Round the world in four seasons
The oft-discussed 10,000 mile Caesar Salad, used to illustrate the degree to which our food system is drenched in fossil fuels, really is only a piker when it comes to the spaces that food can make you cover.
Building Community
Ingredients of Transition: Strategies for plugging the leaks
Money, like other aspects of life, has become controlled by distant organisations who, as the recent economic turmoil has demonstrated, do not necessarily have our best interests at heart. As the New Economics Foundation put it, our economies have become like ‘leaky buckets’, money that should be staying and circulating locally being sucked out to distant corporations and shareholders. This all adds to our vulnerability in times of increasing uncertainty, rather than reducing it.
Movement goes world-wide – Nov 7
– An Update on All Things Transitioney and French
– Round-up of What’s Happening out in the World of Transition (Brazil, US … )
– Dinero contra energía fósil: La batalla por el control del mundo (online Spanish translations)
– Bem-Vindo ao Pico do Petróleo (new Brazil peak oil website)
An interstate bicycling system
A system of bicycle routes to connect the nation? It’s happening. If implemented as planned, the U.S. Bicycle Route System will become the largest official cycling network on the planet, encompassing more than 50,000 miles of routes.
Review: “The Witch of Hebron” by James Kunstler
Having grown tired of the competitiveness of peak oil writers pushing their various grim visions as the most likely to unfold, I am happy to go with this New Age takeover of the geeks’ techno collapsing world simply because it is the more empowering vision.
A world made by hand needn’t wait
People who have caught on to the magnitude of the changes humanity faces in coming years typically describe their process of reaction as “preparation.” That is an adequate word, but incomplete, because it implies only a future focus. Preparation always looks forward, even when it takes appropriate action in the present. The danger in that is it can lead to a life that is forever deferred, waiting for a signal from some external source that it’s time to actually have what you have prepared yourself for.
Reflections on our daily bread, and bees, and chicken poo….
-Brenda Palms Barber, The Promised Land (audio interview)
-Fowl energy: Chicken poo lights Gloucestershire town
-Bio-Agriculture – a Solution to Climate Change
Peak Moment 183: Coping with the decline
This time Janaia’s in the hot seat! In this interview by Jim Fritz on Port Townsend Television, she tackles corporate control and a dysfunctional system that profits from increasing unhealthiness and consuming the planet. She points to Peak Moment guests as models for the average family to gain genuine security. They’re withdrawing from the money system, growing food, and joining neighbors to prepare for emergencies.
Ingredients of Transition: Ensuring land access
Promoting the idea of local food production and the rollout of urban agriculture, whether in the form of market gardens, allotments or back gardening, will clearly struggle if no land is made available to make it possible. Many settlements, even if they are built to a high density, will have both land within them that could be used, and also land around them. Ensuring secure access to this land will be vital.
In war-scarred landscape, Vietnam replants its forests
With large swaths of forest destroyed by wartime defoliants, and even larger areas lost to post-war logging, Vietnam has set an ambitious goal for regenerating its woodlands. But proponents of reintroducing native tree species face resistance from a timber industry that favors fast-growing exotics like acacia.
What I learned on the Cascadia trail
People have asked me about my impressions of my trip and there is one word I want to communicate: Local. The stops were so varied, the needs so diverse, the problems so different, it is difficult to generalize, but I’ll try anyway.
My kids eat snails
It is not so important to me that my kids can explain the significance of a locavore diet at their age. But I do want them to know what food is supposed to taste like when it is a product of a healthy ecosystem. I want them to experience what their bodies feel like when they are nourished in a way that is in harmony with the Earth.
