By Bee Wilson, Sustainable Food Trust
We won’t build a more diverse food system until we help people develop more diverse preferences. At the moment, our food system is suffering from lack of diversity both at the level of supply and of demand.
By Matt Willer, Permaculture Association
The Children in Permaculture Manual has been written by people who not only see the world through the permaculture lens, but also know exactly how, through thoughtful pedagogy, children can be engaged to see through this lens too.
By Rob Hopkins, Jay Griffiths, Rob Hopkins blog
To me one of the most important things is mental sovereignty, is that you really think for yourself rather than be made small, be made constrained, by the narrowness of the dominant culture.
By Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth Island Journal
Protecting the children is a formidable responsibility. But it is our responsibility, and we bring to the task a formidable set of powers, honed, sharpened, and passed down mother-to-daughter over generations.
By Victoria Balfour, Sustainable Food Trust
A group of 5 year old children wearing ear muffs and biting into pears may sound like a bizarre way to tackle obesity, but the founders of the new sensory food education initiative Flavour School would disagree. There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that taste preferences in adulthood are closely linked to what we eat in childhood.
By Sharon Ede, Shareable
Conceived by Australian creative planner and urbanist David Engwicht in 1992, the Walking School Bus is an agreed, set route to and from school supervised by adult volunteer "drivers" (often parents) who collect students from various stops.
By Erik Assadourian, Future Perfect
Learning primitive skills offers an opportunity for people to reconnect to the environment and to gain a deeper understanding of sustainable living. The U.S.-based MAPS Meet provides a forum to learn these skills.
By Brian Kaller, Restoring Mayberry
In his book “Last Child in the Woods” and “The Nature Principle,” US author Richard Louv coined the phrase “Nature-deficit disorder,” which comes from children no longer exploring woods or bogs and having adventures. Children who are obsessed with computer games or driven from sport to sport, Louv maintains, miss the restorative effects that come with the nimbler bodies and sharper senses that are developed during random running-around in wild places.
By Brian Kaller, Restoring Mayberry
When I talk to my elderly neighbours, or read interviews with people from earlier eras, one of the things that most comes through about their childhoods, and seems dramatically different than the way children are raised today, is how far and freely they roamed. Unlike most modern children, they did not spend most of their time indoors watching television or playing video games, or following one adult-led activity after another.
By Bettina Hauser, Future Perfect
“Going to school together helps children feel like part of a group”, says Antonio Moya, an architect by profession. He is one of the four masterminds behind the Pas a Pas (Step by Step) project in Jávea, which aims to give children an active role in urban life. Since April 2016, more than 100 children from four primary schools have been walking to school together in this town on Spain’s East coast. They have been joined in autumn by students from another two schools.