AS a way to save the world, digging a ditch next to a hillock of sheep dung would seem to be a modest start. Granted, the ditch was not just a ditch. It was meant to be a “swale,” an earthwork for slowing the flow of water down a slope on a hobby farm in western Wisconsin.
And the trenchers, far from being day laborers, had paid $1,300 to $1,500 for the privilege of working their spades on a cement-skied Tuesday morning in late June.
Fourteen of us had assembled to learn permaculture, a simple system for designing sustainable human settlements, restoring soil, planting year-round food landscapes, conserving water, redirecting the waste stream, forming more companionable communities and, if everything went according to plan, turning the earth’s looming resource crisis into a new age of happiness.
It was going to have to be a pretty awesome ditch.
That was the sense I took away from auditing four days of a weeklong Permaculture Design Certificate course led by Wayne Weiseman, 58, the director of the Permaculture Project, in Carbondale, Ill.
The movement’s founders, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, coined the term permaculture in the mid-1970s, as a portmanteau of permanent agriculture and permanent culture.
In practice, permaculture is a growing and influential movement that runs deep beneath sustainable farming and urban food gardening. You can find permaculturists setting up worm trays and bee boxes, aquaponics ponds and chicken roosts, composting toilets and rain barrels, solar panels and earth houses.
After last year’s earthquake in Haiti more than a million people were left homeless and without access to proper sewage facilities. A new pilot project is bringing composting toilets to Haiti’s camps, and turning human waste into fertilizer.
GELLERMAN: When you gotta go, you gotta go. But to avoid embarrassment, we use all kinds of euphemisms. We visit the porcelain palace, do number two, and powder our noses, then it’s down the sewer, out of sight, and out of mind - at least for most of us. But 40 percent of the people on the planet lack a sanitary method for disposing of their own waste.
Poverty is a large part of the problem and it’s made worse when natural disaster strikes. In Haiti, where more than a million people are still homeless after last year’s earthquake, euphemisms don’t help. The waste from people is literally piling up, leading to death and disease. So for the past year, the organization Give Love has been running a pilot program in Haiti to turn human waste into “humanure.” Alisa Keesey is the group’s program director there.
KEESEY: Even before the earthquake, 50 percent of city dwellers did not have access to a proper toilet. People were what’s known in the business as open-defecators, or using plastic bags to dispose of their waste, or sometimes poorly maintained pit latrines. So it wasn’t a very pleasant thing to do, and it’s a situation everyone has to deal with everyday. And there really weren’t a lot of options for people.
The Grilled Cheese Bus is a converted school bus (with wings!) and will soon begin serving delicious grilled cheese sandwiches with locally sourced and seasonal flair at locations around the Triangle. The bus will be GPS-trackable via web and cell phone, and we will also be announcing its location via social media sites including Twitter and Facebook. To help create a delicious and sustainable menu, we have brought in several local foodies and talented chefs to consult on our offerings. We’re excited about what we have in the works!
The Grilled Cheese Bus is more than just a restaurant on wheels!
It’s a youth job training and community organizing project housed within a non-profit organization, Action for Community in Raleigh (ACRe). Our goals are to train and employ young people engaged in social change work, with a strong commitment to low-income youth of color. Our youth will learn entrepreneurial principles guided by a respect for community, the planet and each other; earn a living wage; and develop job skills & financial literacy. Youth participants will play an active role in the marketing, menu, staffing, and other decisions regarding the bus. Profits generated by the bus will be donated to community projects that better the planet and work for equity and justice.
Tyler and Alicia Jones on their farm in Corvallis, Ore.
By ISOLDE RAFTERY
Published: March 5, 2011
CORVALLIS, Ore. — For years, Tyler Jones, a livestock farmer here, avoided telling his grandfather how disillusioned he had become with industrial farming.
After all, his grandfather had worked closely with Earl L. Butz, the former federal secretary of agriculture who was known for saying, “Get big or get out.”
But several weeks before his grandfather died, Mr. Jones broached the subject. His grandfather surprised him. “You have to fix what Earl and I messed up,” Mr. Jones said his grandfather told him.
Now, Mr. Jones, 30, and his wife, Alicia, 27, are among an emerging group of people in their 20s and 30s who have chosen farming as a career. Many shun industrial, mechanized farming and list punk rock, Karl Marx and the food journalist Michael Pollan as their influences. The Joneses say they and their peers are succeeding because of Oregon’s farmer-foodie culture, which demands grass-fed and pasture-raised meats.
The Post-Recession Economy and the Fight for Public Water in the United States
Confronted with daunting budget shortfalls following the recent economic downturn, various cities and towns across the country have considered cashing out their water utilities to generate revenue. But rather than ease fiscal pressures, the sale or lease of water assets would likely further weaken a locality’s long-term financial health and saddle consumers with debt.
Food & Water Watch reviewed 200 prospective and completed sales and concessions over the last two decades and uncovered five aspects of this new trend in water privatization:
As of October 2010, at least 39 communities were publicly weighing the possibility of selling or leasing their water infrastructure. That’s more than five times as many systems as were sold or leased in a typical year over the last two decades.
Many cities and towns explored sales and long-term concessions of their water and sewer systems since 2008. There were five times as many prospective deals in 2010 as there were completed transactions in a typical year over the previous two decades.
Prospective privatizations, if actualized, would affect an unprecedented number of people. The typical water system put forward for privatization in 2010 served around 45 times more people than the average system sold over the last two decades.
Budget constraints drove the surge in potential privatization deals. Previously, the need for expensive improvements to water infrastructure was the main factor in a municipality’s decision to sell or lease its water system. Since 2008, several cities have considered privatizing well-maintained water systems to shore up weak budgets.
Possible sales and concessions were clustered around the Rust Belt. Although the surge in interest was a nationwide phenomenon, prospective deals were concentrated in the Rust Belt, where cities were hit particularly hard by the recession.
Strong public opposition hindered privatization. Public resistance thwarted at least 17 possible sales and concessions from 2008 to 2010 and seemed likely to block many more prospective deals. In fact, despite new attention on the idea, the number of sales and concessions completed each year remained small.
Problems with Sales and Concessions
They saddle consumers with debt. The funding that a city receives by selling or leasing its water system is effectively an expensive loan that a water company will recover from consumers through water bills. A Food & Water Watch analysis estimated that the typical interest rate on this loan would be 11 percent. This is 56 percent more expensive than public financing through a typical municipal revenue bond.
They result in high water rates. A review of the 10 largest sales and concessions surveyed in this report found that water rates increased on average by 15 percent a year after privatization.
Solutions
Many communities have saved money with public operation. Public operation of water and sewer services averaged 21 percent cheaper than private operation, based on a Food & Water Watch review of 18 local governments that stopped contracting and brought water systems in-house.
Sales and concessions of water systems are not a smart recovery plan for distressed local governments. Public officials should pursue more responsible courses of action and avoid such quick fixes that jeopardize long-term financial well being.
Instead of cashing out water assets, governments need to invest in their water systems. The country needs a dedicated source of federal funding to help renovate our water infrastructure.
Bees are mysteriously dying across the country, and it’s putting our entire food system in danger.
The death of bees is catastrophic. Bees don’t just make honey; they are responsible for pollinating a full third of our food supply. These tiny creatures are vital to life on earth - if we let them die we are looking at a world without fruit, vegetables, cotton, nuts and oils. Our entire food chain is in peril, and it is up to us to do something about it.
It’s become clear that small group of pesticides is at the root of the death of bees. We need to get the EPA to ban these poisons to save our food and bring back our bees.
We are partnering with the great film *Vanishing of the Bees* to protest this dangerous pesticide. *Sign our petition to the EPA and its director Lisa Jackson to ban these bee-killing pesticides now, and watch a short video to learn more.
Tuesday 09 November 2010
by: Mike Ludwig, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis
A delegation of politicians and community activists gathered on August 7 in La Leonesa, a small farm town in Argentina, to hear Dr. Andres Carrasco speak about a study linking a popular herbicide to birth defects in Argentina's agricultural areas.
But the presentation never happened. A mob of about 100 people attacked the delegation before they could reach the local school where the talk was to be held.
Dr. Carrasco and a colleague locked themselves in a car as the mob yelled threats and beat on the vehicle for two hours. One delegate was hit in the spine and has since suffered lower-body paralysis. Another person was treated for blows to the head. A former provincial human rights official was hit in the face and knocked unconscious.
Witnesses said the angry crowd had ties to local officials and agribusiness bosses, and police made little effort to stop the violence, according to human rights group Amnesty International.
Carrasco is a lead embryologist at the University of Buenos Aires Medical School and the Argentinean national research council. His study, first released in 2009 and published in the United States this past summer, shows that glyphosate-based herbicides like Monsanto's popular Roundup formula caused deformations in chicken embryos that resembled the kind of birth defects being reported in areas like La Leonesa, where big agribusinesses depend on glyphosate to treat genetically engineered crops.
The Hudson Valley Seed Library and its founders Ken Greene, seated (with the dog, Kale), and Doug Muller.
By JOY Y. WANG
Published: October 6, 2010
AS a child, Peg Lotvin used to watch her father, Hank, head out into his garden every fall on a mission. After setting aside part of the bean harvest for his neighbor Flossy, who was reputed to make the best baked beans in all of Ghent, in New York’s Hudson Valley, he would select the largest, heartiest beans from the crop and put them up to plant the next year.
More than 60 years later, Ms. Lotvin, the former director of the town library in Gardiner, N.Y., and others throughout the Northeast are still growing Hank’s X-tra Special Baking Bean. The preservation and propagation of the ghost-white bean have occurred thanks in part to a former colleague of Ms. Lotvin’s at the Gardiner Library named Ken Greene, who founded a group called the Hudson Valley Seed Library three years ago.
In structuring the venture, which aims to be a center for regional heirloom seeds, Mr. Greene chose the library model he knew well: the members of his group receive seeds each spring and then are encouraged to “return” the seeds from the mature plants in the fall.
Human growth has strained the Earth's resources, but as Johan Rockstrom reminds us, our advances also give us the science to recognize this and change behavior. His research has found nine "planetary boundaries" that can guide us in protecting our planet's many overlapping ecosystems.
by: Jill Richardson
Fri Jun 18, 2010 at 21:01:35 PM PDT
The USDA has come out with a new proposed rule and - based on the reaction it has gotten thus far - it's a big fucking deal. In a good way. Here's how the AP described the new rule:
The rules would place the sharpest limits on meat companies since the Great Depression, drastically lowering the bar that farmers and ranchers must meet to sue companies whom they accuse of demanding unfairly low prices.
The rules would dictate how meatpackers buy cattle on the open market, and prohibit them from showing preference to big feedlots rather than buying from small producers.
They would also limit the control chicken companies have over the farmers who raise birds for them. The companies couldn't require farmers to take on debt to invest in chicken houses, for example, unless farmers were guaranteed to recoup 80 percent of the cost.
The law would also make it easier to file suits under the Depression-era Packers and Stockyards Act by stating that farmers don't need to prove industrywide anticompetitive behavior to file a lawsuit under the act.
Sen. Feingold, a longtime champion for fair competition in agriculture, has already come out praising this rule in a statement I've included below. South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson praised the rule as well, as did R-CALF USA. You can see the USDA's press release about this here and the actual rule itself here.
January 18, 2012 - The Sewage Sludge Action Network - a project of the Center for Community Alternatives - is currently recruiting interns to assist the organization move forward with a number of initiatives related to protecting human and biological health from sewage sludge hazards. Students at Duke and Carolina are encouraged to apply. Please contact SSAN directly.
Archived News
January 18, 2012 - The Sewage Sludge Action Network - a project of the Center for Community Alternatives - is currently recruiting interns to assist the organization move forward with a number of initiatives related to protecting human and biological health from sewage sludge hazards. Students at Duke and Carolina are encouraged to apply. Please