Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
America has food taboos just as powerful as the Levitican prohibitions against pork or boiling a kid in its mother’s milk, and for most people, until recently, they are about constituting ourselves as unrelated to our agrarian past.
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “conserve” means “to keep in a safe or sound state… especially: to avoid wasteful or destructive use.” The first example given? To “conserve natural resources.” Obviously! “Conserve” goes with natural resources like “defend” goes with country and “safeguard” goes with Constitution. That’s why those who conserve natural resources are called “conservationists.”
Tracing back down memory lane to my experience then: a young man of 25 arriving at The Farm in 1972 with just a backpack; being greeted by the Night Sentry and shown a place to sleep; going for a breakfast at the Community Kitchen, porridge and sorghum molasses, soysage and corn biscuits; then to the field in a horse wagon; harvesting sorghum cane with a machete and piling it into the wagon; at the end of the day returning to my assigned, dirt-floored army tent lit by candles; supper of bean soup and cornbread with pickled japapeños; guitars and song around a fire under the canopy of stars; abiding sense of harmony in the world; community.
By integrating poverty alleviation with environmental conservation, microforestry eases market pressure on indigenous forests, restores degraded landscapes, and helps Africa’s farmers—the majority of whom are women—make life-long investments in their families’ futures.
I have recommitted to local organizing that aims mainly to strengthen institutions and networks on the ground where I live, rooted in a belief that those local connections will be more important than ever in coming decades. At the same time, I try to maintain and extend connections to like-minded people around the world, hoping that those connections can contribute to the possibility of coordinated global action. In short, I am trying to become more tribal and more universal at the same time.
Kurt Cobb has just released a page-turner of a first novel titled Prelude, which uses a Grisham-esque tale of suspense and intrigue to educate the public about peak oil. Prelude’s main character is a young energy analyst who discovers a top-secret report shedding light on the true, precarious state of the world’s oil reserves….Allegorically named Cassie, she stands for all of the real-life Cassandras within the peak oil movement, who, like the Cassandra of Greek myth, are able to foresee disaster but so far seem cursed never to be believed.
– When eating organic was totally uncool (a Hmong childhood)
– How to get your city to allow backyard chickens
– World Food Prices Enter ‘Danger Territory’ to Reach Record High
Right here in the desert southwest, in fact, one of the last great “common pool resource” systems in North America provides irrigation water and open grazing land to farmers and pastoralists. Derived from the imported culture of Spanish settlers (via the Arabic Moors who brought the concept to Iberia previously) and combined with the best practices of the native peoples of the region, the acequia system is a powerful example of how we might envision people working together not only with each other but with the land itself.
– The American Conservative: Mainstreaming Bicycles
– New York’s transportation chief is a latter-day Robin Hood
– The ‘War on Cars’: A brief history of a rhetorical device
– Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities
-The Legacy of David Suzuki
-China’s Grey Swan is changing colors
-Capitalism and Degrowth—An Impossibility Theorem
-The Oil – Employment Link, Part 1
It started with a conversation among members of a women’s farming group in Affe Tidiane, a small village in the Kaolack region of central Senegal. “The leader of the women’s group said we should have a meeting and ask everyone what they wanted to do,” says Helen Fallat, a Peace Corps volunteer working in the village in 2007 and 2008. “I thought that sounded simple enough.”
-World Food Prices Enter ‘Danger Territory’ to Reach Record High
-The city that grows
-How will growing cities eat?
-Peak Fertilizer?
