Eating snails
Attitudes toward food change constantly, and perfectly edible food that is shunned in one era might be highly prized in another.
Food
Of Coal Stoves and Goat Herders: Getting Out of the Vicious Circle
Energy Bulletin ran this excellent piece from the New York Times on a crisis facing Mongolian Goat Herders who are attempting to deal with unstable world markets, climate change and overgrazing. I was fascinated by the clear way that the author of the piece lays out the vicious circle that they’ve entered into, and I was struck by how useful an example it is of the kind of ecological vicious circle that we face all the time…
Home-grown oatmeal
Oatmeal is a healthful food and now there’s an easier way to grow and process your own. The problem has always been the hulls which grip the groats so tightly that getting them off is difficult.
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.
Peak oil and the psychology of work
This is a preliminary attempt to explore the relationship between the current predicament facing humanity arising out of an exploding population facing planetary resource limitations, in other words known as overshoot, and the psychology of work inherent in the human species.
Solutions & sustainability – Dec 23
A Field Study of Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) in Shanghai
-The Dirt on Climate Change
-HomeGrown
-Open University Transition Films Now Embedded Here Too…
Food & agriculture – Dec 22
-Seed behemoth Monsanto stumbles into antitrust trouble
-Weather no obstacle for Pittsburg garden
-How a Hoop House Can Extend the Growing Season
-Copenhagen: peasant farmers can save the planet
-Getting at the roots of unsustainable U.S. ag policy
-Copenhagen could lead to increase in intensive farming
-Meet the Milk
-Where Industry Once Hummed, Urban Garden Finds Success
Top Ten Sustainability Stories of the Decade
It’s the end of the decade 2000-2009, and there has been progress as well as potential disaster for sustainability. In chronological order, I’ve chosen these ten stories to show a range of relevant global and national issues and events on climate, business, government, media, design, technology, language and demographics.
Peak Moment 157: The Heart of Permaculture
Former truck driver Bill Wilson tells an insightful story about the energy packed in a gallon of gas — which we won’t always have in cheap abundance. Now a permaculture educator, he sees permaculture as a viable, realistic way to use nature to provide the abundance we really need — harvesting sunlight, food, wind, water and more. Can you guess what the magic stuff is that we all can’t live without? (No, it’s not oil.)
Climate negotiations in Copenhagen and “Master Tailor”
The greatest mistake that they did before Copenhagen was to focus the spotlight only on climate. If the world situation is to develop in a positive way in the future then this one-lane track must be broadened into a four-lane highway. One only needs to examine the global welfare equation (HWB) to understand what those four lanes are: Food and water, climate, economy, and peace on Earth.
Mountains of Corn
The jokers think maybe with more progress and more help from Monsanto Claus, in time we will have corn mountains tall enough to use as temporary winter ski slopes.
SnowBear Farm – Ten Thousand Hours and Counting
A year ago I wrote a lengthy article for Oil Drum – Campfire describing the beginning of my conversion from a career of professional life often an desk to one of a farmer. Due to the interest and spirited responses to my article of last December I thought that Oil Drum readers might find it interesting to know what has transpired this past year on the farm and what I think I have learned.
