Harvesting Tranquility
When visitors ask what our main crop is on our little farm, they look a bit startled when I reply “wood.” They look even more startled when I say the reason wood is important to us is that it brings tranquility to our lives.
Building Community
Perennial Polyculture Prevails over PeakOil
KrisCan visits Eric Toensmeier in his Holyoke, Massachusetts home garden that was transformed from a bleakly barren backyard into a thriving oasis of year-round, productive perennial fruits and vegetables.
Who Will Grow Your Food? Part I: The Coming Demographic Crisis in Agriculture
This is the beginning of a multi-part series on agricultural education, the farming demographic crisis and the question of who will grow our food – what the problems are, how we will find new farmers, how they will be trained. To me, this is one of the most urgent questions of our time.
The Meaning of Copenhagen
It was the pivotal international conference of the new century. Tens of thousands showed up, including heads of state, officials at all levels of government, representatives of environmental organizations, and ordinary citizens from nearly 200 countries. Scientists had warned that, without a strong agreement to reduce carbon emissions, the consequences for civilization and the world’s ecosystems would be cataclysmic.
2010: The year for making contact
If we’re to seriously critique the wardrobe of the emperor, we’d better have explicit plans and options for a whole new wardrobe to articulate, otherwise perhaps being quiet and working on said plans is a better idea.
Eating snails
Attitudes toward food change constantly, and perfectly edible food that is shunned in one era might be highly prized in another.
2010 Predictions: Practice Losing Farther, Losing Faster
I suddenly realized that my sense that I had time to do my end of year wrap up was rapidly becoming incorrect – New Years is tomorrow, of course, but somehow it snuck up on me.
Hope, hopelessness and faith
For those involved in issues of sustainability, peak oil, climate change, and relocalization it might be better to feel a certain hopelessness in our situation. For hope implies dependence on forces outside ourselves. Once we abandon that hope, we can get down to the tasks at hand, the tasks that need to be done–for which we need to ask no politician or government official permission–tasks that we can get started on today. In this way hopelessness concerning the current political and economic arrangements becomes an ally.
Who Then Will Lead Us?
Our leaders have failed us. Our leaders are failing us. Our leaders will continue to fail us. It is time – past time – to ask ourselves the necessary questions: Who will step forward to restore sanity to our lives? Who will provide us the real leadership necessary to extricate ourselves from the delusional madhouse our culture has become? If our leaders will not lead us to a livable future, then who will?
The Paradise Imperative
Humans must create paradise or they cannot live on the planet Earth. Paradise here is described as a human community that lives in perpetuity and in peace on one place on the earth, over many generations.
Taking Responsibility for the Climate Crisis
Taking responsibility for our own lot and the climate crisis means we must first reject an unworkable system and culture. I hasten to clarify; this does not mean there aren’t a lot of nice people caught up in it. But if they believe elections and voting with their consumer dollars are going to save them from the ecological crisis and the slide into societal chaos of collapse, they are of no help to themselves or to the countless species being driven extinct by modern civilization.
Peak textiles – Dec 23
-From farm field to cotton mill: The making of America’s denim
-Can China Turn Cotton Green?
-Pastoralism Unraveling in Mongolia
