A meditation on Meat: a benign extravagance – Sept 9
-I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly
-A benign extravagance
-The water footprint: the hidden cost of our meat consumption
Building Community
Lines of defence (I): The thin brown line
There’s a palpable sense of expectation as we cruise down the canal. Two dozen people and barely a word passes between us. It’s not the roar of the triple outboard engines, nor the forced camaraderie of strangers thrust together, with only their environmentalisms in common. Rather, it’s the sense that we’re travelling towards something—not a place, but a phenomenon, an event—whose name we know but whose face we have not yet seen.
Large scale land investments do not benefit local communities
In April 2010, more than 120 farmers’ groups and non-governmental organizations all across the world signed a statement declaring their opposition to the guiding principles endorsed by the World Bank, the FAO, IFAD and UNCTAD on “responsible” land investments.
Further reflections on ‘The Big Society’
We have a guest post today, from Jules Peck, originally posted at Citizen Renaissance.com. We have had some initial explorations of this here at Transition Culture already, but Jules offers some useful additional insights into what the Big Society agenda might mean for Transition, and vice versa. Our thanks for allowing us to publish his piece here.
Climbing a dark mountain: Thoughts on a new culture
I’ve recently finished reading Dark Mountain issue 1, the first publication of the global artists’ collective of the same name, of which I am a member. It’s an astonishing collection (work of 37 different authors) of appreciation and reflection on our civilization’s beginning collapse, and I recommend it without hesitation to anyone who has reached the point of understanding that our unsustainable civilization culture can’t be saved, and is trying to cope with that terrible knowledge.
Reflections from alongside the threshing machine
Last weekend I was at Embercombe, about 20 minutes drive from Totnes, for the West Country Storytelling Festival…Food production is becoming a key part of its work, and it now has a wonderful vegetable garden, orchards, field scale veg and, of particular interest to me, some small scale cereals production. The day I was there, they were threshing (or attempting to thresh) some of what they had grown, and I thought I would share some of the conversations that took place by the threshing machine.
How I became a “rail fan”
President Obama’s proposal to spend $50 billion on transportation infrastructure – including 4,000 miles of rail lines – couldn’t be a better expenditure. … Trains are one of the last public spaces left in our society and they also demand a different kind of behavior than we are accustomed in today’s fast-paced, impersonal, high-security, privatized society. You can interact with other passengers you don’t know, feel safe with them, and be with people who are largely respectful toward their fellow travelers.
Deconstructing Dinner: Local food fraud, an investigation
An exclusive behind-the-scenes investigative report taking an in-depth look into alleged local food fraud. In May 2010, Deconstructing Dinner received a tip from a farmer in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia who alleged that a local business who sells eggs to 18 retailers and restaurants and who was marketing their product as being predominantly from their own farm, was not true. According to the tip, the “farm” was not a farm at all, and housed no chickens on the property!
Why learn permaculture? For the children and ourselves
Permaculture is one of the only ways home for humanity. If one believes in modernism, industrial agriculture and better living through chemistry read no further. However, if you feel something is not right about the way we live, read on.
The errant economics of detrimental dams and ruined rivers
Lessons from the massive flooding that has beset Pakistan, uprooting 14 million people, underscore the need for a new economic paradigm. River engineering (a mainstay of the old economic paradigm) in the Indus Basin reduced small and medium floods, but set up the conditions for millions to be harmed when larger floods occurred.
An interview with Chris Bird, author of ‘Local Sustainable Homes’
In advance of the publication next week of Chris Bird’s Transition Book “Local Sustainable Homes”, I spoke to Chris about the book, and about what he set out to achieve in writing it.
Review: The Witch of Hebron by James Kunstler
The Witch of Hebron picks up a couple of months after World Made by Hand ended. Returning to the small upstate New York town of Union Grove, the new book further defines the post-apocalyptic setting, adds depth to characters who played only minor parts in the first story, ties up loose ends from the previous book and introduces some all new dilemmas. And it does all of this against the backdrop of a full-moon Halloween, lending a delicious sense of foreboding to the proceedings.
