Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Food justice is about ensuring access to healthy, quality food for all people, no matter their economic position. Ahmadi and Reverend Jeffrey sat down with YES! to explain how a total reorientation of the food system can support community health and wealth—planting local businesses, creating jobs, and growing a public understanding about why our current paradigm fails us all, especially those in the most need.
What happens if you create 25 small groups to discuss food values and issues, and include a local farmer or food producer in each one? Innovative organizers Judy Alexander, Dick Bergeron and Peter Bates facilitated the “Menu for the Future” groups to support local farmers and educate eaters. Results? Eaters changed their food choices, and the market for local food products expanded. Winners all around!
Economics is a field in crisis. The failure to prevent or even predict the global financial meltdown is a sure sign of this fact. Over the last few decades, a number of body blows have dented the credibility of mainstream economists. But the utter failure to foresee the financial fiasco was like a Muhammad Ali knockout punch to the jaw.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the Global Economy
-The IEA’s Oil Market Report
-China worries the IEA
-Oil and economic growth
-Briefs
The more that we can create alternative systems by channelling our consumption and investment and convince others these are great ways of living, and consistent with what we’re trying to achieve long term, I think that’s the way we’re going to succeed.
The price of oil is once again daily in the news. The Western Europe benchmark Brent crude has hovered near $100 / barrel for much of the last month, and the IEA is again warning of the burden of oil consumption. Is this a harbinger of things to come, or a mere statistical blip in a market that is “well supplied”? How will events play out in oil markets in the coming year or two?
The report states boldly right at the beginning that “Nothing less is required than a redesign of the whole food system to bring sustainability to the fore”, but nowhere starts to develop the tools which would help people develop a vision of what such a re-design might look like, as if it doesn’t want to say ‘boo’ to power. It seems to take a relatively uncritical view of global and open markets; indeed, whenever the politics of food threatens to break the surface, the report seems to move swiftly on.
-How to build a left-wing Tea Party: A guide for Americans
-Life in the Water
-Paradox: Linchpin of the Long Emergency
When big-thinkers at companies with the most skin in the energy game are behind closed doors and they discuss how the world really looks going forward, do they say that there are bumps in the road but that things will be fine, just fine, as they suggest publicly? Three years ago, we got a glimpse into the room when Royal Dutch/Shell issued a scenario forecasting the world in 2020. Based on current economic and energy-use patterns around the world, Shell said that energy supplies will be so tight that they will tip the world into a full-blown crisis in which governments will force their populations to reduce driving, use less electricity, and pay an extremely steep increase for what they do consume. Today, Shell returned with an update. If the world does not change how it uses energy, its scenario will hold true.
– How Cyber-Pragmatism Brought Down Mubarak
– Another Step Toward Mainstreaming Nonviolence
– How to Build a Progressive Tea Party
– Wendell Berry Joins Retired Coal Miners and Residents in Kentucky Capitol Sit-in
Online Opinion (or “OLO” to its devotees) is Australia’s leading online website for publication of essays on a variety of topics. It also reprints the best available essays from international sites. For a number of years OLO has been a very strong supporter of disseminating ideas about peak oil, climate change, resource limits, economics, religious issues and the vexed topic of population growth (among many others).
Articles from last month that we thought were significant.
