Women

Without women there is no food sovereignty

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In the countries of the Global South, women are the primary producers of food, the ones in charge of working the earth, maintaining seed stores, harvesting fruit, obtaining water and safeguarding the harvest. Between 60 to 80% of food production in the Global South is done by women (50% worldwide) (FAO, 1996). Women are the primary producers of basic grains such as rice, wheat, and corn which feed the most impoverished populations in the South. Despite their key role in agriculture and food however, women; together with their children; are the ones most affected by hunger.

Ending “Farmer’s Wife” Syndrome

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We have used language to write women out of agriculture – out of its history, out of its present, engaging in the “housewifization” of real agricultural work. The implication that the farmer’s wife is not a farmer, and is thus knowledgeable about only kitchens and babies (as important as those things are) is a diminuation, an act of linguistic violence that erases the multiple competences of farm women, partnered or not.

Whither environmentalism?

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There’s room in the movement for everyone who cares, whether their bent is for deadly serious de-industrialization, “fun and sexy” protests, technological innovation, or even, yes, going out walking.

Don’t stand there asking what to do! Look around, roll up your sleeves and get busy! Offer your talents to the task. If you can write, start writing and share your thoughts with ever wider circles of readers. If you can farm, start an organic CSA. If you are an engineer, you should be focusing on renewable energy.

Deep thought – Dec 3

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– Powering the Future: A Nobel-Prize Winner Takes a Look Deep into the Energy Future
– Global warming, population growth, and food supplies: When will Americans finally “get it”?
– Feminism, Finance and the Future of #Occupy – An interview with Silvia Federici
– The Tailor of Ulm – a look at the Italian Communist Party

World made by hand

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Old school letterpress printers Hatch Show Print of Nashville, Tennessee have been in continuous business since 1879. They do everything by hand from carving plates to setting type to inking and then hand cranking their print rollers. Their business model offers an excellent example of the kinds of jobs of the future communities need in addition that go beyond food production and farming.

Review: Songs of Petroleum by Jan Lundberg and Diamonds in my Pocket by Amanda Kovattana

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At first glance, Jan Lundberg and Amanda Kovattana seem like unlikely kindred spirits. He’s a former oil analyst turned whistleblower and rock musician, while she’s a British-educated Thai émigré who makes her living helping people become organized. Yet their similarities run deep, beginning with a profound concern for the planet and a flair for writing. Indeed, both are indispensable contributors to one of the top news sites on energy and the environment, Energy Bulletin. Both also happen to be accomplished memoirists, and their memoirs offer rare insights into family relationships, the vicissitudes of wealth and the quandary of being an environmentalist in an environmentally apathetic age.

7 billion: Understanding the demographic transition

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The term “Demographic Transition” describes the movement of human populations from higher initial birth rates to a stabilzed lower one, and seems to be a general feature of most societies over the last several hundred years.

The demographic transition is not a product of wealth or cheap energy in large quantities – we can see that by viewing the history of demographic shifts in Europe and the US. Instead, it is mostly about enabling people to make different reproductive choices, and supporting those choices – it requires no coercion, no high energy infrastructure, and is comparatively cheap to achieve.

The overburden: Review of “The Last Mountain”

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The film The Last Mountain has it all: a human story of ordinary citizens fighting a soulless and unaccountable coal corporation; an urgency as the last mountain in the Coal River Valley is eyed by Big Coal for surface mining; a history and context for the people’s claim to the rights of the commons; activism in the form of petitioning the government as well as civil disobedience; the role of business, profit, labor and economy as labor power is eroded and corporate profits soar; the eco-system, heritage, and culture of the region; and a new way forward proposed by the people themselves. It’s the best documentary I’ve seen on mountain top removal. But really, it’s about so much more and has come together perfectly as a gestalt, a meme for our times.

The Last Mountain, June 2011, 95 minutes, Dada Films, Directed by Bill Haney.

Reinventing the informal economy

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When the formal economy fails, the informal economy is needed – and yet we have stripped the informal economy over the last decades. How to rebuild is a huge question – and one whose radicalism can’t be overstated. It involves completely reinventing our economy, among other things, since the domestic informal economy stands against industrial growth capitalism and undermines the idea that we can have economy based largely on consumer spending. If you make, rather than buy, well, that changes a lot of things.

Gender Issues

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As you can guess, the French press has been abuzz with the … ahem… legal troubles of our former president-to-be. The … re-ahem… difficulties of Dominique Strauss-Kahn may turn out to have the same historical impact as the rape of Lucretia – that did not change the fact that some pan-Mediterranean Empire would eventually emerge, but it did make sure its language would not be Etruscan or Punic. DSK’s tribulations have, however, a more immediate interest, as they highlight what may be of particular importance as we slide down Hubbert’s curve: the troubled relationship between gender and power.

The Jemima Code: The politics of the kitchen, past and present

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Yet for all the success, the 52-year-old Tipton-Martin is a woman haunted, not by traumatic memories from her own life but by Aunt Jemima. Not just by the Aunt Jemima caricature — the commercial persona for the “Mammy” figure from plantation life that has sold pancake mix and syrup — but by the real African-American women in kitchens through the centuries, during and after slavery, whose work and wisdom has been ignored.