Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Nitrogen fertilizers are not just a technicality, they are a major building block in the industrial, global and capitalist agriculture system. As such they both drive and enable the increasing metabolic rift between human society and the ecosystem that sustains it.
Philippe Barret tells the story of Beaufortain, a community in the French Alps that has been coming together to practice rural sustainability since the 17th century.
Where ponds are cleared, wildlife and biodiversity return rapidly to farmland. Plants recolonise within just 6 months, creating rustic oases amidst bland fields of monocrop.
We are realising the true value of working on the land to grow food – an activity that has been the cornerstone of Ladakhi culture forever. A young farmers’ movement is emerging in Ladakh – a movement that we showcase and celebrate in our film.
So there is no virtue in having a labour-lean, capital-intensive agriculture when labour is abundant and capital is thin on the ground. It will not improve quality of life, which is a more powerful underlying aim than mere ‘efficiency’.
Agroecology has arrived at Mexico’s 4T government. It has arrived not as an explicit and coherent State policy, but rather as a set of actions that get better as they are articulated and consolidated.
From Guatemala to Oklahoma, communities are tackling multiple challenges by saving seeds of traditional agricultural crops.
Transferring wealth to Black-led groups is a particularly potent form of reparations with immediate benefits to communities of color.
As industrial agriculture encroaches into the last wild places of the Earth, it’s unleashing dangerous pathogens. Time to heal the metabolic rift between ecology and economy
Permaculture has transformative potential when practitioners move away from promoting it as a depoliticized set of ecological design practices and principles.
But the choice of swidden that interests me most for my present purposes is when it’s adopted as a way to avoid being caught in a political net of constant productivity gain and, ultimately, state centralization and ‘modernization’.
Many of us have forgotten that our cultural heritage as Black people includes ecological humility, the idea that humans are kin to, not masters of, nature.
