Making gardens useful
I want my garden to be useful. And that means it should produce a harvest that I can use. It also means it should provide home and shelter to as many other beings as possible.
Food & Water
The Volunteers: Excerpt
Wassailing is an old pagan tradition: villagers would visit the orchards on Twelfth Night to drive out the devil by creating a bit of a din and to appease good spirits by making offerings to the tree to ensure a good harvest. The word “wassail” is thought to be old English for good health.
Britain’s ‘broken’ water system: a history of death, denial and diarrhoea
If evidence collected in timely fashion by an independent agency stands up in court, legal routes to compensation become a viable option for customers. This in turn should provide a considerable motivation for water providers – private or otherwise – to finally start cleaning up their shit.
The first farmers often made landscapes more biodiverse – our research could have lessons for rewilding today
Our latest research shows farming and other human-driven ecosystem changes increased diversity as often as they reduced it.
Farm like an ecosystem Part IV: Rainwater harvesting
We can farm like an ecosystem, we can hold onto the rainwater and disperse it when needed. And, with trees nearby, they do much of the work for us. Why aren’t we paying attention?
Nurturing Seeds of Freedom in Palestine
The Om Sleiman farm in the village of Bil’in is part of a growing agroecology movement in the occupied West Bank that is turning to sustainable farming as a way to resist the Israeli occupation and stay rooted to the land. Established in 2016, Om Sleiman—Arabic for “ladybug”—aims to connect Palestinians to the produce they consume and to promote food sovereignty.
The Can Masdeu Valley: Agroecology as a Cure for the Future
In Catalonia, a community-driven initiative has produced a successful case of ecologically aware agriculture, centred around the principles of degrowth.
Newsflash No.1
I thought I’d introduce a new element to the blog starting today with this first ‘news’ post. The idea is to intersperse my longer essay-style offerings with shorter postings on matters that seem newsworthy according to my idiosyncratic view of world affairs.
Ancestral Future: Excerpt
The rivers, those beings that have always inhabited different worlds, are the ones that suggest to me that if there is a future to imagine, it is ancestral, because it is already present.
Getting the bread: What’s the cost to the planet?
In 2017, researchers set out to calculate the environmental cost of the average loaf of bread. They found that the biggest impact came from growing the wheat used to bake it, with around 40% of the damage they measured coming from the runoff of synthetic fertilizers into the environment.
Cultivating Dragon Fruit’s Political Power in Ecuador
Amid ongoing colonization, the Indigenous Shuar people are taking back control of their economic and political futures.
The blessing and the curse of the straight line
Almost all that we cover in the word development, or civilization, are based on straight lines, flat earth and shortage of time. The effects are not only limited to the rest of the living, it also affects us.