Building Community

New online magazine “Hen and Harvest” – serious and sexy food production

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Sharon Astyk, the Submissions Goddess for this new online magazine, writes: “We’re all about serious food production and food security on every scale from container to acreage, from personal to community. And we’ve got food covered at every step of the process, from seed to table. Oh, and we’ll have some sexy stuff (I mean, how could gardening and eating not be sexy?)”

Urbanites in the edible forest

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“Farmers should not go to university,” Jo said, “what is taught there is not sustainable. What good is it for a farmer to have an education if he is not taught how to be sustainable?” I glanced at Jo’s boy Than wondering how this boy would be educated. … Yet I understood what Jo was saying. Perhaps an education was just another form of runaway consumerism training students to increase their needs and consume more resources in order to “succeed”. What, indeed, was sustainable about it? What was progress for a Thai farmer if the use of modern agriculture meant endless debt and health problems from pesticide use?

The coming re-becoming

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Everywhere you turn in this nation, you see a society primed for implosion. We seem unaware how extraordinary the American experience has been, especially in the last hundred years. By this, I don’t mean that we are a better people than any other society — these days, ordinary people in the USA make an effort to appear thuggish and act surly, as though we were a nation of convicts — but for decade-upon-decade, we were very fortunate. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s may seem like a relatively peaceful and gentle “time out” from a frantic era of hypertrophic growth, compared to the storm we’re sailing into now.

“What would my grandfather do?”

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It’s big things, and small things. I don’t know if these qualities come from growing up in the Depression, being a hard working man, not growing up in the computer age, or just learning to be a good person. But for my grandfather, every decision matters, to ourselves, our family, our friends, our communities, and the world as a whole.

Ready, Aim…

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Barbara Ehrenreich has a wonderful essay on the way we’re turning on ourselves in response to the financial crisis – and how we should be turning our anger outwards. She’s right – and it isn’t just suicide. Depression, domestic violence, child abuse – all of these are on the rise, and in large part due to the fact that people are poorer, scared and frustrated. Ehrenreich writes of the move to respond to the financial bad news by destroying yourself that we’re aiming in the wrong direction:

Something Wonderful Just Happened in Somerset

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Last week, Somerset County Council voted unanimously to endorse a motion that they become the UK’s first ‘Transition Local Authority’. What is means is that SCC could start taking an integrated approach to its planning processes, putting peak oil and climate change at the heart of its forward planning. It may well also unlock funds for the many Transition initiatives emerging across Somerset.