Food

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

by

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

by

“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.”

Training Cows

by

I am personally not enchanted with the idea of training horses because if one wants to use animal power in place of a tractor, I’m prejudiced in favor of cows or oxen. Cows and oxen, I believe and shall try to show, are better geared to the smaller homestead farm.

Work and ecology: Less is more

by

Work, for an individual or a society, begins with the effort required to modify or eradicate the ecology that’s there and replace it with something else. For most of history, this is in fact exactly what was meant by the word work. Even more specifically: in most places it meant cutting down forests and then hoeing, plowing, planting, weeding, and harvesting fields. In another word, farming. That was the first work and it is still the one that is prior to all others.

Why I care about the Koch brothers more than heirloom tomatoes

by

“Why do you write about politics so much? Why so negative? Why not more stories on Permaculture?” are questions we sometimes get from readers on Transition Voice. And these are often followed by a statement that Transition is really about “positive actions in the local community.” I’m a fan of community canneries, local currencies and saving energy at City Hall. I’m just not ready yet to join Voltaire’s Candide in withdrawing from the world to cultivate my garden.

Book Review: Basics with a Twist

by

I’m not one for cookbooks but Basics with a Twist by Kim Sanwald has truly inspired me to transform my cooking with the same zeal and enthusiasm as Julie had when she went through Julia Child’s classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But the book is also an inspiring memoir of the author’s complete change of life after 36 years as a manager of a dental office in the city to become a truck farmer in rural Cloverdale.

Food & agriculture – May 22

by

– Why science alone can’t defeat Big Food’s policy stranglehold
– Somalia food aid cut amid UN funding shortfall
– Washington conference on sustainable food: organic ag goes mainstream
– The oceans are emptying fast
– Anton Smedshaug’s Definitive Guide To The Oil-Driven Food Crisis
– Dung loaming: how llamas aided the Inca empire

The Stockholm Memorandum: tipping the scales towards sustainability

by

The jury of Nobel Laureates concluded that humans are now the most significant driver of global change, and that our collective actions could have abrupt and irreversible consequences for human communities and ecological systems. It recommends a suite of urgent and far-reaching actions for decision makers and societies to become active stewards of the planet for future generations

As junk food goes, so goes the planet

by

In pondering the reasons for this lack of progress—this potentially cataclysmic failure of progressive argument—I have come to a fairly radical view: that we can never have a sustainable civilization unless we first achieve sustainability as individuals. Billions of us (not just a few million) will need to embrace lower-consumption, more thoughtful, more ecologically conscious lifestyles with the same personal passion that is today wasted on free-market profiteering, religious proselytizing, or yearning for power and control of other humans. And if I had to identify the single most daunting barrier to that kind of embrace, it is our pervasive intellectual and emotional disconnection from the living planet we evolved on.

The medicinal ornamental garden

by

Ornamental edible gardening gets a lot of attention right now. Consider a new book _The Edible Front Yard_ by Ivette Soler that The Peak Oil Hausfrau has just reviewed. I did a post a while back on ornamental perennial edibles, and I wanted to do a companion piece on ornamental medicinal herbs.