Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The storyteller usually concludes by saying, with all due solemnity, that this is how farmers in the good old days learned to put little sleds under their watermelons so that fast moving vines would not ruin the fruit while dragging it over the ground.
Mahatma Gandhi is widely regarded as the father of the Indian nation, which he was. But the founding of the nation was not his only aim. He was, as he freely admitted, using India to demonstrate to the whole world how nonviolence could change history. The swell of mostly nonviolent revolutions that has followed in the last 30 or so years would seem to indicate that his bold scheme worked.
As people throughout the Western world are increasingly seeking to reconnect with their food, there’s a lot to be learned from the many peoples who have long maintained these dynamic relationships between their sustenance and the earth. Ethnobiologists research these very relationships through a scientific lens and it’s a field of study bringing together many disciplines like anthropology,ecology and conservation to name just a few.
-Water shortages ‘could plunge the world into conflict’
-Government review to examine threat of world resources shortage
-Phosphorus and the Oxygen Connection
Agricultural producers are being hit with yet another rising input cost plus a lot of decision making uncertainty surrounding the emergence of superweeds immune to Roundup.
Over on Earth Island Journal, Sena Christian has an excellent, rigorously reported article about the tough economics of urban farming. She focuses on some of the more famous city farms of the Bay Area, where EIJ is based — City Slicker Farms, People’s Grocery — but she also discusses projects like Milwaukee’s Growing Power. And she finishes the piece with a farm I’d never heard of before: Greensgrow, in Philadelphia.
For at least three decades, Americans have had some inkling that we face an uncertain energy future, but we’ve ignored a much more worrisome crisis—water.
We are told that in the US, the food on our table has traveled an average of 1500 miles and consumed 9 calories of energy for each food calorie on our plate. In a time when “oil prices are likely to be both higher and more volatile and where oil prices have the potential to destabilize economic, political and social activity”[1], we need a way to mitigate the near certain risks of much higher impending food costs.
Laura Allen gives an intimate tour of a home-built composting toilet in her Bay Area urban home. The nitrogen-rich composted “humanure” is used to fertilize the lush edible-food garden, and doesn’t waste precious drinking water like flush toilets. The co-founder of Greywater Action shows the throne-like toilet compartment whose distinctive feature is a urine diverter. Pee and poop are collected in separate containers beneath the toilet, and are accessed outside the house. Sterile pee is watered in at the base of plants, while poop is collected in barrels and aged for a year or more until it has composted fully. What a way to go!
Even though I spend a lot of time growing stuff and raising animals, I am an unreal farmer. A real farmer spends about half the year farming and the other half up at the FSA office trying to figure out how to cultivate the government.
Growing your own food can be a way to increase the security and health of your family in a world facing the multiple challenges of peak energy and resources, unpredictable and more severe climate, and financial uncertainty. At the same time, gardening may become more difficult due to the strange and shifting weather and uncertain consequences of peak oil. You can increase the resiliency of your garden in order to help deal with rapid changes in the economy, environment, and energy landscape.
Pollan posits the existence of a social movement geared to transforming the food system. He emphasizes that it’s loose, internally conflicted, and nascent — but all the same, “one of the most interesting social movements to emerge in the last few years.” People have been talking about the “food movement” for a while, but I don’t think anyone has articulated its existence so clearly and in such an important publication.
