Food

Climate solution: from air to soil

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Tested in lion country in the African bush, Allan Savory is still in the top 11 for the $25 million dollar Virgin Earth Challenge to find a harmless way to remove carbon from the atmosphere. In Vermont, carbon farmer Abe Collins follows that lead. Then we hear how to create a functioning local food system – even in hard times. North Carolina county organizer Aaron Newton was recorded at ASPO 2011 in D.C. All this new agriculture can function in a super-low oil economy – but can we handle change?

Sanctuary

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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.

Citywatch: Urban ag meat

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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.

Edible Landscapes London

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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.

How to eat cheap

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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..

Why Occupy has taken off

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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.

Harvesting crops in the mud and snow

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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.