Local economies close the distance between us

I live in a 19th century neighborhood in a small New England city. My mother-in-law, who grew up in this same neighborhood, often talks about what it was like during her childhood in the 1940s. What I find most striking about her description is how many businesses our little section of town once had. There was a grocery store, hardware store, two drugstores, a tailor, and more.

Dandelions: Miracles in your front yard (plus dandelion tincture recipe)

The dandelion is a much maligned meadow plant, a native of Europe. Americans fiercely and defiantly dig out and poison this miracle plant, for no obvious reason other than they think they should. I started thinking for myself, and I have found out quite a bit about this miracle plant.

Excerpts from “Energy, Growth, and Sustainability: Five Propositions” by Steve Sorrel

Steve Sorrel, Senior Fellow, Sussex Energy Group, University of Sussex in the UK has recently published a 25 page paper called Energy, Growth and Sustainability which can be downloaded at this link. This post provides some excerpts from the paper, which summarize its findings. Readers are encouraged to read the entire paper.

The Great Unreasoning

Wherever we go, and whatever we do, we find ourselves surrounded by a variety of human and animal noises: “Woof!” — “Meow!” — “Moo!” — “Baah!” — “Tweet! — “How about them Red Sox!” And, naturally, we find ourselves wondering, What are they all saying? What does it all mean? Does it mean anything at all, or is it just a lot of meaningless background noise?

Back to the Land!

Get back to where you once belonged. Get your hands dirty, with this week’s grow-op on Radio Ecoshock. We’ll hear from the young farmers movement, with film maker and dirt farmer Severine von Tscharner Fleming of Greenhorn Radio. Community supported agriculture, organic, getting out, or grow where you are, feed the city, from the city. Our second guest, Sharon Astyk, says we need a nation of farmers…Radio Ecoshock digs in.

The new politics of community action

The enthusiasm of the Cameron Tories for community development and localism, and its convergence with the New Labour and Lib Dem ‘community empowerment’ agendas, suggests it is time to ask whether community development and community action, once a radical force in local politics, has been efectively depoliticised and incorporated as an arm of government. Has community radicalism been silenced, or is it more complicated than that?

Food & agriculture – Apr 16

-How world rice trade sparked price riots
-Our £17bn waste mountain: Annual bill for throwaway Britain
-Resistance to Weedkillers a Growing Problem for Engineered Crops, NAS Report Says
-In India, Wal-Mart Goes to the Farm
-What it will take to feed the world
-Report Says Contaminated Meat Is In Supermarkets
-Crop Diversity Pays Off

A blindness to systems

A curious blindness often influences our contemporary conversation about the future. Very often, talk about the viability of technologies when the age of cheap oil ends fails to deal with the costs, often very considerable, of the whole systems needed to make those technologies function. With the aid of a 20th century poet and an unpopular lifestyle choice, the Archdruid explains.