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New internet audio archive on sustainable agriculture
Washington Tilth
Tilth Producers of Washington is very pleased to announce the creation of the Tilth Producers Internet Audio Archive of Selected Conference Keynote Speeches and Workshops.
For our initial roll-out, we have posted three memorable and informative presentations. More will be added on an on-going basis. Our initial features are:
Paul Stamets – Mushrooms as Allies: Potentiating Planetary Host Defenses through Fungi. Tilth Producers 2003 Conference Workshop. Paul Stamets, extraordinary mycologist and long-time Tilth member, takes you to the outer limits of the miracles of mushrooms in this wide-ranging and ground-breaking talk.
Vandana Shiva – Agriculture for Life: Beyond the suicidal Economy of Industrial Farming and Globalized Agriculture. Tilth’s 30th Anniversary Conference Keynote Address November 2004. Dr. Vandana Shiva inspires and awakens us as she describes the history of her anti-corporate/pro-farmer activism in her home country of India.
Fred Provenza – The Role of New Science in Sustainable and Organic Agriculture (with introduction by Kent Mullinex). Tilth Producers 2005 Conference Keynote Address. “There are interesting analogies between agricultural systems and the three pillars of physics’Newtonian Mechanics, Quantum Theory and Relativity Theory’in that some facets of agriculture are predictable (Newtonian), whereas others are relative (Relativity) and considerably less predictable (Quantum).” Fred Provenza, Dept. of Forest, Range and Wildlife Sciences, Utah State University.
The Tilth Producers Internet Audio Archive is hosted at the Tilth Producers website www.tilthproducers.org and offers three methods for visitors to use to access the archive: 1) Streaming audio; 2) Download and save the audio files to disk; 3) Subscribe to the podcast so that you will know when new additions are added to the archive (RSS Feed: www.tilthproducers.org/Audio/tilthaudio1.rss ). For information on how to utilize a podcast, go to www.tilthproducers.org/RSSfeedinfo.htm.
Tilth Producers of Washington, a Chapter of Washington Tilth Association, is the organic and sustainable farm organization of Washington State. A membership organization of over 400 Washington growers, Tilth Producers fosters and promotes ecologically sound, sustainable agriculture in the interest of environmental preservation, human health and social equity.
(19 June 2006)
Another great online resource – 25 video lectures on the science of gardening from University of California Master Gardeners.
Gardeners can slow climate change
Juliette Jowit, The Observer
Experts appeal for the land around every home to become a sanctuary for endangered wildlife
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Britain’s gardeners are being asked to open up their borders, lawns and shrubs to help tackle the world’s greatest environmental threat: climate change.
More than a million species in the world are in danger from a warmer planet – including many of the UK’s birds and other creatures expected to lose feeding and breeding grounds – as warmer, drier summers and wetter, stormier winters become more common.
Experts have long warned that nature reserves will not help protect threatened species because habitats will shift with the weather. Now they are appealing to gardeners, whose land covers a greater area than all the special reserves.
…Each gardener and patch of land might seem too small to solve a global problem, but together they could make a huge difference, say the experts. Nearly two-thirds of British adults are gardeners – more than twice the number who watch football. The total area of UK gardens is also greater than all the national nature reserves, said Morag Shuaib, the Wildlife Trusts’ project officer for Gardening for Wildlife, a scheme run jointly with the Royal Horticultural Society. ‘It does make a difference because of that,’ she said.
One problem the conservationists must overcome, though, is a perception that wildlife gardening is messy, although experts point out that attracting species which eat pests is a way of naturally protecting flowers, shrubs and trees.
Another is a tendency for gardeners to lure the most attractive and interesting creatures – ignoring ‘the importance or plight of other less attractive or entertaining creatures’, said Simon Thornton-Wood, the horticultural society’s assistant director for science and learning.
(11 June 2006)
UK course: Life After Oil: Breaking the Habit
Schumacher College
This unique two-week course brings together leading thinkers in the field to address Peak Oil issues from a variety of perspectives and backgrounds. They’ll discuss questions such as: How did we become addicted to oil? Can the oil industry move down the road to a non-fossil fuel economy? What are the political dimensions of life with and after oil? To what extent can energy alternatives other than nuclear replace oil usage? How can we redesign our society to free ourselves from oil dependence?
Teachers: David Fleming, Ron Oxburgh, Michael Meacher & Richard Heinberg.
(June 2006)
Why Europe needs regional currencies
Richard Douthwaite, FEASTA
I was commissioned to write this article by the Club of Vienna, an Austrian NGO with many interests in common with Feasta. It has not yet been published by the Club, so I would welcome comments on it to enable me to improve it before they do.
As I argue in the paper, the eurozone is too monolithic, too inflexible, to survive. Northern League politicians in Italy have already called for a return to the lire but, rather than allow the zone to break up as countries return to their national currencies, I think that Brussels would prefer to revive the vision of a Europe of the Regions and see regional currencies emerge, perhaps on the lines described here. As a result of this compromise, the euro would cease to be the Single Currency but it would remain as the EU’s common currency and national governments would not recover their lost monetary powers.
I have suggested to the Club of Vienna and Aktie Strohalm in Holland that they join with Feasta in holding a conference in Brussels later this year on the need for regional currencies in the eurozone. The ideas in the version of this paper which emerges from our discussions here would obviously be central to such a conference.
The article can be downloaded in PDF format (2.1 MB) at:
www.feasta.org/documents/drafts/Austria_intro_cut.pdf
(January 2006)
As Michael Ruppert says “Until you change the way money works, you change nothing.” Douthwaite’s proposals are revolutionary, in that these alternative city-scale currencies have fundamentally different characteristics in the way they are issued – attributes which might help address the insane need for economic growth.
Despite having publishing deals, Richard has made two of his influencial books available online for free: Short Circuit and The Ecology of Money.
-AF
Meg Wheatley on how to communicate Peak Oil
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
RH: How can this issue be communicated to the widest possible audience?
MW: I think the way to communicate it is not to start with a belief that you know what to communicate! (laughs). If you think about it, in the environmental movement how many times we’ve just tried to alert people to the dangers and does it make a difference or not? Does it make enough of a difference to tell people the icecaps are melting, the glaciers are disappearing, species are dying at an unprecedented rate, what do people do with that information? In the case of oil and energy consumption patterns, I think we have to go back a lot deeper, and really understand what this issue means to people. That will be a wide range, and then communicate from that. That’s just good psychology, its good PR, its good salesmanship. You really have to know what are the needs of the person you’re trying to communicate to, and I think that’s been one of the major problems in all issues, not just environmental ones.
(22 June 2006)
From Wikipedia:
Meg Wheatley is a writer and management consultant who studies organizational behavior. Her approach includes systems thinking, theories of change, chaos theory, leadership and the learning organization: particularly its capacity to self-organize. Her work is often compared to that of Donella Meadows and Dee Hock. She describes her work as opposing “highly controlled mechanistic systems that only create robotic behaviors.”
This is a short extract from a longer interview.
