Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-Green Fields: Economist’s advice to Big Food: Change or face fate of GM
-Global leaders gather in Iowa for World Food Prize, talks on food, agriculture security
-Bill Gates reveals support for GMO ag
-Gates gives $120 million to help poor nations farm
The American economy has reached a dangerous new phase. We are now in the “recovery” period, but what kind of rebound will we have? In No L, Professor James Hamilton (along with Paul Krugman) takes note of some positive news from the Fed.
Developing a sustainable agriculture is a necessary part of creating a sustainable society. The root of the word sustainable is the verb, to sustain, which means to nourish and prolong. In social and environmental contexts we say something is sustainable when we believe it can persist indefinitely without exhausting resources or causing lasting damage.
Social critics have pointed out with some justice that today’s industrial states are troubled, corrupt, and dysfunctional. It’s too often remembered, though, that as the pressures of resource depletion come to bear, what replaces them need not be an improvement.
-How Can Bright Green Cities Thrive Without Capital?
-A Blueprint for Restoring the World’s Oceans to Health
-Nudging Recycling From Less Waste to None
-The Second Wave of Mining
Brian Moyer, the new executive director of Rural Vermont, explains how the organization plans to follow up on their legislative successes by making sure the laws about raw milk, on-farm slaughter, and other aspects of farming are working as intended and helping family farmers. City planner and designer Darrin Nordahl says cities, towns, and villages should not only let people grow food in the margins of urban areas, they should pay their staff to grow food on public land. Nordahl talks about his new book, Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture.
-Fossil Fuels’ Hidden Cost Is in Billions, Study Says
-Will EPA veto or regulate the plunder of Appalachia?
-Global Warming Accelerating While The U.S. Backpedals
-A tale of how it turned out right
-Investor alarm as Finance Minister blasts corporate Japan’s ethics
-Memo to Investigators: Dig Deep
-A year after the crunch, it’s boom time again for bankers
-Public Health Before Wall Street Wealth
-Stiglitz and Sen’s Manifesto on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress
-The sound of one bank not banking
…A technic society, by contrast, relies primarily on nonfood energy. Modern industrial civilization is simply a form of technic society that gets its nonfood energy from fossil fuels and maximizes production of goods and services in the usual R-selected way at the cost of vast inefficiency. At the other end of the spectrum is the climax community, the ecotechnic society, which gets its nonfood energy from renewable sources and maximizes the efficiency of its energy and resource use in the usual K-selected way at the cost of more restricted access to goods and services.
Speculative bubbles have become an increasingly common feature of modern economies, as concrete wealth has been replaced by its abstract representations. Behind the ever more fictive finances of an industrial world caught in the trap of trying to meet concrete needs with manufactured money lies a vaster speculative bubble focused on money itself. When it pops, as it will, the detonation may echo for a very long time. The third and last post of a series.
-Tulare couple grows a garden by the foot
-Rooftop farming
-Richard Wiswall on the business of organic farming
-On World Food Day: Crunching the Numbers
-Aquacalypse Now
-Culinary Ecotourists Turn Wilderness Foraging into Dinner
-A Timely Reminder of the Real Limits to Growth
-Liberal Education, Stewardship, and the Cosmopolitan Temptation
-Decline of a tribe: and then there were five
-Last Call at Descartes’ Bar and Grill
-The Vindication of a Public Scholar
