If Bill Gates has his way, the food in our future will little resemble what’s on our plates today. Gates and his agribusiness industry partners are proposing to transform our food and how it is produced. To the techno-food industrialists, hunger and climate change are problems to be solved with data and engineering. The core ingredients of their revolutionary plan: genetic engineering – and patenting – of everything from seeds and food animals, to microbes in the soil, to the […]
Help needed: 41 servants and counting
A few years ago, when I began questioning what it really takes to write and publish in our digital era, I wondered about electricity’s true costs. I learned that on average, in order to light, heat and cool our homes; to refrigerate and cook food; wash and dry laundry; keep hot water available; send emails, talk on phones, watch tv and videos, write on computers and publish and read posts online, US households use 1,000 kiloWatt hours (kWh) of energy […]
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 […]
Net zero and ‘nature-based’ solutions: corporate greenwashing
Corporations are, without a doubt, the number one obstacle to meaningful action on the climate crisis. These almighty actors have spent the past two decades undermining scientific consensus, blocking meaningful legislation and greenwashing their own responsibility. Even the last ditch Paris Agreement, with its lame voluntary commitment to keep the world to a still disastrous 1.5 degrees of warming, has done nothing to stop corporate greed from taking the planet to the brink. Since the signing of the Paris Agreement […]
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 […]
Trade treaties and the climate emergency
The chickens have come home to roost for Alberta Premier Jason Kenney. Kenney bet around $1.5 billion of public money on a very risky prospect – the highly controversial Keystone XL pipeline. U.S. President Joe Biden, to the surprise of no one but Kenney, followed through on an election promise and cancelled a key permit for the pipeline on the first day of his administration. Now the premier is scrambling for a way to recoup some of Alberta’s losses, and […]
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 […]
Cities and Green Orthodoxy
As the world has urbanized rapidly since 1950, per capita carbon footprint has declined, and so has carbon intensity in economic output, defined as the amount of energy used to produce a unit of economic growth. But gross material throughputs and greenhouse gas production during this same period skyrocketed. Global natural capital – fisheries, topsoil, freshwater supply, etc. – has plummeted. This is because, as we pack into cities, we are consuming more materials as measured by absolute volume. The totality of […]
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 […]
What to Do When the World is on Fire
This blog is also available in Greek, Russian and Spanish. In December of 2019, my best friend Kit took me and my partner to the place where she grew up, in the remote Thora Valley, in the pristine forested foothills of Eastern Australia’s Great Dividing Range. As we drove down Darkwood, the single road into the Thora, Kit told us stories of floods and mouldy houses, of Christmases spent at swimming-holes and mushroom picking in the rain. She pointed to […]
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