Good ol’ food and farming – Nov 11
-A Socially Conscious Way to Invest in Farmland: An Interview with Dr. Jason Bradford about Farmland LP
-Mushroom Abundance
-Growing Food Starts and Ends with The People
Building Community
New videos to change the world – Nov 10
– “The Ultimate Roller Coaster Ride: A Brief History of Fossil Fuels” (Post Carbon Institute)
– “The Story of Electronics” (Annie Leonard)
– “Permaculture: The Growing Edge” (Starhawk and Donna Read)
– “The Economics of Happiness” (Helena Norberg-Hodge)
– “Collapsus” – what energy collapse might look like (interactive video)
Can Totnes and District House Itself? The potential of local building materials to build resilience
In the same way the local food movement shifts its focus from out-of-season, long supply chain, high embodied energy foods towards more locally sourced, low impact foods rooted in the local region or ‘foodshed’, an emerging branch of architecture and construction examine similar transitions with building materials.
The vision thing – Nov 10
– Bacteria Can Build Better Roads for Our Peak Oil Years
– The food storage secret our grandparents knew
– New $1.1 million program to create urban farms in Cleveland’s Kinsman neighborhood
– First Canadian peak oil task force
– Transition Voice Covers Peak Oil, Zombies and Economic Crisis
Peak Moment 184: YES! Ready for anything
“An awful lot of what we’ve taken for granted about the future can’t continue,” says executive editor Sarah van Gelder of YES! Magazine, whose Fall 2010 issue is about people creatively building resilient families and communities. Publisher Fran Korten describes local food as an important avenue into a much larger vision of what we can become. Fran and Sarah discuss sources of real happiness that don’t destroy the planet, an upcoming issue of YES! Magazine on families, their weekly “YES! This Week” e-newsletter, and the YES! emphasis on helping people see possibilities and take action on positive initiatives.
Abandoned
The abandoned farmsteads shown here are not far from where I live. Such sad scenes are easy enough to find. They have been a part of the landscape of my life, grave markers of the agrarian culture that I love.
Peak Oil – “The Debate is Over”
It’s been a long time coming, but the uber-significant Peak Oil issue has finally started to infiltrate the corridors of power. What they’ll do with this information remains to be seen…
Strengthening our health
America’s health care system is more expensive by 40–60 percent than health care systems in any other industrialized country (it makes up nearly half the health care budget of the entire world), but the results it produces are arguably the worst of the group.
Is the local food movement elitist?
Local food is elitist! This trumpets from one paper or another, revealing that despite the growing preoccupation with good food, ultimately, it is just another white soccer Mom phenomenon.
An existential approach to bringing about change
What accounts for the success of a few large-scale change movements (ending slavery, improving the status of women, reducing tobacco addiction and drunk driving) and the failure of almost all others?
After a strong counterattack, big coal makes a comeback
With an aggressive campaign focused on advertising, lobbying, and political contributions, America’s coal industry has succeeded in beating back a challenge from environmentalists and clean-energy advocates. The dirty truth is that Big Coal is more powerful today than ever.
Ignoble strife
There was a difficult choice of entertainment for me on Thursday night. We had a meeting about the cuts here in town organised by the the Socialist Workers Party while Channel 4 was advertising a professional butchery job on the green movement. I think I made the right choice: I spent Thursday evening watching John Schlesinger’s 1967 film version of the Hardy classic Far From the Madding Crowd.
