“Regenerative Futures” The phrase had been rolling around my head for a while. I felt that it pretty neatly summed up the direction I wanted to be heading with my work and life. ‘Regenerative’ – I reasoned – is the next stage after sustainability: Degeneration –> Sustainability –> Regeneration And ‘futures’ is, well, the future. Or multiple futures, since there is no predetermined future. I was reading and writing quite a bit about regeneration and so, like a good little […]
World Localization Day is back!
June 20th 2021 marks the return of the international WLD campaign, which aims to galvanize the worldwide localization movement into a force for systemic change. This movement is made up of myriad initiatives and groups on every continent working to rebuild community fabric, reduce ecological impact and increase human wellbeing, by bringing the economy back to the local level. Think farmers’ markets, permaculture, community gardens, small-business alliances, micro-grids, alternative education projects, and much more. Over the last few decades, the […]
Young farmers in Ladakh: the future of our food
Ladakh – high on the Tibetan Plateau at the northern extreme of India – is the place we call home. The vast majority of Ladakhis are villagers, who have, for centuries, provided for most of their physical and emotional needs through interdependent webs of relationship with the land and with community. We remember running through fields as children, picking freely from the orchards of apples and apricots that we came across as we played. Significant changes took place when Ladakh [...]
Co-opting Regenerative Agriculture
There’s one skill that Big Food and Big Ag corporations have in abundance: taking control of every situation and corrupting it into an opportunity for profit. For example, as consumer interest in the terms “natural” and “sustainable” increased, industrial agribusiness began to use these unsubstantiated terms to market greenwashed products. These products were, in fact, just the opposite – made with pesticide-laden, factory farmed, and/or genetically engineered ingredients. Even the powerful Organic movement, which actually is based on specific certifiable […]
The changing nature of milk
When I was a child, my Dad and I had regular arguments about whose turn it was to have the “top of the milk” – that thick yellow head of cream on the daily pint that we both coveted for our breakfast cereal. More often than not, someone would go out to the doorstep only to find that the blue tits had got there first, pecking through the foil lid to the sustaining food beneath. This childhood ritual came back […]
Birdsong as a Compass
The booming call of the Pheasant Coucal is soft and rhythmic on a calm, springtime afternoon. I first noticed it in 2004, when I was eight years old. From the window of our old weatherboard house, I spotted the bird splayed out on top of the wire fence, calling out into the bushland: He has a streaked black head with a robust, downcurved beak, and he’s fanning his broad, intricately patterned wings and tail. He’s big – so big, I […]
How to fix a food system that’s not designed to feed people
Earlier this year, Americans learned what it looks like when a food system reliant on industrial agriculture, near monopolies and exploited laborers breaks down. Just two months into the pandemic, the meat industry in the most powerful nation in the world was buckling. In March and April, COVID-19 swept through meatpacking plants, infecting thousands of workers. In Colorado, an outbreak at a huge JBS beef processing facility killed six workers. In South Dakota, as cases surged in a Smithfield pork […]
How the World Bank helped re-establish colonial plantations
In October 2020, a group of 79 Kenyans filed a lawsuit in a UK court against one of the world’s largest plantation companies, Camelia Plc. They say the company is responsible for the killings, rapes and other abuses that its security guards have carried out against local villagers at its 20,000 hectare plantation, which produces avocados for European supermarkets. Such abuses are unfortunately all too routine on Africa’s industrial plantations. It has been this way since Europeans introduced monoculture plantations […]
Making the Case for a Small Farm Future
For a good stretch of the last 20 years, I’ve tried as best I can to be a small-scale farmer. The results have varied from the worthwhile to the hapless, always constrained by a world geared to treating the efforts of farmers in general, and small-scale farmers in particular, with indifference at best. But my story isn’t about those efforts, or that indifference. Instead, it considers what may be impelling humanity toward a small farm future; what (in broadest outline) […]
How Industrial Food Makes Us More Vulnerable to COVID-19
When I finished working on my book, “Formerly Known As Food: How the Industrial Food System is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture,” in 2018 — after 10 years of research and writing — I was certain of two things: First, our industrial food system is decimating our environment. Second, our nutrient-depleted, and chemically saturated processed food supply is changing our bodies from the inside out. It was also clear how these two issues are deeply linked: What we do […]
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