Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
At first there was nothing spectacular about this rejuvenating forest, but then Brad and Berny Billock (my brother-in-law and sister) bought the property, cleaned out much of the underbrush that had crept in and encouraged seedling black walnuts to spread out from a couple of hundred year old bearing trees. The Billocks reintroduced sheep but on a careful, rotational schedule. Then the flowers ran rampant through the grove.
There’s everyday unsustainable, and then there’s completely off-the-chart unsustainable. In this second slot, we can put the worldwide move to Western-style meals centered around livestock fed on cheap corn and soybeans. Feeding three squares of meat to the world’s expected 9 billion mouths in 2050 would require doubling of global grain production, which in turn would require entire rainforests converted to corn and soy monocultures.
It’s a brisk Autumnal Monday morning. I’m at Edible Landscapes London, an offshoot of Transition Finsbury Park. This is the cutting edge of no-dig, agroforestry, predominantly perennial and definitely low-maintenance gardening and our practice challenges conventional gardening wisdom. I’m talking about deeply ingrained habits of digging and tidiness. Tell a trad gardener that they’re working too hard, that they don’;t need to dig every year or remove every weed to the compost heap and it’s like whipping the (strictly manicured) lawn from under their feet. They wince and clutch onto the spade handle more tightly.
-Dickson Despommier on the Rise of the Vertical Farm (Podcast)
-We’re all paying for Europe’s gift to our aristocrats and utility companies
-Reinventing the Farm with Cheryl Rogowski, (podcast)
-Scarcity and degradation of land and water: growing threat to food security (FAO report)
Not everyone can eat cheaply in the ways I am proposing. Single parents with multiple jobs, homeless folks, those living in shelters or in motels with limited cooking facilities and those with no cooking skills at all have more limited choices. Still, many of us can do this – it isn’t terrifically time consuming or that expensive. Moreover, eating cheap means mostly eating lower on the food chain and focusing on what’s available with a minimum of packaging or processing and in season. Cheap eating can be a gift for all of us if we have the good fortunate to have a home or a place we can cook and store food – at the same time, let us recall that we are blessed, because not everyone does..
– The Coming Green Wave: Ocean Farming to Fight Climate Change
– A Quiet Push to Grow Crops Under Cover of Trees (NYT on food forests)
– That’s Not Trash, That’s Dinner
– Rules of Engagement for Non-Profits and Unions Working with the #Occupy Movement
– Stan Goff: A Million Gardens (for the 99% of the 99%)
– Naomi Wolf: The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy
How do we move away from a fossil-fuel based society? David Holmgren, ecological design engineer and co-originator of the term “Permaculture” discusses this very question.
The Occupy movement, unlike the peak oil/climate/Transition movement (?) is a bottom-up not a top-down approach. That appeals to the younger people and many of the older ones as well. What they are doing is not coming in the form of ‘delivered wisdom’ from the ‘experts in the field’ with their laundry list of what we ‘must’ do.
The weather has kept the ground wet through much of the Corn Belt but that mud doesn’t stop today’s machines of mass destruction when farmers get desperate enough to harvest anyway. They grind their way through the wet soil, leaving in their wake roiling, rolling gullies of ooze deep enough in the wettest areas to sink a Greyhound bus.
Ten thousand years ago, ancestors of today’s Coquille Indians lived along the southern Oregon coast from Coos Bay to Cape Blanco and along the inland valleys of the Coquille River drainage. A common misconception among European Americans is that Indians lived passively within their environment, “at one with nature.” On the contrary, aboriginal peoples actively managed their landscape for their own objectives, using the technologies available to them.
The holiday season is a time for gifts, decorations, and lots and lots of food. As a result, it’s also a time of spectacular amounts of waste. In the United States, we generate an extra 5 million tons of household waste each year between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, including three times as much food waste as at other times of the year. When our total food waste adds up to 34 million tons each year, that equals a lot of food. With the holidays now upon us, the Worldwatch Institute offers 10 simple steps we all can take to help make this season less wasteful and more plentiful.
