Food

Post Carbon Institute Natural Gas Report Supplements: Public Health, Agriculture, & Transportation

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The challenges posed by shale gas production have serious implications for the future of agriculture, transportation, and health in the United States. In this collection of articles, PCI Fellows explore what the Hughes Report means for these sectors.

 

A Field Guide To Farmers

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Now that farmer-watching has become more popular than bird-watching, urban people need a way to help them distinguish between the various breeds in case they want to rent one, or buy one for a personal pet. Farmers actually resemble other members of the human race in most respects. They walk upright if there is no wheeled vehicle available to ride, have cell phones hanging on their ears most of the time, and feed at short order restaurants more than in their natural environment of open fields… Zoologists distinguish several sub-types of the species…

Gary Nabhan and the importance of seed diversity

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World-renowned conservation scientist Gary Nabhan is an author and farmer at Patagonia, Arizona along the Mexican border, raising sheep, heritage grains, and orchard fruits…When asked his definition of sustainable, he said, “What’s just? What’s right? What’s healing? Leave the land in better shape than we got it.”

A Pigpen for the Backyard

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Loose talk about pigpens in the yard will send the blood pressure soaring in the veins of local zoning officials, if not your neighbors. It’s perfectly all right in our culture to keep a dog half the size of a cow in the yard, letting it bark all night and running all over town dropping manure in its wake. But a quiet, clean hog producing something useful like pork chops? Heaven forbid.

From the bottom up – A DIY guide to wicking beds

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Wicking beds are a unique and increasingly popular way to grow vegetables. They are self-contained raised beds with built-in reservoirs that supply water from the bottom up – changing how, and how much, you water your beds. In this article, we’ll talk about how wicking beds work and why we love them. We’ll also show you some great examples and leave you with ideas and instructions for creating your own.

Vandana Shiva x3

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In this interview for CSSC Encounters, Dr. Vandana Shiva gives the history of her engagement and explains the situation we are in now, facing a new fascism as corporations and governments merge. Still, she is always using an optimistic tone, in spite of corporate grabs of our common heritage, the natural world — a world caught in a system where the ecology and the economy are fierce enemies, when they should have been best friends. How to reunite them? Vandana gives the answer, through true community! (plus two more talks).

The Jemima Code: The politics of the kitchen, past and present

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Yet for all the success, the 52-year-old Tipton-Martin is a woman haunted, not by traumatic memories from her own life but by Aunt Jemima. Not just by the Aunt Jemima caricature — the commercial persona for the “Mammy” figure from plantation life that has sold pancake mix and syrup — but by the real African-American women in kitchens through the centuries, during and after slavery, whose work and wisdom has been ignored.

Ambitious plan launches to establish bee corridors across the U.K.

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Like the United States, the United Kingdom has seen honeybee populations plummet in the last couple of years. The Co-operative Group—a U.K.-based consumer cooperative—has launched an awareness campaign around the issue, and a comprehensive plan of action. The US$1.2 million campaign, called Plan Bee, includes the establishment of long rows of bee-friendly habitats across the country to act as bee corridors. The corridors will also support other key pollinator species like bumble bees, hover flies, butterflies, and moths.

Farming fiber

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“We’re not trying to mimic industrial production, but we are trying to find that scale halfway between hand-spinning your yarn and a football field-sized industrial spinning rack,” says Burgess. Not, in many ways, unlike artisan food production. “I’d love to see the food movement incorporate the fiber movement, because, whether it’s what we put in our body or what we put on our bodies, all of it comes from the same soil.”