Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Animals are great to talk to. They can be trusted to keep any secret, will not point out to you embarrassing contradictions of logic in your arguments, and they never argue back. They just nod and keep on eating. They will only interrupt your flow of brilliant reasoning if they run out of food.
Most of us dress ourselves each morning with garments that were grown, processed, designed and sewn by an anonymous supply chain. A combination of animal, plant, machinery, imagination, and technical skill came together to clothe you, but it is rare to have connection to any of these real life elements. It is the goal of one central Californian community’s members to put a face on their wardrobes, and to uncover, develop, and build a new way of engaging with the textiles of their lives. A bioregional supply chain known as a Fibershed is being grown out of a region with a 150 mile diameter — the epicenter just north of San Francisco.
Here is the January Transition podcast, lovingly spliced together in order to offer a more in depth look at three of the stories from last month’s round-up. You’ll hear about how Transition Chesham’s local produce market was recently voted the greenest market in Britain, how Transition Town Whitehead are planning to plant 60,000 trees over the next few weeks, and how Transition Town Shrewsbury stepped in when the local council announced that it was stopping collecting cardboard for recycling, and did it themselves. I hope you enjoy it, and do let us know what you think.
This is what I tried to explain to the New York Times reporter as I prepared my squash. Organic agriculture and sustainable agriculture are based on similar principles. They both used to be fuzzy ideas, but that is no longer the case for organic agriculture, which became more cut-and-dried with the introduction of national organic standards. Apparently she heard me say that organic agriculture used to be sustainable, but isn’t always anymore.
How do we catalyze a movement of urban farmers throughout the country and throughout the developed world? Renowned speaker, activist, and urban farmer, Michael Abelman sits down with me to discuss the reasoning and strategy behind encouraging millions of people to become small plot farmers.
This is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains…But for once, this story isn’t about tragedy. It’s about a resistance movement that has arisen to challenge some of the most powerful corporations in history.
In the 1990s, Richard J. Jackson had an epiphany while driving on the car-choked Buford Highway, on his way to his job at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta “I realized that the major threat was how we had built America,” he says. Dr. Jackson, who is now a professor and chair of environmental health sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles’s School of Public Health, has since become one of the leading voices calling for better urban design for the sake of good health.
For thousands of years before refrigerators and packaged food, people across the world needed to make food last through the winter. Starches present no problem; dried, grains like wheat and rice can last decades. Vitamins, found in fresh plants and lasting only a short time in the body, present more of a challenge.
Luckily, there are several ways to get fresh vitamins all through the winter, first by fooling the vegetables, as it were, into thinking they’re not dead yet.
It’s counterintuitive that suppressing volatility in human affairs would actually make the world a more dangerous place. But that is precisely the thesis of a recent article by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Blyth which appeared in Foreign Affairs.
– Salon on urban gardens: The future of food?
– Solutions Series Guides: chickens, greywater, rainwater harvesting …
– European banks fuelling food price volatility and hunger
– The Paradox of Cuban Agriculture
– Food as a Commodity
If only the rest of the world could emulate the Government of Rajasthan in India in adopting public policies to promote the commons! As the Times of India reports “Rajasthan has become the first state in the country to have drafted a policy underlining the importance and the need to preserve and secure common land (commons) in rural areas.” There may be other such government policies around the world, but they are few and far between. The Rajasthan policies are a real breakthrough.
There was some good news on the local food security front this fall. One recent critical success was the election of antifracking candidates in several Tompkins County towns, which for the moment at least has challenged the claimed right of area landowners to extract short-term profits at the expense of the long-term health and agricultural productivity of local farmland. The other development was the November 2011 approval of the Town of Ithaca Agricultural and Farmland Protection Plan (AFPP) by the Ithaca Town Board and the preparation of similar plans for the Towns of Lansing and Ulysses.
