Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It was clear that there was power in the idea that together we can improve the productivity and viability of sustainable farming and local manufacturing, especially when we share the goals of healthy land, abundant food, successful farm businesses, and invigorated local economies.
But sovereign wealth funds crush real visions of food sovereignty as they take resources away from local communities and push a capitalist, industrialist food system – be it green or not.
It wasn’t that long ago in most places that a lot more people lived more land-based lives grounded within more local and more renewable economies than today. It’s unlikely that the future will involve faithful replication of these lifeways, but it’s well worth understanding how they worked…
ARC2020 and friends were in Cloughjordan Ecovillage, Ireland on March 25-26 for the annual Feeding Ourselves gathering, which takes food and farming as an entry point for moving towards fairer, more caring communities.
We have to produce more to feed a growing population – but what if it is the other way round?
Using the same land for the production of both agriculture and solar energy is a win-win for the climate and farmers.
We, in the US, can feed ourselves without destroying our planet and therefore ourselves — but only if we change everything about the ways that we go about feeding ourselves today.
As a rapidly warming world strains at the shortcomings in industrial farming, key lessons can be taken from Indigenous practices.
What we saw with the Fox’s Field forest garden project, is that the power of illustration to create the future we want is no small thing.
But inasmuch as the small farm societies of the future will be peasant societies I think they’ll be ‘reconstituted’ peasant societies…, rebuilding themselves out of the declining structures of an earlier economic system in the absence of an ‘authentic’ prior peasant tradition – albeit, I confess, in a very different historical situation.
Each year I save more seeds, from my own plants, from what I forage, from neighbors… This is where Charles Darwin and Mother Nature converge with our new climate extremes.
I suppose the lingering question is: barring a wider distribution of Depression Era grandmothers, can you learn to cook out of a book? Or a blog…
