Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
On this part 8 of our Conscientious Cooks series, we listen in on a really interesting panel discussion hosted in 2008 by the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (or CUESA) located in San Francisco, California. The panel was themed around the concept of Climate Friendly Eating.
The backyard organic gardens central to the current series of posts on The Archdruid Report — and equally central to most strategies for relocation in the face of looming energy shortages — have a lot of work to do in the period between the last frosts of spring and the first frosts of fall. Stretching that interval, by way of “time machines” drawn from appropriate technology, can help make growing part of one’s own food a more viable proposition.
As global change related to resource depletion and climate change becomes increasingly severe, the ineffectiveness of world governments as well as mainstream environmental organizations and movements is obvious…Instead of relying on these approaches, it seems the safest and most secure adaptive route is the introduction of decentralized, local alternative energy and environmental solutions.
One thing that fascinates me about political theorist Murray Bookchin’s writing is how prescient it is. His essay, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” was written in 1965, six years before Earth Day, and almost a half-century before now. Yet its content is as relevant as ever, if not more so, given society’s increasing interest in all things “green.” Bookchin even references future ramifications of climate change, long before many had even considered it.
I’ve had a bee in my bonnet for a while now about the need for a paradigm shift. This began when I came up with the title for a paper: ‘Let’s Twist Again: Time for a Real Copernican Revolution’. Don’t worry, this is the sort of party game academics get up to – yes really! My own favourite is ‘Haydn Sikh: The Adaptation of the Classical Form in Britain’s Minority Religious Communities’, or something like that.
I start my day late after a much needed lie in and finally come downstairs and start my blog catch up; I have had no opportunity these past few days to get near either internet, or time to myself to write, and now I have both. The sign above the desk reads “Be yourself. There is something you can do better than any other. Listen to the inward voice and follow that” A transition saying indeed; one the Big Society should perhaps adopt.
It is tempting to despair of all action. And sometimes those who despair are right. But sometimes they aren’t. And this, I think is an important and central point for everyone who hits those moments when they simply don’t believe society will self-correct in any measure from its impending ecological disaster. I should be clear – I don’t believe it will self-correct in every measure, or even as much as I wish desperately it would. But I also do not believe that what one does to mitigate suffering, soften impacts, make life livable or plan for a better outcome is wasted.
-The Erosion of America’s Middle Class
-Death by Growth: What the Climate-Bill Autopsies Missed
-The Federal Reserve Enters Decline
-Deflation and you: Acting perfectly sensibly
-Forget the ‘big society’; we just need a co-operative one
-Chinese scholar: Will Chinese workers challenge global capitalism
A month into BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe, the US press began to say that the crisis might be ‘Obama’s 9/11’. It was a comparison that Obama himself repeated a couple of weeks later. Hyperbole? Perhaps – but the disaster certainly opens up space for thinking about alternatives to the industry that created it.
In the main section of the Lederer Youth Garden in northeast Washington D.C., run by the DC Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR), a staff member pulled up a weed from the rows of okra, peppers, and watermelons. “This will sell for 3 dollars a bunch at the farmers market,” he said. “But here in our garden, we consider it a weed.” Looking on, Yao Afantchao, who works with the University of the District of Columbia’s (UDC) cooperative extension service and its agricultural experimentation service, smiled and shook his head. On just the other side of the Lederer Garden’s green house, the small demonstration garden he manages boasts an entire section dedicated to growing this weed.
Could a system of energy rationing, or even rationing of high energy goods and foods work in the US? The conventional answer is that it is politically impossible to even consider it, and that the public would never go along with it. But a closer look at the history of rationing during the second World War suggests that it might not be so unthinkable, and that in fact, rationing has historically been viewed as highly positive, pro-democratic and good public policy by the general populace.
While North gives a good overview of the most sophisticated portions of the local-finance spectrum, he is writing about local money, not community finances in general. The scope of his book does not include the low-hanging-fruit — the easy to set up, free to establish vehicles which hold enormous community-building potential. Group purchasing, garden sharing, carpooling, tool libraries, seed swaps, barter fairs and more – these fill in the most intimate, colorful portion of the spectrum in the vision of a multifaceted local financial infrastructure.
