The Looming Food Crisis and the ‘Food 2030′ Report
Consumerism, Deforestation, Economics, Food Shortages, GMOs, Global Warming/Climate Change, Health & Disease, Population, Society, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Water Contaminaton, peak oil — by Craig Mackintosh January 7, 2010
It can’t go on like this….
Not long ago I was standing in a bookshop, minding my own business, when a book title leapt out in front of me. The book was "History’s Worst Decisions and the People Who Made Them". It documents the sorry tales of dozens of people throughout history who, with the best of intentions, made some fascinatingly terrible choices.
Comments (6)120 Most Read Posts of 2009
General — by Craig Mackintosh January 6, 2010
Given it’s holiday season for many of you, and, with the recession and all, many of you in the southern hemisphere will be, hopefully, spending time in the garden preparing for uncertain times. But, there’ll be rainy days where you may well be pressing your nose up against the glass, wishing you could go outside and play but not being allowed to, and of course the rest of us in the northern hemisphere may have a few months to go before the ice melts….
As such, to give you something worthwhile to do, I thought I’d put up the most read posts from this site from 2009. Our internal stats give us a breakdown of clicks, and so the posts below are listed in the order of popularity of visit. You voted for them with your mice.
Comments (1)Farmers’ Handbook
Courses/Workshops, DVDs/Books — by Craig Mackintosh
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. – Chinese Proverb
Worldwide, mainstream aid projects tend to deal with the symptoms of problems, rather than the problems themselves. In fact, often aid projects actually exacerbate the root issue, by supply free food and clothing that undermines the ability of people on the ground to make a living. In other words, we put them out of their low carbon business, forcing them off the land into cities where they must become part of the consumer treadmill, or perish.
But, sometimes, people with clear heads and unselfish hearts manage to help in much more substantial ways. The links to follow are to individual chapters of a Farmers’ Handbook created by Chris Evans (UK) and Jakob Jespersen (Denmark), who have spent considerable time in Nepal, helping to develop locally appropriate methods and technologies that can help the people of Nepal live better lives, and sustainably so.
Although the information is specifically tailored for Himalayan conditions, almost everyone will find some useful ideas and information in this comprehensive work. The whole handbook is 50 chapters in 5 volumes – a total of 792 pages, including 170 pages of colour photos and illustrations.
Aside from gleaning valuable ideas for your own region, I post this work, with permission, in the hope it will inspire others to do likewise for their own region and climate zone. This is the kind of information sharing that will move humanity onto a sustainable platform of peace and low carbon prosperity.
Please note: These files are free for personal use and circulation (please just link to this page), but can not be used for commercial purposes. They are copyright of Chris Evans and Jakob Jespersen. The Farmers’ Handbook is also still in a draft form and any suggestions of improvement are welcomed. Chris has the original editable version – if people are interested to translate this production into another language, or offer other suggestions, please contact Chris on: cevans (at) gn.apc.org
All files to follow are PDFs.
Comments (12)Anupam Mishra: The Ancient Ingenuity of Water Harvesting (Video)
Conservation, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, Irrigation, Regional Water Cycle, Water Contaminaton, Water Harvesting — by Craig Mackintosh January 5, 2010
India is a country where water shortages have become so acute that the failed monsoon rains in 2009 had people literally killing each other over buckets of water, and tensions are still rising. (See this video also.) In many places cities are receiving less than half the water their populations need to meet basic requirements, and the constant bickering between individual states often breaks down into violent clashes.
Comments (0)Move Your Money
Alternatives to Political Systems, Bio-regional Organisations, Consumerism, Eco-Villages, Economics, Ethical Investment, Financial Management, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Craig Mackintosh January 2, 2010
I want to wish all our readers a very happy new year. May the next year, the next decade, become a major step forward for all of us in finding ways to build a better future. I personally see the next decade as being rife with problems that need addressing at their most root levels. Challenges are afoot, but we live in exciting times, to be sure.
The last decade was quite an eye opener to the world. Multiple converging events collided to shake many awake out of their apathy, and the proliferation of the internet helped spread the word like never before. Environmentalism went from a concept that was scoffed at to being the overriding concern of the majority. Today you’ll find sandal wearing tree huggers side by side with briefcase wielding wannabes. The tanked economy woke people up, worldwide, with the startling realisation that free market capitalism has completely failed them. Celebrations for the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism were half-hearted and filled with cynicism, with the realisation that the greed that forms the basis of capitalism brings very real consequences. We watched in horror, while the ‘invisible hand‘ (see also) went AWOL when we needed it most and governments worldwide took trillions of taxpayer dollars and spent us all into the next century to salvage the largest industries from their own stupidity and lack of foresight. By now we were so punch drunk we could only stare as the Wall Street bankers who orchestrated the collapse made off with golden parachutes and bonuses that defied belief. And, although the economic slowback reduced oil prices from the through-the-roof highs of 2008, thus muting alarm over this for too many with short attention spans, we now have millions more people the world over conscious of the outright vulnerability of our present situation as we ride the crest of peak oil. The unjust wars fought with a veiled but obvious motive disgusted and infuriated all but the most callous or ignorant, and the decade was peppered with annual, high level international talks about climate change that were doomed to fail from the outset.
With these thoughts in mind, I share the video clip below. Despite only being uploaded onto YouTube three days ago (Dec 29), it’s already been watched 173,000 times.
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Serco – the “Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of”
Alternatives to Political Systems, Consumerism, Economics, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Craig Mackintosh January 1, 2010
One of our readers provided a link to the following video in a recent comment. I thought it was worth putting it up as a post itself. A perfect example of why I spend time examining options for a ‘third way’, that doesn’t allow centralisation to occur.
It these kind of trends don’t wake us up, what will?
Comments (4)Letters from Sri Lanka – Sarvodaya Builds Community and National Resilience, Part II
Aid Projects, Alternatives to Political Systems, Community Projects, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Craig Mackintosh December 31, 2009
Part V of a series – If you haven’t already, please read Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV before continuing. This series is part of my work for the Sustainable (R)evolution book project.
Post-civil war security in Sri Lanka
All photographs © Craig Mackintosh
Standing, jostling in a small space with 15,000 people of mixed ethnicity and religion, just after a deadly civil war had been quashed by Sri Lanka’s government forces, could make a person feel a tad jittery – particularly when the event that attracted the aforesaid 15,000 people was in respect to Lord Kathirgaman, a six-headed Hindu god of war.
But here I was.
Comments (2)Money Well Spent?
Society — by Craig Mackintosh December 30, 2009
This clip was made about a year ago. From a quick scan on the internet, the figures seem roughly on track, give or take a few billion.
Something has got to be skewed in our priorities.
Comments (6)Amazing Speech by War Veteran
Consumerism, Economics, Society — by Craig Mackintosh December 27, 2009
I see a world ripe and ready, even braced, for change. This gem of a speech by a soldier confessing his shame for his occupation, the occupation, and the system that finances it all for profit is a very fine example of this. In similar fashion to yesterday’s clip, the thoughts are appropriate for this time of year – when we contemplate the meaning of our little lives and the direction they’re heading in.
A world based on privatised competition and profit will always destroy itself. It creates ‘health systems’ that incentivise and feed on illness, it creates prisons that depend on crime for their survival, it creates bombs that must be detonated to keep the armament industry afloat and private armies that need war to remain profitable.
The question is, will the massively powerful and centralised profit-based systems – that we’re bankrolling with our labour and consumer involvement – fortify their positions as modern-day feudal lords while society teeters on the edge of the abyss? Or, will we find the way, challenging though it may be, to dismantle them wholesale through a broadscale shift to relocalised self-sufficiency?
Comments (11)The Price of ‘Development’ in China
Consumerism, Economics, Society — by Craig Mackintosh December 26, 2009
Christmas is supposed to be a time where we give some thought to people less fortunate. It is also a time of major consumeristic excess. The incongruity of these two thoughts is starkly demonstrated by the clip below. This is China, factory for the world. Here, to make room for industries and infrastructure that China needs to supply the world with barbies, bicycles and toy berettas, the common people are forcibly evicted from their homes before seeing them demolished.
It’s sobering to think, as we stand at the checkout – with our trolley overflowing with crap for little Tommy and Britney – that we are financing a tyrannical allegiance between governments and Big Industry.
Further Reading:
- Food Miles, or Fair Miles?
- The Peasants are Revolting
- Rich Nations Buying Up Land in Poor Countries at Escalating Rate
Pinky’s Scary School Nightmare – and Deschooling Society
Alternatives to Political Systems, Consumerism, Economics, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Craig Mackintosh December 22, 2009
From looking at site stats, I see that significant numbers of people have read my recent ‘Carbon Trading – and What Should Be on the Negotiating Table at Copenhagen‘ post. The climate talks are over now, and appear to have achieved little more than add to a global atmosphere of discouragement, and so it’s left to us, the average guy on the street, to do what they should have done – that being to deeply consider what the world we want to develop should look like and to then consider how we can get from where we are now to that destination.
One of the key points I raised in the aforesaid article is the need to educate, educate, educate. The kind of education I’m referring to is not your contemporary, institutionalised, factory-type schooling that churns out faithful drones of consumption – but rather more practical-based education that enables individuals to take on the very real social, ecologic, resource challenges we now face.
The clip below, I think, is a good way to get one thinking about the topic in an outside-the-box fashion:
Comments (11)
From Annuals to Perennials
Conservation, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Seeds, Soil Conservation, Structure — by Craig Mackintosh December 20, 2009
Permaculture is all about mimicking natural systems – patterning our agriculture and other critical human needs on the symbiotic processes we observe all around us. If you compare nature’s methods we see that stable natural plant systems are polycultures, and perennial, whereas our modern industrial agriculture is the exact opposite – largely being monocultures and annuals.
But, imagine if the annual crops we rely on the most, grains and pulses, could be made to grow perennially instead. No end/beginning of year ploughing, no annual replanting, etc. It would save enormous amounts of time and energy on cultivation and planting, and allow soils to remain undisturbed for longer, with immense benefits to soil life, structure, organic matter and carbon content.
The video below highlights this out-of-the-box permaculture thinking. The Land Institute in Kansas has been working solidly on engineering annuals into perennials (by way of natural plant breeding – not by gene gun). They take ancient wild, perennial varieties of grains, and cross them with their modern annual counterparts, and repeat, and repeat, until they end up with a harvestable product from a plant that doesn’t have to be resown every year. Or at least that’s the aim. This is still a work in progress, but their purpose is "to develop an agricultural system with the ecological stability of the prairie and a grain yield comparable to that from annual crops".
Comments (10)Yeomans’ Pioneer Demonstration Site to Be Turned into Housing Estate
Conservation, Demonstration Sites, Irrigation, Land, News, Rehabilitation, Soil Biology, Soil Conservation, Structure, Water Harvesting — by Craig Mackintosh December 19, 2009
One of the most influential people in sustainable agricultural systems development is the late P.A. Yeomans. Yeomans went against the contemporary fertility-in-a-bottle school of thought to develop ‘keyline’ concepts of land management that work in harmony with natural land features (working with contours), to maximise water harvesting in the landscape, minimise soil erosion and build lasting soil fertility. His observations and practice led him to design and develop the keyline plow, a deep chisel plow that maximises water infiltration and soil aeration – setting up conditions that soil macro and microorganisms can flourish in – but that doesn’t overturn the soil, with its associated destruction of soil structure and life, as other plows do.
The ABC just ran an interesting spotlight (video – or transcript here if you prefer) where we learn that one of Yeomans’ properties, ‘Yobarnie’, in Richmond, north of Sydney, is facing ‘development’ that would turn this important historical demonstration site into a housing estate. In the 1950s and ’60s the site attracted busloads of people on weekend tours where observers could see the transformation his methods effected and learn about their implementation.
Comments (1)Letters from Sri Lanka – Sarvodaya Builds Community and National Resilience
Aid Projects, Alternatives to Political Systems, Community Projects, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Craig Mackintosh December 18, 2009
Part IV of a series – If you haven’t already, please read Part I, Part II and Part III before continuing. This series is part of my work for the Sustainable (R)evolution book project.
The 2300 year old sacred fig of Anuradhapura in north central Sri Lanka
All photographs © Craig Mackintosh
It was kind of humbling, and strangely reassuring, standing next to one of the oldest living trees in the world. It is, in fact, the oldest known human-planted tree. Its limbs are aided by vertical supports now, lest they tumble, but despite being 2300 years old, its wide spreading branches were still flush with green leaves.
Comments (3)In Transition – the Movie
Alternatives to Political Systems, Community Projects, Consumerism, DVDs/Books, Eco-Villages, Economics, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, People Systems, Society, Urban Projects, Village Development, peak oil — by Craig Mackintosh December 15, 2009
In Transition 1.0: from oil dependence to local resilience, available now!
The title says it all. Sit back and enjoy the latest work from the Transition Towns movement. You can watch in parts via YouTube below, or if you prefer, catch the whole thing in one hit on Vimeo.
‘In Transition’ is the first detailed film about the Transition movement filmed by those that know it best, those who are making it happen on the ground. The Transition movement is about communities around the world responding to peak oil and climate change with creativity, imagination and humour, and setting about rebuilding their local economies and communities. It is positive, solutions focused, viral and fun. – TransitionCulture.org
Part I
Comments (4)
