Food

Peeling the Onion: What’s Behind the Financial Mess?

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If you want a pat answer to what has caused the financial crisis that is reverberating around the world, and now threatening the derivatives market, we’ve got one. Nearly everyone – in the mainstream media and outside it, tells the same story – that the crisis was caused by the unravelling of the housing market, particularly the US housing market. And if you ask what’s behind that, well, we’re told there was a bubble. And if you ask what was behind the bursting of the bubble, well…;it is turtles all the way down.
I’m going to suggest that if you peel off the layers of the financial crisis, we’re going to find some pretty basic things…

Organic Money

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Surrounded by shade trees and gardens, about 200 people, a surprising number for such a rural setting, stood around in little knots talking spiritedly about subjects that all came under the heading of Home Economics: local food; natural medicine; home-based alternative energy; home birthing; home schooling, even, get this, home churching.

Solutions & sustainability – Sept 23

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New system could help avert collapse of fisheries
Peak climate (audio) Part 1 is Dr. Peter Ward on past extinctions & violent climate change, Part 2 is Julian Darley, founder of the Post Carbon Institute, on how to live past the energy crisis
Isle of plenty

Albert Bates on peak oil, relocalisation and why the hippys were right all along

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What is so wonderful about Albert’s talk is the incredible story he tells about what can be achieved when people work together to make something happen. The story of hundreds of middle-class city hippy kids turning up on 1000 acres of poor farmland in Tennessee and having to work out how to grow food, build houses, make electricity and so on, is a great story for our times, showing what the combination of circumstance, passion and necessity can draw out of us.

The minimum tools for small-time garden farming

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One of the chief advantages of the small garden farm based on grassland farming with pasture and crop rotations is that only a small portion of the total farm is cultivated, and of that cultivated part, only an even smaller portion needs to be cultivated at any one time. To ascertain your power and tool requirements on such a farm, you do not look at total acreages, but rather the number of acres that necessarily have to be cultivated in any one day.