Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
PCI Local Economies Fellow Michael Shuman joins Slow Money Founder and Chairman Woody Tasch to discuss the wide-ranging benefits of investing in local food systems.
It appears as if organizers have gathered enough signatures to put an initiative on the November ballot in California which would require the labeling of genetically engineered foods. Of all the efforts to date to mandate such labeling, this initiative seems most likely to succeed in a state known for its health consciousness and its widespread organic agriculture (which doesn’t permit genetically engineered crops). But passage of the California initiative would almost certainly lead to a court battle as major producers of genetically engineered seeds seek to have the new law invalidated.
To mark the release of In Transition 2.0 — an inspirational film about communities printing their own money, growing food, localising their economies and setting up community power stations — I spoke to Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Network and Transition Totnes, about energy ownership, cooperative finance strategies, and how storytelling can change our expectations of ourselves and our communities.
Just about every sustainability magazine on the planet, much less the food ones seems obsessed with no-knead breads. No-knead is trumpeted by everyone on the planet as the easy, awesome way to make bread, the thing that will convert non-bread makers into converts. Now don’t get me wrong – I don’t really have a dog in this hunt – I’m certainly not opposed to no-knead, but I don’t see it as the miracle that some do.
If you’re one of those humans who actually eats food, like I am, then a non-negligible part of your energy allocation goes into food production. As an approximate rule-of-thumb, each kilocalorie ingested by Americans consumes 10 kilocalories of fossil fuel energy to plant, fertilize, harvest, transport, and prepare….But much like household energy, we control what we stick in our mouths, and can make energy-conscious choices that result in substantial reductions of energy consumption. I now call myself a flexitarian, a term acknowledging that my body is a flex-fuel vehicle, but also that I need not be rigid about my food choices in order to still make a substantial impact on the energy front.
If we don’t watch ourselves, we’ll fail to pause and experience one of the most beautiful and fulfilling times in this annual cycle of seasons we call a year: spring’s boom of wild edibles.
One of the unsung advantages of being in love with a garden or a farm is that the lover doesn’t mind staying home and by doing so, saving gobs of money. In fact most of us land lovers much prefer to stay home… With 30 acres, I never want for a changing world to travel through, a journey not far in miles but almost infinite in terms of material wonders and splendors deep down into the earth and high up into the ever-changing beauty of the sky.
Our generation is coming of age with the starkest income disparity since the 1920’s, with climate change already making major impacts on our environment, with student debt creeping towards $1 trillion, with progress on race and gender issues stagnating. We did not create this mess. We are pissed, so we are connecting the dots and we are skilling-up.
The argument is being made that “food sovereignty” is an organising principle so demonstrably strong that it has the potential to transform economic power. Can we really invest in it as the ecological principle to take us into the 21st century?
Since its beginnings, the sleeper-awakes scenario has been one of the most commonly used frameworks for introducing fictional utopias and dystopias–yet somehow it doesn’t feel overdone. The reason, I suspect, is that the sleep is incidental to the story, the true focus being the new world order and how it compares with the old. That’s certainly the case with Patricia Frank’s Falling Through Time, the story of a woman who travels into the future and takes us on a sort of guided tour of it. Her name is Summer Holbrook, and she’s a prominent advertising executive who goes missing while vacationing in Alaska. After suffering a spill down a glacier crevasse, she freezes, falls into suspended animation and is found and rescued by a band of expeditioners in the year 2084.
-France’s small-scale organic farmers celebrate 10 years of boxing clever
-‘Food Forward’ PBS Series Debuts With ‘Urban Agriculture Across America’ Episode
-Motown hopes food will spur rebirth, growth
-Move over cotton, hello hemp
-‘No-till farming’ revolution grows in Indiana
Here are two stalks of asparagus growing just a foot apart. Both are of the same thickness and height. After an early morning temperature of 28 degrees F, one stalk is frozen and one is not. I have seen this happen many times. Anyone know why? This spring, when temperatures went from ridiculously high levels much of winter and early spring, and then plunged on some nights in late March and early April as much as fifty degrees in 24 hours into the twenties, fruit farmers are at their wits’ end. Early warm weather usually means lots of killing frost later on.
