of year, as those of us in the northern hemisphere plan our gardens and sow our first seeds, we must remember to devote part of our garden to reimbursing the armies that work for us.

“Democracy Uprising” in the U.S.A.?

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World-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky discusses several domestic issues in the United States, including the protests in defense of public sector employees and unions in Wisconsin, how the U.S. deification of former President Ronald Reagan resembles North Korea, and the crackdown on political activists with anti-terror laws and FBI raids. [includes rush transcript]

Bill McKibben: Climate change is our most urgent challenge

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Bill McKibben, author and founder of the international environmental organization 350.org, says that without a global campaign to curb climate change, the ecological devastation of our warming climate will make our planet uninhabitable. His appeal to citizens and policy-makers, the seventh video in the series “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate” from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, is a call to action as much as it is a sobering account of the damage we’re already doing to our environment.

The orgacity of hope

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One of the questions I encounter most frequently is how the vision for a sustainable society we are developing in the market town of Stroud might be applied to the cities where most of the world’s population now live. This is a troublesome question for me, because I have never enjoyed the city, with its concrete and anonymity, but from an ecological perspective no question is more important.

Desalination: Unlocking lessons from yesterday’s solution

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There is powerful information waiting to be unleashed in water data. If it were set free it would force us to re-think how we use, develop, sell, transfer, and dispose of water. Rather than focusing on the miles per gallon our cars get, we might consider how much water per mile that fuel’s production required. Rather than arguing over how much energy is being used to produce water, we would give credit to how much water is required to produce energy. Rather than focusing on whether our food is grown locally, we would consider how much water it took to grow that food in our locality.