Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Promoting the idea of local food production and the rollout of urban agriculture, whether in the form of market gardens, allotments or back gardening, will clearly struggle if no land is made available to make it possible. Many settlements, even if they are built to a high density, will have both land within them that could be used, and also land around them. Ensuring secure access to this land will be vital.
With large swaths of forest destroyed by wartime defoliants, and even larger areas lost to post-war logging, Vietnam has set an ambitious goal for regenerating its woodlands. But proponents of reintroducing native tree species face resistance from a timber industry that favors fast-growing exotics like acacia.
It is not so important to me that my kids can explain the significance of a locavore diet at their age. But I do want them to know what food is supposed to taste like when it is a product of a healthy ecosystem. I want them to experience what their bodies feel like when they are nourished in a way that is in harmony with the Earth.
-Brenda Palms Barber, The Promised Land (audio interview)
-Fowl energy: Chicken poo lights Gloucestershire town
-Bio-Agriculture – a Solution to Climate Change
Pat Leuchtman brought up an interesting subject when she reviewed my book, “Holy Shit,” on www.commonweeder.com. She reminisced about her early experiences on the farm and how much she liked the smell of cow manure in the barn when she was a child. Lots of us agree with Pat but it has been awhile since I’ve heard anyone praise the smell of manure right out loud.
“I know all about food security,” says Mitharam Maslai, a farmer from India’s Northeast highlands. “We ate only pumpkin and bamboo shoots every year for two to three weeks because we had run out of rice.”
Articles that we thought were significant this month.
In the wake of the oil supply shocks of the 1970s, the U.S. DOT encouraged the development of regional transportation energy contingency plans. But by the early 1980s, regional and local governments stopped developing transportation energy contingency plans as the threat of fuel supply disruptions diminished, as funding and support for the development of these plans discontinued, and as other more pressing issues emerged. Nearly 30 years later, there are warnings that we are again at risk for potential fuel shortages.
We are developing the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – an advanced industrial economy-in-a-box that can be replicated inexpensively anywhere in the world. The GVCS is like a Lego set of modular building blocks which that work together for creating sustainable, regenerative, resilient communities. Our prototype village aims to demonstrate that we can create a complete economy from local resources on ~1000 acres via regenerative resource use – for ecological living with modern-day comforts, minus resource conflicts.
– Soup swaps help stock your freezer and foster friendships
– The mellow Monbiot: How to make apple juice that doesn’t cost the Earth
– Robert Putnam (“Bowling Alone”) on Social Capital and Happiness
– Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood talks about livable communities
– Goodwill and compromise: Nagoya biodiversity deal restores faith in UN
– The UK’s great forest sell-off
– Bat disease threatens ecological catastrophe
– Growing Calls for Moratorium on Climate Geoengineering
Salone is a rare coming together, an opportunity for the stewards of the world’s food biodiversity, to share and market their wares.
