Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Reduce your consumption. Increase your awareness. Use berms/swales/mulch. Use infiltration as well as storage techniques. Build healthy soil. Change your plant palette. Bucket in the shower. Greywater-plumb your laundry (and consider guerilla greywater too). Use found materials as shade devices. And use rain barrels. Do all of the above in combination, and move into the gardens of the future.
In February, world food prices reached the highest level on record. Soaring food prices are already a source of spreading hunger and political unrest, and it appears likely that they will climb further in the months ahead.
That is a much bigger project even that conversion to small farms and agro-ecology. That requires that we care about other people enough to make changes and sacrifices, that we take the right to food seriously.
– The unusual uses of urine
– NYT on Peak Coffee: Heat Damages Colombia Coffee, Raising Prices
– Decline of Honey Bees Now a Global Phenomenon, says UN
– US farmers fear the return of the Dust Bowl
– The world food crisis” the squeeze on purchasing power
In addition to water, people need food for their very existence. Thus food is also essential to economic growth.
It is ironic that the Dervaes–homestead project originated long ago in a desire to access GMO-free food. Now they have become, in effect, the GMO of the L.A. Green Scene. They are attempting to patent the “seed,” so that no one else is allowed to touch it without paying royalties. Just like Monsanto, they are sic-ing their attorneys on people who are working publicly in good faith to do the right thing.
One could argue that the principles common in addiction recovery hold much wisdom for a transition process. To truly “recover” from an addiction one must go through the transition of recognizing first that one’s way of life is not working—the compulsion with the behavior or substance is getting in the way of one’s relationships, health, future well-being, and growth. In other words, one recognizes their desire to consume is insatiable and destructive, and a change is needed.
A local diet can reduce energy use somewhat, but there are even more effective ways to tackle the problem. Single-minded pursuit of local food, without consideration of the bigger picture, can actually make things worse from an energy perspective.
For millions of rural women and their families in developing countries, rights to agricultural land and forest resources are critical determinants of their well-being and their security against destitution. Not only can such property rights enhance individual welfare, they can also strengthen livelihoods for the most vulnerable and help conserve forests that are of global importance as carbon sinks and sources of biodiversity.
As all of you know who have spent the better part of your working life hitching and unhitching stuff, when you are alone you must bring the tractor to a dead stop at the exact right place, get off, and because you never are in the exact right place, pull the implement forward or the tractor backward the inch or so necessary with brute, hernia-causing strength. No tractor yet made, even on perfectly level ground, will stay put exactly where you stop it for hitching.
– UN: Eco-Farming Feeds the World
– Eco-Farming Could Double Food Output of Poor Countries, Says UN
– NYT’s Mark Bittman: Sustainable Farming Can Feed the World?
– Report submitted by the Special Rapporteur on the right to food
In an odd sort of way, Hurricane Katrina helped to make New Orleans an incredible laboratory not only for understanding the role and importance of a city’s food system but for recognizing the importance of food as an essential tool for community building.
