Tania Melkonian Waking Times When Vancouver couple Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon began their experiment – to eat only foods grown and produced within 100 miles of their home – they reported dubiety. This doubt was reflected in the first chapter of their book, The 100 Mile Diet (now among the locavore’s principal reference manuals) when Smith …
Chris Bourne, Contributing Writer Waking Times These are very exciting times. A whole host of events and circumstances are converging across the world causing the old fear based reality to fracture and fragment. It’s big business that has had such a strangle hold on Humanity’s freedom of expression and evolution: well I believe these two …
While mental health experts warn about depression as a global epidemic, other researchers are discovering ways we trigger our natural production of happy chemicals that keep depression at bay, with surprising results. All you need to do is get your fingers dirty and harvest your own food.
Havana, Cuba, is a world leader in urban agriculture. After the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, food production was decentralised from large mechanized state farms to urban cultivation systems. Today more than 50 per cent of Havana’s fresh produce is grown within the city limits, using organic compost and simple irrigation systems.
You won’t see cornrows stretching into the horizon or amber waves of grain as far as the eye can see, but there’s a growing phenomenon in urban America – agriculture is “growing” in our big cities, and as a result, lawmakers and policy chiefs are taking notice.
“For ten years people in Albany have tried to turn the Gill Tract into an urban farm and more open space for the community,” explains Jackie Hermes-Fletcher, an Albany resident and public school teacher for 38 years. “The people in the Bay Area deserve to use this treasure of land for an urban farm to help secure the future of our children.”
As centuries passed, ancient civilizations learned that some of the celestial objects they had called stars were actually planets. The planets also were given characteristics, and all living things were placed under both the sign of a planet and a zodiac sign
But if we could speed up time a little and become a lot more perceptive, we would see that nature’s big idea is to try out life wherever and however it can be tried, which means everywhere and anyhow. The result — over time and at this instant — is diversity, complexity, particularity, and inventiveness to an extent our minds are almost unfitted to conceive.
Learn how an Arizona family converted their unused swimming pool into a garden oasis that can continually feed a family of four. Combining solar energy, water conservation, poultry farming, aquaculture, hydroponic gardening, organic gardening, aquaponics, and bio-filtration, this ingenious system demonstrates just how feasible individual sustainable living could be in America today. Visit GardenPool.org for more info.
In the midst of a dense city setting in downtown Pasadena, radical change is taking root. For over twenty years, the Dervaes family have transformed their home into an urban homestead and model for sustainable agriculture and city living.
Permaculture is a fundamental approach to food production and urban renewal, water, energy and pollution. It is based on the ethics of caring for people and our planet. It is about growing your own healthy food, being resourceful and environmentally responsible.
According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a quarter of the world’s known plant species—some 60,000 to 100,000 species—are threatened with extinction. And even though plants may not receive as much attention as endangered animals, they are essential. Among their many attributes, plants are a vital source of food, they can help stabilize the climate, and they also provide shelter, medicines, and fuel.
Fred Kirschenmann has been involved in sustainable agriculture and food issues for most of his life. He currently serves as both a Distinguished Fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, and as President of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York. He also still provides management over site of his family’s 2,600 acre organic farm in south central North Dakota.
Peter Proctor teaches Biodynamic agriculture in India, demonstrating how healthy soil creates healthy plants, which creates healthy food for healthy people. And throughout this cycle, every additive needed to produce natural and bountiful results is naturally produced and supplied by the farm. Biodynamic farming brings together the forces of nature in a unique way that can heal, land, livestock and people.
A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more. All will be available for public plucking to anyone who wanders into the city’s first food forest.
There are a lot of different ways to get involved in influencing peace and freedom. You don’t have to be a philosopher if that’s not your thing; you don’t have to make signs and march if you don’t want to; and you don’t have to get involved with podcasting or video editing if you don’t have the ability to. You can make great contributions to freedom movement simply by doing what you love and sharing your unique gift with the world. Maybe you are an artist, musician, comedian, or you have some kind of public platform that will allow you to bring these ideas to a lot of people.
A growing coterie of farmers, landlords, scientists, and rural philosophers in both England and Germany had begun questioning the wisdom of the chemically based agriculture that had grown so prominent from its tiny beginning in the 1840s. Advances in biological sciences during the late 19th century, such as those that explained the workings of nitrogen fixation, mycorrhizal association, and soil microbial life supported their case.
Geoff Lawton demonstrates how to turn acres of dry, arid, salty and overworked soil into a desert oasis. Proving that man can overcome nature and the self to improve life on earth, this is an inspiring must watch.
To him, the religions were an unnecessary structure that people have created to try to understand. And understanding is not part of this at all. If you really wanted to set him off, you would just say, Don’t you think people can understand nature? And he would say, People can’t really, truly understand anything.
Lulu is a single mom who’d gone back to school and didn’t have the time or interest in working full-time to pay for rent. So when she had to move out of her more conventional home, she decided to move herself and her daughter into a shipping container. With no building experience, Lulu spent just one month cutting windows and a door and installing insulation and a basic kitchen (complete with propane-powered campstove and on-demand water heater).
