Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We tend to think of our beloved trees as monuments but they are living things. We should be planting them and harvesting them on a schedule of about eighty to a hundred years to take advantage of their value as lumber or fuel while avoiding most of the possibility of storm damage. The issue is increasingly pertinent, especially now that power companies are again thinking seriously of using wood for some of its electrical generation.
From the toes of our socks to the hem of our necklines, Americans alone consume 25% of the world’s cotton, mostly in the form of clothing and home furnishings. People are often surprised to learn that the world’s largest purveyors of cotton seeds (80-90% of market share in some cotton-producing countries), is a company generally assumed to be focused on food stock. When pulling on their pants in the morning, most people don’t think about Monsanto.
In an earlier series of posts, I identified the four primary attributes necessary to thriving during the post-carbon era (or, for that matter, today): water security, food security, body temperature, and human community. … I’m adding to the previous essays with a series of video clips. The usual caveats apply, primarily including the one about relevance to a specific region. The first two video clips, posted below, provide (1) a brief introduction and (2) an overview of how we secure water at the mud hut.
“Imagining a world without oil” describes in stark detail what might happen if one day the world decided to decommission all its oil tankers, rigs, pipelines and strategic reserves. The authors, environmental scientist Steve Hallett and journalist John Wright, expect that we’d initially see sky-high prices and long lines at pumps. After a few weeks, fuel wouldn’t be had at any price and even first-world citizens would struggle to stay fed and out of the elements. This is no Hollywood doomsday scenario—it’s a levelheaded extrapolation from current trends in the fast deteriorating world energy situation. [An essay prefiguring the book originally appeared in The Washington Post.]
“We tend to characterize every civilization in terms of “preclassic, classic, and postclassic,” but we might do better to think of it as “stable and expanding,” “unstable,” and “shrinking and reconsolidating.” Preclassic Maya agriculture was exceedingly diverse, with agroforestry, household garden plots, rotational field crops, chinampas and aquaponic systems, and perhaps also novel farming techniques we have yet to learn about. So was the postclassic.”
Once regional planners come alive to the planning considerations of cities designed for mental health, human scale and biophilic connections, they need to locate spaces and activities that can make pay the freight of high-spaced city land. This, in my opinion, is where urban agriculture wins its day in the sun. What Swiss army knives and scarves are to multi-tasking in the wilds, urban agriculture is to multi-tasking in the cities, which is how it pays down the high cost of urban land to support it.
-Are food prices approaching a violent tipping point?
-Tesco and Starbucks feel the heat in battle against ‘clone town Britain’
-As Farmers’ Markets Go Mainstream, Some Fear a Glut
It is becoming standard procedure these days to decry those who oppose you politically as radicals as in “radical agenda,” “radical views,” “radical friends,” and “radical past.” Often this refers to suggested changes in policies that are no more than a few decades old. But I’d like to do something that will seem truly radical to those who are narrowly focused on the contemporary world. I want to look at what might be regarded as radical when considering not the last few decades, but the last 100,000 years.
The combined effects of climate change, energy scarcity, and water paucity require that we radically rethink our agricultural systems. Countries can and must reorient their agricultural systems toward modes of production that are not only highly productive, but also highly sustainable. Following the 2008 global food price crisis, many developing countries have adopted new food security policies and have made significant investments in their agricultural systems. Global hunger is also back on top of the international agenda. However, the question is not only how much is done, but also how it is done—and what kinds of food systems are now being rebuilt.
Agroecology, the application of ecological science to the study, design, and management of sustainable agriculture, offers a model of agricultural development to meet this challenge. Recent research demonstrates that it holds great promise for the roughly 500 million food-insecure households around the world. By scaling up its practice, we can sustainably improve the livelihoods of the most vulnerable, and thus contribute to feeding a hungry planet.
“If anyone tells you that there’s a single-factor explanation for societal collapse,” says collapse guru Jared Diamond, “you know right away that they’re an idiot. This is a complex subject.” So, forget about peak debt, peak oil, peak climate, peak Harry Potter or even peak everything as the single most important problem that could bring today’s whole pulsing, beaming and txt-mssgng mess down into a lifeless pile of shorted-out microchips, rusted carburetors and busted sporks from Taco Bell. Diamond gives the Five Fatals that could do us in, using the example of the unlucky Greenland Norse.
Many food justice advocates are brought into their work by an emotional reaction to the tragic hunger that exists in the world, be it in the context of the U.S.’s inner cities or global poverty. Indeed, hunger and emergency food efforts have been the recipients of the bulk of funding in the growing food movement over the last 40 years, a time period that simultaneously saw an expansion of hunger and food-related problems. Focusing on the one issue of food access has only enabled the persistence of the true underlying causes of our unjust food system. Food access, though important, cannot be the focus of efforts. It is more important to restructure the food system in a way that empowers a community to have control in their food system thereby ensuring their continued access.
Despite flood, hail, drought, high winds, plant diseases, weeds, bugs, deteriorating muscles, coons, deer, squirrels, moles, stock market crashes, grain market inflation, skyrocketing land prices, root rot, robins, rabbits, and radio talk shows, once more the annual great miracle has occurred. We are (literally after the last downpour) swimming in homegrown food. The August Glut is upon us, and we dance among the corn stalks in sheer delight.
