Nature As Muse

Costa Rican hiatus

2012-02-07T14:53:00.003-05:00

In daily lives, it is easy to become disconnected, unplugged from Nature. In a competitive work world, we pontificate, philosophize, categorize, order, list, regulate, exploit, exaggerate, abuse, control, manipulate, distort, lie, make claims….

But when we see that monkey in the wild looking right at us, as we look into her deep eyes as she tries to fathom us, we melt into a profoundly stimulating sense of connection. It is a mere token of our sensibility, and a shame that such encounters with the wild rarely spark a deeper exploration of Earth, a deeper ongoing appreciation of its inseparability from our personal experience. We can of course stay plugged into the world of quick views, quick shots, fast downloads, instant replays on cameras, laptops and I-Pads, but it is immensely gratifying to be able to delve deeper.

The ocean is unusually placid for several weeks here on this tiny nation of Costa Rica’s south west Pacific coast. The view from our Pacific Edge cabin is simply breathtaking. Perched on the deck, as if suspended overlooking the lush green jungle canopy, the distance reveals a view north up forty kilometres of scalloped bays and sweeping shoreline beyond Dominical to Manuel Antonio. At night we can hear the waves kissing the land. By day, this gentle rhythm is drowned out by the pervasive throbbing hum of crickets and cicadas which reaches fever pitch an hour or so after the sun comes up and just before that same sun sinks like a fireball into the ocean to the west, occasionally honouring us with a green ray at the last millisecond. Some mornings, the still ocean comes alive with the dark shapes of humpback whales just beneath the surface; they are just arriving from the Arctic to calve in the warm waters. If we are patient enough – and, after a few days of tuning in, we are - big iridescent blue morpho butterflies fly jerkily by, toucans squawk and swoop onto the guarumo trees to peck at the seeds, howler monkeys send out their primeval grunts and growls from the jungle down below, a flock of screeching green parrots flies by in a mass frenzy, and a giant lobster locust lands on the wooden deck to sun himself before alighting again revealing his red undercarriage.

Trippers return from several days further south in Corcovado on the Osa Peninsula. They report on pristine Nature devoid of human influence, just as it was before the first Europeans arrived scratching their heads just over five hundred years ago. It is heartwarming to know that there are still places on this Earth moreorless untouched by human depredations, left to Nature to tend so magnificently. A few intrepid souls tiptoe around this sanctuary in awe of the profusion of decorated birds, large reptiles, multitudes of frogs and insects, kaleidoscopic butterflies, big cats, sloths and tapirs.

To counterpose immersion in this rich coast (it was the Spanish who christened it

Costa Rica

), my reading takes in two contrasting books. The first is a cutting analysis of the world that keeps us all constantly on edge with its wildly excessive machinations, a financial system that is a madly careening rollercoaster. It is Extreme Money, by Satyajit Das. The second is an engrossing exploration of a world that could and should be through our connection with Nature. Becoming Animal by David Abram probes well beneath the surface. Orion Magazine wrote that Abram’s “profound recognition of intelligences other than our own enables us to enter into reciprocal symbioses that can, in turn, sustain the world. Becoming Animal illuminates a way forward in restoring relationship with the earth, led by our vibrant animal bodies to re-inhabit the glittering world.” Reading this book helped me appreciate that Nature doesn’t always perform tricks like breaching whales, cavorting dolphins, parading peacocks, soaring eagles. Sometimes you just sit with it, feel a faint whiff of wind, hear far-off rolls of waves on the shore, sense the gathering moisture in the air or the intensifying heat of the morning, smell the waftings of flowers, of woodfire smoke, of cows in the field. Nature in all its guises flows subtly over, into, and through us, or it can explode without warning like a booming firework. We just have to open our minds and bodies and embrace the charge.

George from London and Suzy from California discovered their Pacific Edge haven some twenty years ago. They took in the magnificent view for the first time, purchased the land from locals, then set about opening up a dirt road up the mile or so from the coast, and building their cabins and house.

According to the New Economics Foundation,

Costa Rica

ranks first in the Happy Planet Index and is the "greenest" country in the world. In 2007, the Costa Rican government announced plans for

Costa Rica

to become the first carbon-neutral country by 2021. We are happy, not wealthy in our own home country, but when we spend times on this naturally rich coast, we too are enrichened. As George always says in his straight-up Cockney accent, “Happy Days”. Happy Days, George.

It can be done...

2011-12-20T09:37:00.004-05:00

Photo: www.inhabitat.com

German village generates 321 percent more renewable energy than it needs, earns millions selling it back to national power grid

Monday, December 19, 2011 by Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

(www.NaturalNews.com) Developing a renewable energy system that creates energy independence and even a considerable new source of revenue is not some sort of sci-fi pipe dream. BioCycle reports that the German village of Wildpoldsried, population 2,600, has had such incredible success in building its renewable energy system. Wildpoldsried generates 321 percent more renewable energy than it uses, and it now sells the excess back to the national power grid for roughly $5.7 million in additional revenue every single year.

By utilizing a unique combination of solar panels, "biogas" generators, natural wastewater treatment plants, and wind turbines, Wildpoldsried has effectively eliminated its need to be attached to a centralized power grid, and created a thriving renewable energy sector in the town that is self-sustaining and abundantly beneficial for the local economy, the environment, and the public.

You can view some amazing pictures of the Wildpoldsried village at

http://inhabitat.com/german-village-produces-321-more-energy-than-it-needs/wildpoldsried-germany

Possessing admirable vision for the town and strong motivation to see the project as a whole succeed, Mayor Arno Zengerie has led the way for many years in making Wildpoldsried's energy independence efforts a success. As far back as 1997, the village has been investing in building and promoting new industries, maintaining a strong local economy, generating new forms of revenue, and ultimately staying out of debt. And the best way it saw fit to accomplish much of this was through the implementation of self-sustaining, renewable energy technologies.

Not only did Wildpoldsried successfully reduce the amount of time expected to generate the necessary funds to build local treasures like a sports hall, theater stage, pub, and retirement home with the revenue generated by its thriving renewable energy sector - the village has already successfully built nine community buildings, with more on the way - but it also achieved all this and more without going into debt.

"We often spend a lot of time talking to our visitors about how to motivate the village council (and Mayor) to start thinking differently," said Mayor Zengerle, who now gives talks around the world about the successes of his award-winning village. "We show them a best practices model in motion and many see the benefits immediately. From the tour we give, our guests understand how well things can operate when you have the enthusiasm and conviction of the people.

Be sure to read the full, inspiring account of Wildpoldsried's history of, and successes in, renewable energy at http://www.jgpress.com/archives/_free/002409.html

Learn more at www.naturalnews.com/034440_renewable_energy_Germany_power_grid.html#ixzz1h5L66mKS

Occupy Earth - Nature is the 99%, too

2011-11-16T09:24:00.000-05:00

Image credit: NOAA

Chip Ward brings this remarkable insightful analysis of the dangers of increased despoiling of the planet’s ecology as it is trampled by the mantra of growing the economy.

The economy is built on the idea of relentless growth, which is an environmental and health disaster for all but the 1%.

Chip Ward 09 Nov 2011

Posted by www.aljazeera.com

What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet's life-support systems - its atmosphere, oceans and biosphere - goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power and control by that corrupt and greedy 1 per cent we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America's middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?

It's not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organiser dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: Someone got rich and someone got sick.

In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents.

We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television. We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.

Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don't live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they can't afford better.

Similarly, the gated communities of the hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled with fuming smokestacks, but the slums of the planet are. Don't think, though, that it's just a matter of property values or scenery. It's about health, about whether your kids have lead or dioxins running through their veins. It's a simple formula, in fact: Wealth disparities become health disparities.

And here's another formula: When there's money to be made, both workers and the environment are expendable. Just as jobs migrate if labour can be had cheaper overseas, I know workers who were tossed aside when they became ill from the foul air or poisonous chemicals they encountered on the job.

The fact is: We won't free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.

Polluters routinely walk away from the ground they poison and expect taxpayers to clean up after them. By "externalising" such costs, profits are increased. Examples of land abuse and abandonment are too legion to list, but most of us can refer to a familiar "superfund site" in our own backyard.

Clearly, Mother Nature is among the disenfranchised, exploited and struggling.

Democracy 101

The 99 per cent pay for wealth disparity with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, weakening pensions and slashed services, but Nature pays, too. In the world the one-percenters have created, the needs of whole ecosystems are as easy to disregard as, say, the need the young have for debt-free educations and meaningful jobs.

Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with profound consequences. If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people's labour, it's called a "bonus". If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it's called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.

If you drag heavy fishnets across the ocean floor and pulverise an entire ecosystem, ending thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations of a healthy ocean, it's called free enterprise. But if, like Tim DeChristopher, you disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it's called a crime and you get two years in jail.

In campaigns to make polluting corporations accountable, my Utah neighbours and I learned this simple truth: Decisions about what to allow into the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat are soon enough translated into flesh and blood, bone and nerve and daily experience. So it's crucial that those decisions, involving environmental quality and public health, are made openly, inclusively and accountably. That's Democracy 101.

The corporations that shred habitat and contaminate your air and water are anything but democratic. Stand in line to get your 30 seconds in front of a microphone at a public hearing about the siting of a nuclear power plant, the effluent from a factory farm, or the removal of a mountaintop and you'll get the picture quickly enough: The corporations that profit from such ecological destruction are distant, arrogant, secretive, and unresponsive.

The one per cent are willing to spend billions impeding democratic initiatives, which is why every so-called environmental issue is also about building a democratic culture.

First Kill the EPA, then Social Security

Beyond all the rhetoric about freedom from the new stars of the Republican Party, the strategy is simple enough: Obstruct and misinform, then blame the resulting dysfunction on "government".

It's a great scam. Tell the voters that government doesn't work and then, when elected, prove it. And first on the list of government outfits they want to sideline or kill is the Environmental Protection Agency, so they can do away with the already flimsy wall of regulation that stands between their toxins and your bloodstream.

Poll after poll shows that citizens understand the need for environmental rules and safeguards. Mercury is never put into the bloodstreams of nursing mothers by consensus, nor are watersheds fracked until they are flammable by popular demand. But the free market ideologues of the Republican Party are united in opposition to any rule or standard that impedes the "magic" of the marketplace and unchecked capital.

The same bottom-line quarterly-report fixation on profitability that accepts oil spills as inevitable also accepts unemployment as inevitable. Tearing apart wildlife habitat to make a profit and doing the same at a workplace are just considered the price of doing business. Clearcutting a forest and clearcutting a labor force are two sides of the same coin.

Beware of Growth

Getting the economy growing has been the refrain of the Obama administration and the justification for every bad deal, budget cut and unbalanced compromise it's made.

The desperate effort to grow the economy to solve our economic woes is what keeps Timothy Geithner at the helm of the Treasury and is what stalls the regulation of greenhouse gasses. It's why we are told we must sacrifice environmental quality for pipelines and why young men and women are sacrificed to protect access to oil, the lubricant for an acquisitive economic engine.

The financial empire of the one percenters and the political order it has shaped are predicated on easy and relentless growth. How, we are asked, will there be enough for everyone if we don't keep growing?

The fundamental contradiction of our time is this: We have built an all-encompassing economic engine that requires unending growth. A contraction of even a per cent or two is a crisis, and yet we are embedded in ecosystems that are reaching or have reached their limits.

This isn't complicated: There's only so much fertile soil or fresh water available, only so many fish in the ocean, only so much CO2 the planet can absorb and remain habitable.

Yes, you can get around this contradiction for a while by exploiting your neighbour's habitat, using technological advances to extend your natural resources and stealing from the future - that is, using up soil, minerals, and water your grandchildren (someday to be part of that same 99 per cent) will need. But the limits to those familiar and, in the past, largely successful strategies are becoming more evident all the time.

At some point, we'll discover that you can't exist for long beyond the boundaries of the natural world, that (as with every other species) if you overload the carrying capacity of your habitat, you crash.

Warming temperatures, chaotic weather patterns, extreme storms, monster wildfires, epic droughts, Biblical floods, an avalanche of species extinction... that collapse is upon us now.

In the human realm, it translates into hunger and violence, mass migrations and civil strife, failed states and resource wars.

Like so much else these days, the crash, as it happens, will not be suffered in equal measure by all of us. The one percenters will be atop the hill, while the 99 per cent will be in the flood lands below swimming for their lives, clinging to debris or drowning. The Great Recession has previewed just how that will work.

An unsustainable economy is inherently unfair and worse is to come. After all, the car is heading for the cliff's edge, the grandkids are in the backseat, and all we're arguing about is who can best put the pedal to the metal.

Occupy Earth

Give credit where it's due: It's been the genius of the protesters in Zuccotti Park to shift public discourse to whether the distribution of economic burdens and rewards is just and whether the economic system makes us whole or reduces and divides us.

It's hard to imagine how we'll address our converging ecological crises without first addressing the way accumulating wealth and power has captured the political system. As long as Washington is dominated and intimidated by giant oil companies, Wall Street speculators and corporations that can buy influence and even write the rules that make buying influence possible, there's no meaningful way to deal with our economy's addiction to fossil fuels and its dire consequences.

Nature's 99 per cent is an amazingly diverse community of species. They feed and share and recycle within a web of relationships so dynamic and complex that we have yet to fathom how it all fits together. What we have excelled at so far is breaking things down into their parts and then reassembling them; that, after all, is how a barrel of crude oil becomes rocket fuel or a lawn chair.

When it comes to the more chaotic, less linear features of life like climate, ecosystems, immune systems or foetal development, we are only beginning to understand thresholds and feedback loops, the way the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. But we at least know that the parts matter deeply and that, before we even fully understand them, we're losing them at an accelerating rate. Forests are dying, fisheries are going, extinction is on steroids.

Degrading the planet's operating systems to bolster the bottom line is foolish and reckless. It hurts us all. No less important, it's unfair. The 1 per cent profit, while the rest of us cough and cope.

After Occupy Wall Street, isn't it time for Occupy Earth?

Chip Ward co-founded and led Families Against Incinerator Risk and HEAL Utah. A TomDispatch regular, he wrote about campaigns to make polluters accountable in Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and about visionary conservationists in Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land.

A version of this article was first published on www.TomDispatch.com

At this eleventh hour...

2011-11-11T11:11:00.003-05:00

Image from www.13moon.com

At this eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of this new millennium, it would be good to take pause:

to reflect on a century of wars that have affected the whole world deeply,
to remember all the millions of innocent women, children and men and the sacrificial lambs who have lost their lives in the process,
to believe in, and strive for, a better way,
to work in a co-operative spirit toward that natural antithesis of war and conflict - peace and harmony.

Time Out in Nature – Killarney

2011-11-01T14:19:00.000-04:00

We do it every year at this season of transformation, diving into the chill late autumnal air of the great outdoors of lakes and rocks, woodlands and wetlands, just as they are all bedding down for winter. It’s a few days and nights of time out from routine and regularity; a breathing space. Our spouses think we have lost our senses; far from it, we know they are out there to be retrieved. The sense of connection runs deep – a kinship with the trees, the waters, the canoe that guides us, the ravens, beavers, ducks and loons that greet us, the white two billion years-old quartzite rocks that cradle us, and the star-filled sky that parades at night.

The greed and fear, waste and war, death and destruction so prevalent in the troubled realm of humanity are purged from our thoughts for these few precious days. What good are they to us out here in the pure wild? The true natives of these lands knew all too well that true respect for Nature is key to survival.

Far-sighted visionaries set aside the almost 50,000 hectares of Killarney Provincial Park for many generations to behold, in their pristine natural state, to be shared with the black bears and the beavers, the lynx and the loons, the ravens and the rattlesnakes. This perfect fusion of earthly terrain and watery expanses has evolved without us humans over millennia. Let’s hope we allow it to continue to succour and sustain all manner of life for millennia to come. Unfortunately it is our call…

Two spirited ravens

flap their timeworn wings

and rise into the still clear air

above glistening lakes,

sun-dappled trees,

rounded white quartzite ranges,

two pilots on an endless flight,

bound they know not where.

Nuclear lessons unlearned

2011-10-02T10:07:00.000-04:00

How many more chances will we have to learn from the nuclear failures of the past?

Tibor Toth 17 Sep 2011

(as published on http://www.aljazeera.com/)

Since 1961 some 200 nuclear bombs have been exploded, mostly in the atmosphere [GALLO/GETTY]

Much of the world marked the 50th anniversary in early August of the Berlin Wall’s construction. But, while that Cold War abomination has truly been consigned to history’s dustbin, September 1 marks another 50th anniversary, one that resonates far more directly today.

As of 1961, some 200 nuclear bombs had been exploded, most of them in the atmosphere, but two on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Three years earlier, in October 1958, nuclear testing had ground to a halt after the United States, the Soviet Union, and the

United Kingdom

agreed on a moratorium. During most of this period, one could get the impression, although it was deceptive, that nuclear testing was actually over.

But the moratorium had been fragile from its very beginning, with nuclear-weapons establishments pushing hard for a resumption of testing. Like the run-up to an earthquake, political tension was building behind the scenes. It peaked with the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Then, on September 1, the Soviets broke the moratorium, joined shortly thereafter after by the

What followed was a veritable nuclear-testing frenzy. More than 250 tests were conducted in the 16 months following the aborted attempt to put the nuclear genie back in its bottle - more explosions than in the 16 preceding years. One test explosion set the infamous record for the largest-ever manmade explosion: the Soviet Tsar bomb, detonated on October 30, 1961, was the equivalent of 4,000 Hiroshima bombs. It is no coincidence that a year later, in October 1962, the world found itself on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis.

While the barrage of nuclear tests poisoned the political climate, it also literally poisoned Earth’s atmosphere and environment. With her "Baby Tooth Study", the American physician Louise Reiss, who died earlier this year, proved in the 1960s that radioactive fallout from nuclear testing had entered the food chain - and thus into human babies - all across the US. Some isotopes linger for tens of thousands of years. Plutonium-239 from a nuclear test conducted at the end of the Stone Age, for example, would have lost a mere sixth of its radioactivity by now.

Unfortunately, the lesson was not heeded. Nuclear-weapon lobbies triumphed. The distrustful Cold War mentality had taken its toll, with both sides regarding nuclear weapons as the ultimate guarantor of their own security, but a threat in the hands of the other. The inability or unwillingness of either side to put itself in the other’s shoes, a precondition for any compromise, kept both locked in a spiraling arms race. The blasts continued - albeit underground - and increased greatly in number.

Today, 50 years and 1,500 nuclear explosions later, we have an historic opportunity to learn from the failures of the past. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) bans all nuclear explosions, everywhere, by everyone. It represents a strong norm - testing virtually screeched to a halt in 1996, when the Treaty became available for countries to adopt. More than 180 countries, 90 per cent of the world’s countries, have signed it and committed themselves to a planet free of nuclear explosions.

Compared to the 500 nuclear explosions witnessed each and every decade during the pre-CTBT period, the last ten years witnessed only two tests, both carried out by

North Korea

. While this was still two tests too many, the CTBT clearly has helped force the test genie back into its bottle - and keep it there.

But the Treaty hasn’t yet entered into force. Nine countries must first ratify it. Until then, nuclear tests are not outlawed, and their absence relies on moratoria. Unfortunately, history has shown just how unreliable moratoria can be.

As a result, we could see yet another volley of blasts, another obscene megaton-range competition, and another fatal countdown between nuclear-armed states, whose numbers have increased. Only after the Cuban Missile Crisis - humanity’s closest encounter with nuclear Armageddon - did

President John F Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev grasp the security risks of unchecked nuclear competition and the merits of a test ban to stop it. Only then did they really try to reach a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing - and failed.

How many more chances will we have to learn from the nuclear failures of the past?

Tibor Tóth is Executive Secretary of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation.

A version of this article first appeared on Project Syndicate.

The new African land grab

2011-06-30T21:51:00.002-04:00

Smallholder farms are disappearing across Africa because of large-scale foreign investment [EPA]

Foreign investors, with the World Bank, are acquiring vast tracks of land in Africa - at the expense of local farmers

by Joan Baxter, as reported by Aljazeera

The "town" chief of the village seemed to be in a state of shock.

Sitting on the front porch of his mud and thatch home in Pujehun District in southern Sierra Leone, he struggled to find words that could explain how he had signed away the land that sustained his family and his community.

He said he was coerced by his Paramount Chief, told that whether he agreed, or not, his land would still be taken and his small oil palm stand destroyed. He didn't know the name of the foreign investor nor did he know that it planned to lease up to 35,000 hectares of farmland in the area to establish massive oil palm and rubber plantations.
Haltingly, he said that without his land, he might as well take his leave of the village. By that he meant that he was as good as dead.
This is a ground-level view of a large land deal in Africa, where in recent years foreign investors have acquired tens of millions of hectares of farmland. In 2009 alone, the World Bank estimates that around the world foreign investors acquired about 56 million hectares of farmland - an area about the size of France - by long-term lease or by purchase. Farmland has become a favourite "new asset" class for private investors; "like gold, only better" according to Capital & Crisis.
The World Bank has its own term for the new global land rush. It calls it "agro-investment" and has developed seven voluntary principles to make the land deals "responsible".
Critics of the phenomenon - farmers' movements, human rights, civil society, women's and environmental organisations, and many scientists - call it "land grabbing". They say there is no way that the taking over vast areas of smallholder farmland and transforming it into giant industrial plantations and agribusiness operations can ever be "responsible".

They argue that land grabs are throwing millions of farming families and indigenous peoples off their land. They say that it's not just land that's being grabbed, but also precious water resources.
The investors are hedge funds, private equity funds (that are attracting even prestigious American universities with their promises of high returns), pension funds, banks, multinational corporations, and sovereign wealth funds seeking to sow capital and grow profits. They are also Middle Eastern and Asian nations anxious to secure their own future food security in the face of climate change, with dwindling water resources and arable land.
An estimated 70 per cent of the demand for farmland is in Africa, where land is cheap and traditional communal ownership makes people particularly vulnerable. Sometimes this can be done for the cost of a few gifts to traditional chiefs and grandiose promises of bringing "development".
Since 2009, in the wake of the food, fuel and financial crises of 2007-2008, the rush for farmland has only accelerated. But it's impossible to know just how much more of Africa's fertile land has now been taken by investors.

Corruption and profit

Recent in-depth research by the US-based Oakland Institute of land deals in seven African countries found that most of the land deals lack transparency, making it almost impossible to calculate their total area. Lack of transparency is a great enabler of corruption.
Yet "transparency, good governance, and a proper enabling environment" is one of the seven principles laid out by the World Bank for "responsible agro-investment". The Oakland Institute found that most of the land deals do not respect any of these principles.
This is ironic, to say the least.

More than any other institution or agency, the World Bank Group has been promoting direct foreign investment in Africa, and enabling the farmland rush. Its private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), with its Foreign Investment Advisory Service and its program to Remove Administrative Barriers to Investment, has been working - often behind the scenes - to ensure that African countries reform their land laws and fiscal regimes to make them attractive to foreign investors.

The World Bank Group has funded almost identical investment promotion agencies - "one-stop-shops" - in countries across the continent. It places people in strategic government ministries - even presidential offices - as private sector advisors.
The investment promotion agencies are developing and advertising a veritable smorgasbord of incentives not just to attract foreign investment in farmland but also to ensure maximum profits to investors. These include extremely generous tax holidays for 10 or even 30 years, zero per cent duty on imports, and easy access to very large tracts of land, sometimes over 100,000 hectares. Investors may pay just a couple of dollars per hectare per year for the land, and in Mali, sometimes no land rent at all.
The Sierra Leone Investment and Export Promotion Agency, boasts about the extremely low labour rates and flexible labour laws in the country and about other privileges it accords investors - 100 per cent foreign ownership in all sectors, full repatriation of profits, dividends and royalties, no limits on expatriate employees.
Such giveaways cast doubt on claims by African governments, and others trying to defend the land deals, that this kind of "agricultural investment" will solve unemployment, generate revenue for cash-strapped governments, reduce the dependence on aid, and bring economic development.
In this race to the bottom, African governments are also encouraged by the World Bank Group to outdo each other when it comes to protecting investors. Each year, it grades African on investor protection in its "Doing Business" report cards, praising countries that move up in the rankings in what an IFC official admits is a "horse race".
This means that low-income and food-deficit African countries, some still struggling to rebuild after long conflicts, such as Sierra Leone and Liberia, find themselves competing with each other to offer foreign investors ever sweeter deals on their arable land, so desperately needed for local food production.
The investment promotion agencies quote figures for the vast amounts of "uncultivated" or under-utilised" land in their countries, often without offering any recent land use studies to back up these figures or a thought for the millions of people who depend on that land for their livelihoods.

Nor do they take into consideration the crucial importance of small family farms, which employ more than half the people and produce 80 per cent of the food on the continent. Smallholder farms tend to be extremely biodiverse, involving fallow periods to protect and restore soils and water resources.

Not in Africa to help

Conspicuously absent in the talk about the purported benefits of the land deals is serious discussion of protection of local people, human and environmental health, water resources, biodiversity, human rights, food security, and free prior informed consent of the affected communities.

As the Oakland Institute research shows, many of the land deals are for enormous plantations of palm oil and sugarcane for agrofuels, or for the production of cut flowers and a handful of staple crops - all for export.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has just released a "new paradigm" for agriculture, called "Save and Grow". Echoing other recent major studies, it finds that agro-ecological agriculture that emphasises conservation of soil and water resources and reduced use of agrochemicals can "enable low-income farm families in developing countries - some 2.5 billion people - to maximise yields and invest the savings in their health and education."

It states unequivocally that the industrial agricultural model of the Green Revolution, involving monocultures, high-yielding [commercial] crop varieties, heavy use of agrochemicals and mechanisation and irrigation, has "degraded fertile land and depleted groundwater, provoked pest upsurges, eroded biodiversity, and polluted air, soil and water."

And yet this unsustainable industrial agricultural model is the one being promoted by many African governments, donor agencies and foreign investors.
African farmers, left high and dry by their own governments during the decades of austerity programs imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, do need investment and support. They desperately need decent roads and access to local markets, processing equipment to add value to their own diverse farm produce, storage and drying facilities to prevent post-harvest losses, and basic amenities such as schools and health centres and water wells to improve rural lives, so that farming communities can thrive.
But foreign investors are not in business to provide any of these things. They are not in Africa to help impoverished African farmers improve their own farms, or to combat hunger. They are far more likely to destroy the family farm in Africa and aggravate hunger, all in the name of economies of scale, a global corporate food chain, and profits.
The same actors - the speculators, bankers, unregulated investors - who have had a hand in inflating food prices and bringing the global economy to its knees are now consolidating control of global food production and of land, to profit from the very crises they provoked.
It is beyond tragic that so many of them have set their sights on the new "asset class" of African farmland - which is the very asset on which hundreds of millions of Africans depend for their livelihoods and their survival.

Joan Baxter is a Senior Research Fellow with the Oakland Institute and author of its investigative reports on land deals in Sierra Leone and Mali. She is a journalist, award-winning author, and development researcher who has lived and worked in Africa for more than 25 years.

The great Indian land grab

2011-06-11T14:35:00.019-04:00

In India, the state forcibly acquires land from farmers and hands it over to private speculators, real estate corporations, mining companies and leisure industries [EPA]

India's war on farmers

Land is a powerful commodity that should be used for the betterment of humanity through farming and ecology.

By Vandana Shiva (as reported by Aljazeera)

"The Earth upon which the sea, and the rivers and waters, upon which food and the tribes of man have arisen, upon which this breathing, moving life exists, shall afford us precedence in drinking."
- Prithvi Sukta, Atharva Veda

Land is life. It is the basis of livelihoods for peasants and indigenous people across the

Third World

and is also becoming the most vital asset in the global economy. As the resource demands of globalisation increase, land has emerged as a key source of conflict. In

India

, 65 per cent of people are dependent on land. At the same time a global economy, driven by speculative finance and limitless consumerism, wants the land for mining and for industry, for towns, highways, and biofuel plantations. The speculative economy of global finance is hundreds of times larger than the value of real goods and services produced in the world.

Financial capital is hungry for investments and returns on investments. It must commodify everything on the planet - land and water, plants and genes, microbes and mammals. The commodification of land is fuelling the corporate land grab in

India

, both through the creation of Special Economic Zones and through foreign direct investment in real estate.

Land, for most people in the world, is Terra Madre, Mother Earth, Bhoomi, Dharti Ma. The land is people's identity; it is the ground of culture and economy. The bond with the land is a bond with Bhoomi, our Earth; 75 per cent of the people in the

Third World

live on the land and are supported by the land. The Earth is the biggest employer on the planet: 75 per cent of the wealth of the people of the global south is in land.

Colonisation was based on the violent takeover of land. And now, globalisation as recolonisation is leading to a massive land grab in India, in Africa, in

Latin America

. Land is being grabbed for speculative investment, for speculative urban sprawl, for mines and factories, for highways and expressways. Land is being grabbed from farmers after trapping them in debt and pushing them to suicide.

India

's land issues

In India, the land grab is facilitated by the toxic mixture of the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894, the deregulation of investments and commerce through neo-liberal policies - and with it the emergence of the rule of uncontrolled greed and exploitation. It is facilitated by the creation of a police state and the use of colonial sedition laws which define defence of the public interest and national interest as anti-national.

The World Bank has worked for many years to commodify land. The 1991 World Bank structural adjustment programme reversed land reform, deregulated mining, roads and ports. While the laws of independent

India

to keep land in the hands of the tiller were reversed, the 1894 Land Acquisition Act was untouched.

Thus the state could forcibly acquire the land from the peasants and tribal peoples and hand it over to private speculators, real estate corporations, mining companies and industry.

Across the length and breadth of India, from Bhatta in Uttar Pradesh (UP) to Jagatsinghpur in Orissa to Jaitapur in

Maharashtra

, the government has declared war on our farmers, our annadatas, in order to grab their fertile farmland.

Their instrument is the colonial Land Acquisition Act - used by foreign rulers against Indian citizens. The government is behaving as the foreign rulers did when the Act was first enforced in 1894, appropriating land through violence for the profit of corporations - JayPee Infratech in Uttar Pradesh for the Yamuna expressway, POSCO in Orissa and AREVA in Jaitapur - grabbing land for private profit and not, by any stretch of the imagination, for any public purpose. This is rampant in the country today.

These land wars have serious consequences for our nation's democracy, our peace and our ecology, our food security and rural livelihoods. The land wars must stop if

India

is to survive ecologically and democratically.

While the Orissa government prepares to take the land of people in Jagatsinghpur, people who have been involved in a democratic struggle against land acquisition since 2005, Rahul Gandhi makes it known that he stands against forceful land acquisition in a similar case in Bhatta in Uttar Pradesh. The Minister for the Environment, Mr Jairam Ramesh, admitted that he gave the green signal to pass the POSCO project - reportedly under great pressure. One may ask: "Pressure from whom?" This visible double standard when it comes to the question of land in the country must stop.

Violation of the land

In Bhatta Parsual, Greater Noida (UP), about 6000 acres of land is being acquired by infrastructure company Jaiprakash Associates to build luxury townships and sports facilities - including a Formula 1 racetrack - in the guise of building the Yamuna Expressway. In total, the land of 1225 villages is to be acquired for the 165km Expressway. The farmers have been protesting this unjust land acquisition, and last week, four people died - while many were injured during a clash between protesters and the police on May 7, 2011. If the government continues its land wars in the heart of

India

's bread basket, there will be no chance for peace.

In any case, money cannot compensate for the alienation of land. As 80-year-old Parshuram, who lost his land to the Yamuna Expressway, said: "You will never understand how it feels to become landless."

While land has been taken from farmers at Rs 300 ($6) per square metre by the government - using the Land Acquistion Act - it is sold by developers at Rs 600,000 ($13,450) per square metre - a 2,000 per cent increase in price - and hence profits. This land grab and the profits contribute to poverty, dispossession and conflict.

Similarly, on April 18, in Jaitapur,

Maharashtra

, police opened fire on peaceful protesters demonstrating against the Nuclear Power Park proposed for a village adjacent to the small port town. One person died and at least eight were seriously injured. The Jaitapur nuclear plant will be the biggest in the world and is being built by French company AREVA. After the

Fukushima

disaster, the protest has intensified - as has the government's stubbornness.

Today, a similar situation is brewing in Jagatsinghpur, Orissa, where 20 battalions have been deployed to assist in the anti-constitutional land acquisition to protect the stake of

India

's largest foreign direct investment - the POSCO Steel project. The government has set the target of destroying 40 betel farms a day to facilitate the land grab. The betel brings the farmers an annual earning of Rs 400,000 ($9,000) an acre. The Anti-POSCO movement, in its five years of peaceful protest, has faced state violence numerous time and is now gearing up for another - perhaps final - non-violent and democratic resistance against a state using violence to facilitate its undemocratic land grab for corporate profits, overlooking due process and the constitutional rights of the people.

The largest democracy of the world is destroying its democratic fabric through its land wars. While the constitution recognises the rights of the people and the panchayats [village councils] to democratically decide the issues of land and development, the government is disregarding these democratic decisions - as is evident from the POSCO project where three panchayats have refused to give up their land.

The use of violence and destruction of livelihoods that the current trend is reflecting is not only dangerous for the future of Indian democracy, but for the survival of the Indian nation state itself. Considering that today

India

may claim to be a growing or booming economy - but yet is unable feed more than 40 per cent of its children is a matter of national shame.

Land is not about building concrete jungles as proof of growth and development; it is the progenitor of food and water, a basic for human survival. It is thus clear: what

India

needs today is not a land grab policy through an amended colonial land acquisition act but a land conservation policy, which conserves our vital eco-systems, such as the fertile Gangetic plain and coastal regions, for their ecological functions and contribution to food security.

Handing over fertile land to private corporations, who are becoming the new zamindars [heriditary aristocrats], cannot be defined as having a public purpose. Creating multiple privatised super highways and expressways does not qualify as necessary infrastructure. The real infrastructure

India

needs is the ecological infrastructure for food security and water security. Burying our fertile food-producing soils under concrete and factories is burying the country's future.

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecofeminist, philosopher, activist, and author of more than 20 books and 500 papers. She is the founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and has campaigned for biodiversity, conservation and farmers' rights, winning the Right Livelihood Award [Alternative Nobel Prize] in 1993.

Day of the Rapture

2011-05-21T18:22:00.000-04:00

Harold Camping, an American Christian radio broadcaster and president of Family Radio, has famously predicted that the end of times Rapture would occur today, May 21, 2011 and that God would subsequently completely destroy the Earth and the universe five months later on October 21. (He had previously predicted that the Rapture would occur in September 1994). On this heralded Day of the Rapture, it would be wonderful – blasphemous as it seems - to reclaim the word rapture to include transportation into another realm by things other than Judgement and the second coming of Jesus.

For Buddhists, rapture is a common translation of the Pali word piti, which is a very specific joy associated with a state of deep tranquility or meditative absorption.

As an emotional state, rapture is a feeling of joy or delight, synonymous with ecstasy.

Nature has the power to enrapture, delight, and send into ecstasy. This is my preferred form of rapture, particularly in this fecund, dynamic Spring season when Nature is transcendentally alive with regeneration and growth.

We Are All Fukushima

2011-04-21T10:02:00.002-04:00

Photo of blossoms in the Mountains of Fukushima Prefecture by Eddie Wong

(www.NaturalNews.com)

In cooperation with NaturalNews, David Rainoshek, creator of www.JuiceFeasting.com has authored an important new report called We Are All Fukushima. This report delivers "an integral perspective on the meanings and promises of disaster." It is an advanced look at the cultural and spiritual causes behind Fukushima and other disasters.

We Are All Fukushima is available now as a free download (PDF). Simply click the following link to download and read it:http://www.naturalnews.com/download...

In this groundbreaking report, David Rainoshek asks the question, "Where does the problem of Fukushima really exist?"

It's not just at the nuclear power facility, it turns out. This disaster - as with many other disasters - begins in the hearts and minds of modern humankind. To explain his perspective, David Rainoshek, an avid student of philosopher Ken Wilbur, cites the Great Chain of Being and the roots of our the worldview and human values.

His report also asserts that science is the domain of "external truth" that often ignores the far more important inner truths from which any lasting science must spring. "Science without religion is lame," Albert Einstein once said. He followed it up with "...religion without science is blind." This quote invokes an integral approach to understanding both the fabric of reality around us as well as the apparent events that take place within that fabric.

The free downloadable report serves as both a primer on Ken Wilbur's philosophy as well as a deeper, more holistic explanation for the root causes behind global disasters such as Fukushima.

It also warns that human civilization moving forward guided only by science but not a more integral understanding of our role in the universe is a path fraught with peril.

Download the free report and read it yourself:http://www.naturalnews.com/download...

You may also wish to learn more about David Rainoshek's Juice Feasting programs at www.JuiceFeasting.com

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/032148_Fukushima_David_Rainoshek.html#ixzz1KAH7k1da

What is the source of the Fukushima problem?

Nuclear Mayhem

2011-03-31T09:45:00.001-04:00

Japan

, things will never be the same again. Just like after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is sad that we – as a human race – have not learned our lesson after those two terrible atrocities. Between them these two atom-bombings exterminated over 300,000 innocent civilians! It seems ironic that the nation subjected to those nuclear attacks some sixty five years ago went on to embrace the same technology and now pays a potentially awful price in lethal, long-lasting radio-activity in the atmosphere, land, oceans, and bodies of living things.

Those staggering images of the time the combination earthquake/monster tsunami hit the east coast of Honshu will haunt the Japanese for a very long time; in minutes, lives, livelihoods, houses, cars, whole towns were turned upside down and large ships were deposited on land far from their ocean moorings. In a few moments of time, we were all reminded of the tremendous unstoppable force of Nature; almost without warning, a catastrophic chain of events was unleashed that we ignore or brush off at our peril. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant was a sitting duck for the wave of destruction.

It is human ingenuity through reductionist science that released the genie from the bottle, but Albert Einstein warned in 1946: The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

In a stunning new video, renowned physicist Dr. Michio Kaku lays it all out on a news interview without mincing words. He said, to the great shock of many:

"If it goes to a full-scale evacuation of all personnel, it means that firefighters are no longer putting water onto the cores. That's the only thing preventing a full-scale meltdown at three reactor sites. Once they evacuate, then we past the point of no return. Meltdowns are inevitable at three reactor sites, leading to a tragedy far beyond that of Chernobyl, creating permanent dead zones in

Japan

This truly shocking interview is at:

http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=604AB3FA803FF3647DF6E34EC5E8C8A0

The Three Mile Island nuclear accident was brushed off as being due to “human error”; the far more serious Chernobyl nuclear accident (which has killed almost a million people over time) was brushed off as due to “faulty design” and “careless maintenance”. What will we put the Fukushima nuclear accident down to? It will be blamed on an unprecedented natural calamity and antiquated design. I put it down to hubris and the human error in building it in the first place at a location prone to wild and unpredictable seismic activity. The nuclear industry is blinded by the almighty dollar at the best of times, and now is in denial about the perils of the power they espouse. They don’t know what they’re doing!

Even without a meltdown, Fukushima is going to take decades to shut down, and then, spent plutonium and uranium will not be gone, just covered over, transported away, out of sight, out of mind.

For the sake of all of humanity, shut all these plants down, worldwide! Make the necessary leap on over to ever-improving technologies that are truly clean, safe, and renewable, with Nature as their source.

The Island of Naxos

2011-03-08T12:14:00.005-05:00

The road to Lionas, Naxos

After spending an acclimatizing week on a verdant Paros, nothing prepared us for the bold drama of neighbouring island of Naxos. From the moment the ship rounds the northern tip of Paros at Naoussa and the jagged peaks around Naxos town loom on the horizon, we were held in her thrall. The island throws up a mixed bag of weather in this pre-Spring off-season. The Aegean sun casts luminosity onto the brilliant whitewashed, electric-blue painted houses, verdant landscape, and omnipresent white marble. Cool northerly gusts whip up the dark blue sea, then grey scudding clouds swoop down over the high peaks, and torrential showers pass over and by. It is a delight to slip into the slow pace as we ramble and toodle along narrow winding streets, rustic roads, country paths and lonely beaches bereft of summer hordes.

In a rented Fiat Panda, we set out to visit Koronos in the mountains and Lionas, a pretty cove 800 metres and 9 kilometres below. The drive that passes through the high-perched towns of Chalki, Filoti, and Apiranthos takes us along asphalted, seriously twisting roads with breathtaking vistas, often down around two thousand feet to the glistening blue ocean way below. The mountain sides are strewn with rocks and boulders, criss-crossed by stone walls demarcating property, even high on precipices.

In Koronos, hostess Matine cooked delectable dishes from her own greens, potatoes, cheese, and village lamb and pork. Her taverna is abuzz with loud conversation and oratory, thick with smoke. She put us up in the simple suite of a renovated house in the village. Down on the beach in Lionas, Gundi was entranced by the most interesting beach for rock-picking she has ever combed. The earthy and white tones of the weathered pebbles are varied and marbled; they gleam in their wet coat of seawater. I wander off to just perch and ponder in the marble amphitheatre above the vibrant green sea. What a joy to be here, at the wild remote edge of a Greek island, where a sturdy historied land meets a swirling fabled sea. At night, the glow of the village illuminates the massive rock-face of the south of the cove as darkness envelopes the sea, and the whooshing of the waters, the whistling of the wind above continue unabated.

One lively evening in Lionas, at the Delfinaki taverna of Manolis and Vasso Koufopoulos, English-speaking Lionas resident Apostoulos taught us of the concepts of filoxenia and aftarkis. He says these are both especially well-honed on Naxos. Manolis’ fine fresh rosé wine was free-flowing and Apostoulos acted as interpreter not only of language, but also of cultural refinements. He explained that filoxenia is what Naxians, and Greeks, welcome visitors with. Once they warm to you, their hearts and souls open up to wrap you in a blanket of stoic insight. Filoxenia, that literally means "love of strangers", is a generosity of spirit, a joyful kind of the-best-of-what's-mine-is-yours attitude in which Greeks take great pride as a defining attribute. Manolis spent over thirty years mining emery from within the local mountains; now he is a proud farmer and food producer. He beams as he brings us olives from the family trees, rosé wine made from the family grapes, honey produced by the family bees, eggs from the family chickens, meat and cheese from his brother’s goats and sheep. And filoxenia is a main reason that he loves to provide this bounty and Vasso loves to cook it.

Aftarkis is an ancient word that literally means ‘sufficient in oneself.’ It is used to describe a person who, through discipline, has become independent of all external circumstances, and who has discovered within him- or her-self resources that meet the demands of any situation that may arise. Naxians display aftarkis probably because of the challenges of surviving and sustaining livelihood, community and culture on a mountainous island.

Naxos is blessed as the most fertile island of the Cyclades. It has a good supply of water in a region where water is usually inadequate. Mount Zas at 999 metres is the highest peak in the Cyclades, and tends to trap the clouds, generating greater rainfall. This has made agriculture an important economic sector with various vegetable and fruit crops as well as cattle breeding, sheep- and goat-rearing, making Naxos the most self sufficient of the island group. Grapes, oranges, lemons, limes, figs, olives find ideal conditions, generating not only fruit, but precious wine and olive oil. Tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, cucumbers all grow robustly here. Growing wild on the hillsides island-wide are sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano, giant fennel. Yellow-flowering clover carpets the soil between the olive and citrus trees. Beekeepers make a delectable thyme honey, especially renowned in Gundi’s favourite little mountain village of Keramoti, so picturesquely located in its high verdant valley. Farmers make milk, cheese, butter, yogurt, and succulent chicken, pork, lamb, beef. Fishermen bring in an array of fish large and small, squid, octopus, and shrimp, (though catches are much smaller than they used to be). This all makes for a local food culture which is vibrant, hearty, and sustained by each succeeding generation of wonderful cooks. Portions are generally large and overly-generous. Naxians love their food and wine, and they love to share it. Filoxenia is alive and well on Naxos.

Back home, I miss the intoxication of it all already…

Going to Greece

2011-02-07T09:35:00.004-05:00

We’re off to Paros – not Paris as in French metropolis, but Paros, beguiling Cycladic island in Greece. Always, Gundi and I have been drawn to islands. All those years ago we lapped up and (ever since) gushed over Bali, travelled through Java, blissed out on Tioman, sojourned on Ometepe, and visited close family on the open Pacific shore of Vancouver Island. We have dreamed of Majorca, Sicily, the

Seychelles

, but now we are taking the plunge to satisfy the yen to spend slow time on a Greek island. In fact, we are going to get greedy and take in adjacent Naxos as well.

Having been on but one cruise in my life – some forty years ago as a teenager on a school-arranged Mediterranean tour taking in Venice, Corfu, Athens, Crete, Tunis, Naples, Rome, and Pisa – I am impatient for that moment when island landfall appears on the horizon and we approach a bustling port. Paros drew us with its picturesque little harbour at Naoussa, white marble, lively towns, navigable size, hilly terrain, high villages, beaches and coves, mellow and friendly reputation.

We will plonk ourselves down in Naoussa for a few days, explore the town, nearby beach rock formations at Kolymbithres. We’ll then head up in the hills to the quaint village of Lefkes. We’ll go walking from there on the ancient Byzantine Road through the villages of Prodromos and Marpissa, on to the little fishing harbour at Piso Livadi. We will inhale the heady scent of wild sage and thyme, blooming wildflowers. Sometime after that, we’ll head over to Naxos on the ferry to take in a very fertile island dotted with traditional whitewashed villages, impressive mountain landscapes, fishing harbours, Byzantine churches. On the way I will be getting Gundi to read the draft manuscript of my book, about living and growing here on the land in eastern

Canada

. It is tentatively titled Leafy Greens in the Rolling Hills.

It will be so refreshing to take in off-season island culture, character, food and drink, to inhale the soul of a locality. Most of all, I just want to lap up the heritage and the land and look out over the dark blue Aegean.

Back to the Garden

2011-01-27T17:43:00.001-05:00

True love in the garden...

We are stardust.

We are golden.

And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden…

Way back in 1969 – over forty years ago now – Joni Mitchell wrote Woodstock in a hotel room in New York City as she watched reports of the events at the Woodstock Festival on television. (She had been advised by a manager that appearing on the Dick Cavett Show instead would be a better choice than performing at Woodstock).

In the intervening years, the world has seen growing corporatization, expanded government control and curtailment of personal freedoms, and with this the accelerating scourge of globalization and marginalization of small-scale, community-based initiatives. The need has become ever greater to get ourselves back to the garden. And, in truth, many of us are doing it, back there, as we see a resurgence in organic farms and foods, local production, farmers markets; we just need more of the same to stem the tide sweeping so many treasured things away in the depleted soils and wastewater of the mainstream.

As a society, we are now another stage further removed from Nature’s way. Over half the world’s population is now urban. Having gone through the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, and a 20th century riddled with wars of massive carnage and devastation from chemicals, atomic and nuclear agents, we now live at the beginning of the 21st century in an age of great upheaval and shifting empires. Synthetic materials and new technologies now rule the roost.

In medicine, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, radiation are prescribed, gradually sidelining all time-honoured natural, traditional treatments. In farming, factory feedlots, antibiotics, pesticides, chemical fertilizer and genetically-modified crops are promoted, as control of natural seeds and lands gets wrested away. In food, sterilization, pasteurization, irradiation, genetic modification are the order of the day for those that control the production and distribution system. In the environment, indiscriminate deforestation, mining, resource exploitation, desecration of land and ocean, and an inexorable build-up of greenhouse gases hold sway. In all these areas, ever more carcinogens, toxins, poisons cause escalated disease in humans, animals, plants, “natural” environments. The bottom line for the western capitalist system is man-made, geared for profit, making some much richer, and many much the poorer. Obscene levels of power are enjoyed by ruthless elites in the form of centralized government, mega-corporations, secret cabals, the ultra-rich, all at the expense of the power-starved masses.

Those who control this state of affairs exercise greed, repression, and perpetuate misery and disease. A renewed connection to Nature and all things natural would help us all to reclaim and recover health, sanity, dignity, meaning, happiness. We need to keep on engaging, person by person, step by step, community by community, movement by movement – without selling out. Change has to come from the grassroots up, as it is very unlikely to come from the top down. Back to the garden, one more time.

The Revolution Has Begun - "The Shift Hits the Fan"

2011-01-07T10:57:00.001-05:00

I have just finished reading When Healing Becomes A Crime, Kenny Ausubel’s riveting fullsome account of the politicization of mainstream medicine, and the victimization of alternative medicine.

Kenny is an extraordinary voice for a changing paradigm for the world at the start of the 21^st century, and via the platform of Bioneers, he and his wife Nina Simons have started the wheels in motion.

The Revolution Has Begun - "The Shift Hits the Fan"

By Kenny Ausubel
Co-CEO and Founder, Bioneers, www.bioneers.org

Excerpts from the address opening the Bioneers Conference, October 15th, 2010, San Rafael, California.

For the full text, go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kenny-ausubel/the-revolution-has-begun_b_764128.html

The Bottleneck. The Great Disruption. Peak Everything. The Great Turning.

Whatever you call it, it's the big enchilada.

In the words of filmmaker Tom Shadyac, "The shift is hitting the fan." We're experiencing the dawn of a revolutionary transformation. This awkward 'tween state marks the end of pre-history - the sunset of an ecologically illiterate civilization. Like a baby being born, a new world is crowning….

From breakdown to breakthrough, it's a revolution from the heart of nature and the human heart. It leads with a basic shift in our relationship with nature from resource and object to mentor, model and partner. Game-changing breakthroughs in science, technology and design such as biomimicry are revolutionizing our very ways of knowing. The Rights of Nature movement is recognizing the inalienable rights of the non-human world of ecosystems and critters, widening our circle of compassion and kinship. Greater decentralization and localization are building resilience from the ground up - shaped by ancient indigenous wisdom of becoming native to our place.

The digital communications revolution is primed to spread solutions without borders at texting speed. Historic demographic shifts are fertilizing the landscape - from the ascendancy of women's leadership to the worldbeat of cultural and racial pluralism. Empires and dynasties are waning and waxing with sudden shifts in the balance of global power.

When a chrysalis turns into a butterfly, the caterpillar's immune system attacks the very first of the butterfly's cells as invaders. The pushback will be equally fierce, casting shadows of widespread destruction and violence, mass migrations, virulent ideologies, and ethnic strife. Yet in the end, the big, hairy caterpillar audaciously becomes a beautiful butterfly….

In truth, the world is reaching "peak everything," in Richard Heinberg's words. A global economy built on unlimited growth and massive resource use is heading for inevitable contraction.

A major barrier in the

U.S.

is the annual military budget of over a trillion dollars. Although the Defense Department has embraced climate change as a top national security issue, national sustainability must move front and center. As David Orr observes, "The concept of sustainability should be the new organizing principle for both domestic and foreign policy. Sustainability is the core of a national development strategy designed to enhance our security, build prosperity from the ground up, and reduce ecological damage, risks of climate destabilization and the necessity of fighting endless wars over dwindling resources."….

But for now, the

U.S.

is being left behind. As a leader at

Germany

's Deutsche Bank stated, "They're asleep at the wheel on climate change, asleep at the wheel on job growth, asleep at the wheel on this industrial revolution taking place in the energy industry." Rather than catastrophe, business competitiveness may ultimately prove the more compelling driver.

Yet as Einstein said, we cannot solve the problem with the same mentality that created it. Brother, can you spare a paradigm? The supreme challenge of global interdependence is to foster meta-cooperation in a full world….

Shifting the mindscape starts with systems thinking. Complex systems by nature are unpredictable, nonlinear and cannot be controlled. The key to building resilience is to foster the system's capacity to adapt to dramatic change. As Dana Meadows observed, "A diverse system with multiple pathways and redundancies is more stable and less vulnerable to external shock than a uniform system with little diversity."

A paradigm is the hardest thing to change in a system, but it can happen fast. As Meadows advised, "Keep pointing at anomalies and failures in the old paradigm. Keep speaking loudly and with assurance, from the new one. Insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. Don't waste time with reactionaries; work with active change agents, and the vast middle ground of open people."

At the core is the transformation to a restoration economy.

What's afoot globally today are the re-envisioning of the economy and the redesign of the corporation into diverse structures of business ownership and governance - such as large-scale co-operatives, mission-controlled social businesses and foundation-owned social profit companies. Bill Gates calls it "creative capitalism." It works. Employee-owned firms modestly outperform their peers. Foundation-owned, values-driven companies perform at least as well or better. In Europe, co-ops comprise 12 percent of GDP and engage 60 percent of the population. Marjorie Kelly terms them "emergent new organizational species" designed like living systems to deliver human and ecological benefits as well as profits.

Another seismic meta-trend transforming the economy and society at large is the ascendancy of women's leadership. As writer Hanna Rosin points out in "The End of Men," "Those societies that take advantage of the talents of all of their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest." One study measuring the economic and political power of women in 162 countries found with few exceptions that the greater the power of women, the greater the nation's economic success. As David Gergen wrote, "Women are knocking on the door of leadership at the very moment when their talents are especially well matched with the requirements of the day."

Natural systems have their own operating instructions, as biomimicry master Janine Benyus describes. Nature runs on current sunlight. Nature banks on diversity. Nature rewards co-operation. Nature builds from the bottom up. Nature recycles everything. And Earth's mission statement: Life creates conditions conducive to life..

Given that the most important element in systems is purpose and goals, the big question is: What's the economy for? If the goal is building resilience, the priority flips from growth and expansion to sufficiency and a sustainable prosperity. Resilience also favors economic re-localization, which in turn produces greater energy and food security….

The ruling story according to Western Civilization took hold about 500 years ago with the birth of the Scientific Revolution and exaltation of human reason. When the Copernican revolution showed the Earth revolves around the sun, science redefined humanity's place in the natural order and the cosmos.

Perhaps the defining characteristic of the modern mind is the belief in a radical separation between the human self and the external world. According to the modern mind, Tarnas observes, "Apart from the human being, the cosmos is seen as entirely impersonal and unconscious... mere matter in motion, mechanistic and purposeless, ruled by chance and necessity. It is altogether indifferent to human consciousness and values. The world outside the human being lacks conscious intelligence, it lacks interiority, and it lacks intrinsic meaning and purpose... For the modern mind, the only source of meaning in the universe is human consciousness."

The modern mind stands in radical contrast with the primal worldview, exemplified by indigenous cultures. As Tarnas continues, "Primal experience takes place within a world soul, an anima mundi, a living matrix of embodied meaning. Because the world is understood as speaking a symbolic language, direct communication of meaning and purpose from world to human can occur."

The linear, mechanistic, reductionist worldview has yielded as science has radically evolved into a vastly more complex view of interdependence and other ways of knowing. From complexity and chaos theory to the Gaia Hypothesis, a new cosmology is unfolding. In this scientific revolution, the Earth does not revolve around us….

Away from the mainstream

2011-01-04T10:31:00.002-05:00

Distracted, nauseated by mainstream media, and its shrill panderings; by mainstream medicine, and its monopoly on disease; by mainstream food, and its unlabelled carcinogens; by mainstream farming, and its chemical toxins....

We are way happier and healthier, away in left field, where the grass grows lusher, the flowers bloom bolder, and where we, and the cows, can eat our natural diet, untainted by all that mainstream sludge.

Hill-walking with Janko

2010-12-18T20:22:00.001-05:00

During our recent family reunion in Shrewsbury and the surrounding Shropshire countryside, I came to the realization that we are a pretty diverse and eclectic bunch. Among our number are a glass artist, a naturopath, a newspaper journalist, three linguists, two kindergarten teachers, two community social workers, a housing consultant, an organic farmer, and a renewable energy specialist.

It was important for me to spend a day out walking with Janko, my nephew and the recent graduate in renewable energy studies in Berlin. We have a common love of wild places, open country, the great outdoors, so it was only natural that we chose a walk up on the high Shropshire hills, with magnificent views in all directions. We set out at the ancient stone circle of Mitchell’s Fold, which sits high in the Shropshire hills, on the long ridge of Stapeley Hill, 1000 feet above sea level and close to the Welsh border. Its exposed position gives fine views of the Stiperstones to the east and the Welsh hills to the west. From this heathland height, we clambered down the steep valley slopes to fenced woodlands. Here we were happy to stir up no end of pheasants and were taken aback by each new sudden ruffling and noisy flight of pairs. We stopped at an old ruin of a homestead tucked into the fold of the valley, a pastoral setting at one time for a sheltered orchard and meadow. On the slopes above grew corn and grain, carved out of the autumnal brown ferns and the green uplands shorn by roaming sheep. As we climbed again past ponds through the soggy soft grasses, light shafts flitted across the distant hills bathing the land in that poetic light so special in British hill country. At the craggy tors atop the ridges, we paused to inhale the clear crisp air and reflect on the splendour of the 360-degree view.

We talked about the endless opportunities for Janko as he sets out exploring possibilities with wind, solar power, super-efficient energy-saving alternative power systems and the places around the world to effect and implement them. Living in Berlin, Janko loves to get away to the woods and lakes of northern Sweden, sharing in food growing, bee-keeping, fishing, living on the land within a local community with a number of friends from several countries. To return to the land after an arduous spell of urban confinement is to let out a primal roar and then open up one’s soul to wonder. I am fortunate enough to be opened up most of the time, living in the hills, working the land, and growing fresh food for Gundi and myself and to take to market. However, I do envy young man Janko as he sets out on a fascinating path that – I have no doubt – will lead to much invention and fulfilment, as he helps to introduce brilliant, simple energy-saving systems that make homes, communities, businesses smarter and more efficient. “Why didn’t I think of that?”, they will all ask about each new innovation. If I had my time over – with more of a pragmatic bent - I would be following Janko’s path, effecting change based on simple, natural methodologies.

Our walk ended at dusk, up on the Long Mynd, with spectacular views to the distant Brecon Beacons, Welsh Hills, and the Malverns. It seemed we looked out on forever, with the bewitching lights twinkling on in the farms, towns and cities all around, and we two blown away by the cold wind, steep drop-offs, and a deep sense of communion.

Autumnal Killarney

2010-12-12T18:34:00.002-05:00

The afternoon paddle to our campsite home for the next four nights and days is leisurely as we glide over translucent aqua waters against a backdrop of vibrant October foliage and a deep blue sky.

Arrived and settled in, the late afternoon sees the sun sliding down to the west and an orange glow illuminating the white quarzite mountains rowed up on the north side of Killarney Lake. Dotted with a variety of trees in resplendent autumnal colours, the knobbly ridges become increasingly electrified as purple shadings alternate with ever deeper sun-dappled ochres and burned golds.

We sit perched on our rock-face, overlooking the rippling waters stretched out below, sipping a beer, as dusk descends, and then – oh, wow – the plumpest full moon comes popping up over the dark silhouette of white pines on the eastern horizon. The waters ripple in a frisson of vibration, as a faint breeze whistles through the trees.

The campfire - primed with paper, twigs for kindling, and rafts of scoured dry branches from the lakeside - is ceremoniously lit; sparks drift up through the high pines and fade away into the night air. Our senses blaze with the wonder of being truly out there, wrapped in the welcoming embrace of ancient rock, primal forest, clear lakes, and open skies that reveal worlds, planets, constellations, nebulae beyond our tiny temporal home. For this fleeting moment in time, at this pure place on Earth, we feel centre-stage, truly here now, supremely alive and transfixed by the beauty of it all.

Up on Kinver Edge

2010-12-02T17:53:00.001-05:00

Kinver Edge is a spirited ridge overlooking glorious rolling countryside in the middle of England. Below and around are forests, heathlands, farms, fields, villages, and at the foot, the busy little town of Kinver. As one climbs gently towards the ridge top, spectacular distant views open up in all directions. Walkers sniff the fresh air and exhale heartily, in thrall; unleashed dogs release their pent-up energy.

Up there now - as was their expressed wish - co-mingled and fully re-united are my dear Mum & Dad, Mary (Mullins) Finch and Jack Finch. Dad ascended first, around five years ago. And now at rest, my Mum has made it there too, her ashes spread on and around the bushes, saplings, trees, some of which my Dad planted in covert missions several years ago. Their three children, four grand-children, one great grand-daughter, son-in-law, and grandson-in-law together strewed the remains in a tender family ceremony that signalled both the end of Mum & Dad’s happy ramblings on this Earth and also peace of mind and closure for the surviving family.

Sabrina, Goddess of the Severn

2010-11-17T10:54:00.000-05:00

Sabrina was the Roman Goddess of the Severn, the longest river in England and Wales. She poured forth the waters that this time last year flooded around her memorial in Shrewsbury, just down the road from the birthplace of Charles Darwin, evolutionary theorist.

I needed to go back, just as my Dad had - to the source, to discover where Sabrina conjured her magic. For Sabrina and her two sisters were all water nymphs who met on Plynlimon to discuss the route to the sea. Each sister took a different route, Ystwyth to the west and Varga (Wye) away to the south, while Sabrina, who loved the land, lay down her blond tresses and set out on a slow meandering course that took her far into the east, then south.

Unlike the straightforward climbing up a mountain, my brief journey to the source of the Severn was a backward course to the beginning - from sheltered forested valley to exposed bog moorland, on the rooftop of Wales, atop the Cambrian Mountains' highest massif.

On that crisp bright November day, I heard echoes of William Wordsworth:

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit that impels.

Long after we're gone, long after the rapid changes in climate have transformed our known landscapes, rivers like Sabrina - the Severn - will continue to rise in the hills, gurgle, babble, cascade, swirl, wave and flow, following gravity's call seawards, past the lowlands to the open ocean, in continuity, in perpetuity.

Progress on the farm

2010-09-20T09:00:00.000-04:00

I live on a rural acreage, so does this make the land a farm? I grow crops commercially, so does this make me a farmer? I prefer to think of the land as mixed use rural and myself as a land steward and market grower rather than farmer. There are too many “conventional” (industrial) farmers for me to relate to this breed, although the resurgence in “traditional” (organic) farmers is very heartening, even if we are a tiny minority.

It is gratifying to see the progress we have made in the eleven years that we have been tending this lovely patch. There have never ever been chemicals spread here; Carman who owned then rented it for growing a variety of crops always farmed traditionally, even though engulfed in a sea of conventional farms. We began growing garlic and lavender, then echinacea angustifolia, before settling on market-fresh greens and herbs as our mainstay and setting up shop as Rolling Hills Organics, certified organic all the way.

We now sell twice weekly at organic farmers market in the city (Toronto), an hour and a half away. We also sell to a handful of upscale city restaurants and I make weekly deliveries to several local eateries (in Warkworth, Cobourg, Port Hope, on Rice Lake). I can genuinely promise all customers exclusively fresh organic produce of premium quality, picked that day or the day previous, washed in pure well water, spun, dried, weighed, bagged and cooled.

Having retired the beast of a BCS walking tractor which doubled as roto-tiller and sickle-bar mower, the grunt work is ably performed by our labour-saving New Holland tractor with its 72-inch roto-tiller, cultivator, plow, and bush-hog, not to mention the front-end loader with its lugging capacity.

Two one-thousand square-foot growhouses now supply mostly salad greens and fresh herbs from mid-April to mid-December, extending our growing and selling season from six months to nine. A third growhouse (next year?) will help us better keep up with demand.

Elsewhere, five acres of fields re-treed five years ago with white and red pine, spruce, and larch are coming along somewhat patchily. This year, beekeeper Ian Critchell placed ten beehives next to the upper fields and so the bees are back and busy (after previous owner Paul von Baich’s six hives and wonderful honey moved away).

In the coming months the first 100 x 300-foot array of solar panels is due to be installed in a pastured field up the hill, the first of an entire acre. We have leased this acre to a Canadian solar energy company and are thrilled to be on the cusp of generating both electricity to go straight into the local grid and supplementary income for, yes, OK, the farm.

In the guise of a ginkgo

2010-08-29T11:36:00.000-04:00

In the guise of a ginkgo, my dear old Mum lives on. This graceful, sturdy tree was planted and dedicated to her in our garden this April after she left this life in the dead of winter in December.

Today marks Mum’s birthday, her first re-birthday since she glided into her new life in the great beyond. I will always remember, love and cherish her for her unconditional love, mischievous grin, and ready humour. She gave me the strength to go out into the wide world with a sense of independence and curiosity. On a Severn riverside walk shortly after her passing, I felt her telling me that she had done all she could, her time was up, and it was now up to her little boy, her beloved son to go and do his thing, whatever that may be. Look after yourself, she would always say. So it is that I tend the garden, feeling blessed to be able to cultivate our own as per Voltaire’s - and my Mum’s - sound advice.

2010-08-25T14:36:00.000-04:00

Lean, green and surprisingly flavourful!
(A review article by Malcolm Jolley in the National Post, June 11, 2010):

Evergreen Brickworks Farmers’ Market (Saturdays),
Riverdale Farmers’ Market (Tuesdays); $5 for small bag (serves four)

Sometimes, I think the locavore movement is less about where things are grown and more about who grew them and how. Concepts like the 100-mile diet are great for introducing folks to the idea of caring about your food, but if you want the very best quality of produce possible, you better buy it from the person who grew it. A few organic growers, such as Cookstown Greens in the Holland Marsh, package their salad mixes and sell them to specialty retailers in Toronto including Harvest Wagon, The Healthy Butcher, Pantry and the 100% all Ontario-sourced shop Culinarium, but to be guaranteed a salad at dinner that was picked after breakfast, nothing beats buying it from a farmer at the market.

Farmers’ markets have sprouted like weeds throughout the GTA and Ontario (a quick Google search will turn up a bunch of listings). Rolling Hills Organics from Northumberland Hills, northeast of Toronto, grows mesclun mixes that it sells in bags at the Riverdale Farmers’ Market in Cabbagetown on Tuesdays and at the Evergreen Brick Works Farmers’ Market on Saturdays. Theirs is a peppery, mustardy blend. In fact they sell a “hot” version and a “mild” version, as well as a straight bag of baby arugula. Unlike import mesclun blends, these greens haven’t been gassed to stay fresh. They actually are fresh, and they’ve been washed with water, so they can be eaten right away.

The point of ingredient-driven cooking is to get out of the way of the ingredients’ flavours, so that they are the star rather than the sauce or garnish. When faced with just-picked greens, I simply toss them in a good glug of quality extra virgin olive oil and season with a little coarse salt (I might add a squeeze of lemon, but only if I’m cutting one up for something else). The salad will accompany some kind of grilled meat or fish, and once the steak, trout or whatever has been cooked and let to rest, I’ll leave the barbecue on, clean it and make simple bruschetta to round out the meal. No pots or pans to wash up!

Loving local Thursdays

2010-08-04T22:21:00.000-04:00

As I wind up another Thursday of deliveries to local restaurants – and drive home along the winding south shore of Rice Lake, the sun sparkling on patches of lake between the hillock islands - I feel the luckiest fella in the world.

The day began with picking, washing, spinning and bagging various fresh greens and herbs. Then came the leisurely toodle along the scenic backroads of Northumberland to drop off to first Ken and Penny at the 100-Mile Diner in wonderful Warkworth, then to Edward at the eclectic 66 King Street West and Johnny and the boys at the Northside (both in Cobourg), on to the always-jovial Chef Ray at Zest in Port Hope, to Jeff at the Victoria Inn overlooking the jewel that is Rice Lake. Along the way, kudos for the offerings, genuine appreciation, and heartfelt thanks. To go with the ready pay that comes with it, what could be nicer? Halibut and chips at Cap’n Jacks is a treat, as is the fine summer weather, but it is the delivery of fresh local organic to truly nice people and businesses that brings an upwelling of real satisfaction.

Also rewarding and productive are the good nature and hard work of local helpers in the fields. Meredith is living at her family’s farm for the summer. Like last growing season, she comes to help out three days a week with weeding, planting, and preparation for markets and restaurant deliveries. Lukash is a gifted guitarist making the most of a wonderful music teacher and program at Campbellford High School; his summer job is helping out here, and his enthusiasm and energy are exactly what we need. Natasha was a whirlwind who came in and got the season up and running with planting and early ground maintenance during this explosive spring. She shared her broad experience and exhilarated with her wide-ranging conversation; then was gone in a flash, via Georgian Bay and back to Scotland. And in Toronto at the markets, my trusty co-seller Chris has been ever-present and a lively, dynamic presence. Thanks to all for the warm glow you have brought to our fields, table and lives!

Local flavour and local spirit are a joy to partake of; long may they linger and suffuse.

Sunshine and rain

2010-07-25T14:43:00.000-04:00

It strikes me that – in the quest for healthy food – we are extremely fortunate to have the conditions for growing that we sometimes take for granted. Sunshine, fresh air, fertile soil, rain, and clean pure well water when is doesn’t rain regularly are all here in abundance, most of the time. This summer, we’re benefitting from more than our fair share of sunshine and rain, and always adding to soil fertility, so we’re away to the races with fine plentiful produce. From the Central Valley of California to the Indus Valley of Pakistan, availability of water is becoming a more precarious problem year to year, with less and less water for irrigation to divert for growing food.

Food is naturally at its freshest and most nutritious when crops grown in natural organic soils are fresh out of the ground. Leafy greens and fresh herbs are loaded with nutrients, as are many newly-dug root crops. From these as well as clean water, fresh air and good doses of sunshine, we are able to draw and maintain good health.

Presently for markets, we are up with the sun, harvesting and preparing for market peppery arugula, punchy mustard greens, lush lettuce, juicy fresh garlic, exceptionally fragrant basils, cilantro, dill, parsleys, and a rainbow of baby carrots, baby beets. It is a joy to receive the appreciation of customers, banter with them, and to sell out of produce most days. And it is with a deep sense of fulfilment that I come home to the sun setting over the fields, sip on a refreshment and partake in the abundance, before falling into a deep rich slumber.

Just Do It!

2010-07-14T22:13:00.000-04:00

There are ever more articles published in the mainstream media, recognizing the plight of the industrial food system and suggesting various tentative solutions to the problem – more study, more subsidies, more farmers – and yet all they ever seem to conclude is the need for more money spent on marketing.

More marketing is the last thing we need; we don’t need more fat consultants on excessive stipends telling us we need more this, more that; the real need is for well-meaning people to get up, follow their dreams, and get growing and selling. They will be warned that there is no money is organic farming; that it is a lot of hard work for scant returns. Yet I, and many other ethically-minded farmers like me, live the dream every day. We get up with the first light, look out on the dawn mists across the valley, head out to open up the greenhouses and fields for the day, and get to work with our chores before the sun gets its heat fan going. We harvest greens, beets and carrots, beans, peas, berries and currants, and get them washed and cooled before the heat is cranked up. We just do it, not asking for any support, sympathy, or subsidy, as we know that governments are too busy helping out the big boys, propping up the ailing conventional agriculture model farm system. That’s OK; we can look after ourselves. We can make a very gratifying living by peddling our produce direct to eager, aware customers at weekly farmers markets where we can gauge production to match sales and come home sold out, with zero waste on most days where exceptional circumstances do not intervene – severe thunderstorms and extreme humidity are not good, but the recent G20 summit in Toronto, despite dire warnings, turned into our farm’s most successful market ever, thanks to the vigilance of our loyal customers. They turned out in droves, thanked us for being there, purchased (and, I hope, ate when they got home), heartily.

There is nothing wrong with this alternative regional food system that runs outside the industrial one. It is dynamic, lively, healthy, just missing maybe a few more intrepid, innovative growers and sellers of fresh local organic food to help us all stay healthy.

Best of all, we come home with beautiful breads, berries, smoked fish, cheeses, raw chocolates traded with our fellow producers, and tuck into a freshly-prepared dinner du jour. What could be better?

The perfect rainbow

2010-07-14T20:55:00.000-04:00

It was complete, a perfect rainbow, blessing our fields, and especially the garlic that was preparing to be lifted from the soil, all earthy and strong and pungent.

Tonight, as is sit solo chomping on arugula and baby lettuce salad drizzled with infused hot jalapeno oil, our precious little black cat Negra is licking up my plate of curried chicken with fried yellow potatoes traded with a fellow organic farmer. Even our cat is sold on the wondrous sensory experience that is summer organic living.

It has been a hot and breezy day. After the rains, I have been out on my tractor churning up the soil prior to planting more arugula, spicy mesclun, purple carrots. The basils in the greenhouse smell divine; sweet, Thai, purple, lemon, and particularly the lime hit you with a scent sent from another place. Yesterday at the Riverdale farmers market, an encounter with a customer perusing the fresh garlic led to a sensual discussion about the lime basil and what to do with it. She said she just wanted to keep inhaling it.

Today too, I have my freshly-ground dried echinacea angustifolia successfully introduced to its new bed partners – ginger and astragalus root, lemon balm for the Immuni-tea blend, and elderberry and yerba mate for the Vitali-tea blend. Looking forward to tasting before turning in tonight.

The fresh garlic, pulled, cut, stripped of its dirt, and bathed in cold water, is potent and robust. It is indeed a powerful season, heady with herbal scents, healing potential, and vigorous good health, aided and abetted by Carmenere wine from Chile and India Pale Ale from the old country.

The bees have found the buckwheat

2010-06-18T10:06:00.000-04:00

It has been the most fecund Spring imaginable. It seems that all of Nature has answered a call to fruition, with blossoms abundant; chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons, starlings, grosbeaks, gold and purple finches, bluejays all scurrying, feeding, reproducing; wild apples, grapes have budded ample fruits; and now the wild bees, gorgeous butterflies and a host of other insects have descended en masse onto the flowering buckwheat.

This Spring, first came the intense heat, then the big rainless dry, then at last sporadic rainfall. Now plants and crops are off to the races, with salad greens happy, and flora and fauna, new-born babies all in a growth spurt. We have been working through the rampant weeds; native grasses surprised us early with their spread.

As the Summer Solstice is upon us, all is well with the natural world immediately around us. Meantime in the Gulf of Mexico crude oil continues to gush into the ocean at a catastrophic rate and it is with dread that the ultimate toll of devastation is anticipated. Marine life will never be the same again and the environmental and economic fallout are bound to be colossal and cruel. Once more corporate greed trumps common sense.

Growing naturally

2010-04-05T09:24:00.000-04:00

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Never truer than today, as the major political powers continue to divvy up the states and borders of the world like they own it, and as goodly individuals hunker down and do their own thing in their neighbourhoods.

Honest farmers hearken back to the good old days BC (before chemicals) when the air and soil were pure and naturally chock full of nutrients. Some of us hearken back to the days BO (before organic) and wonder if by natural farming we can dispense with all the terminology, from organic to sustainable to environmentally-friendly to ecological. Our method of growing is just plain natural. It would be nice not to be boxed in any more; to be liberated to roam, grow, and explore, spiritually and physically. It would feel good to re-establish our deep ancient connection to the soil, to the plants we nurture in it, and all the microcosmic world we share life with.

In parts of the Japanese countryside, this practice has gone on continuously, uninterrupted all through industrial, agricultural, technological and digital information revolutions, and through world wars too. Farmers there have always understood that Nature in all its complexity and wealth simply provides. It provides a healthy environment for plants, animals, birds, insects, and human beings in community too. It provides food, medicine, shelter, all the basic needs for optimal health.

Underlying Natural Agriculture is a profound reverence for nature, and the farming involved is guided entirely by nature’s intrinsic wisdom. Rather than seeking to control nature, farmers listen and respond to it. Mokichi Okada, who developed Natural Agriculture in the 1930s, envisioned it not only as a means of cultivating pure and wholesome food, but in addition as an art and also a spiritual pursuit.

Natural Agriculture is not merely a horticultural technique; it entails a change in the way we think about nature, and the advancement of a more sustainable style of living. As an agricultural method, it relies on an understanding of the subtle physical relationships and spiritual bonds that exist among all elements of the cultivation and consumption of food: the earth, sun, rain, wind, the farmer, the people who eat the food, and the society in which these people live. All these benefit from its practice; it is Natural Agriculture's purpose to make all these elements spiritually and physically healthy.

The unique contribution of Natural Agriculture is its fundamental respect for all the elements involved in the natural growing processes – light, soil, water and air. Natural Agriculture fosters a deep awareness of the contributions of each element and the benefits derived from working in harmony with them. In today’s consumer society, some people have lost the understanding of the underlying interconnection of all life; one reflection of this has been a severing from the natural world. Some no longer see their relationship to the natural elements, as they have for millennia. The manipulation of nature has taken an enormous toll on human heath and the well-being of the planet. Natural Agriculture seeks to restore the vital and sacred relationship between humankind and the environment.

A seed is planted in the earth. Rain comes and the seed sprouts and takes root. The germ of consciousness begins to grow. The root derives its nutrition and water from the soil. The leaves absorb the light of the sun and through photosynthesis change inorganic matter into organic matter. This spurs growth. Tens of millions of microorganisms in the soil help to transform organic matter. In its natural state, soil is pure and contains all the elements needed for healthy plant growth. Eventually plants blossom and, with the help of insect pollination, bear the fruit that contains the next generation of seeds. Too much human intervention in this process can hamper and harm the forces of nature, causing all sorts of deviations. But by forming a spiritual collaboration, we can guide, aid and enhance natural food production.

A plant grows amid a myriad of relationships: relationships with neighbouring plants, with the weeds near it, with the insects, birds, squirrels, earthworms and moles. All of these elements make up the natural environment of the plant, and the plant is affected by its interaction with each one. Additionally, the ponds, rivers, trees, surrounding woods and mountains also contribute to the plant’s natural environment and growth. The effect of sun, rain, wind, changing seasons, annual weather conditions, and the region’s climate all have to be considered as part of this plant’s place in Nature. The energy and heat received from deep within the earth and from the sun and other planetary bodies also impact its growth and composition. Equally important is its relationship with the farmer. According to the philosophy of Natural Agriculture, plants respond to the thoughts, emotions and deeds of the people who care for them. The more conscious the farmer is of the interrelationships within nature, the more he or she is able to play a part in fostering the balance and harmony needed for healthy plant life.

The basis of Natural Agriculture is to work in harmony with the natural environment for the benefit of the plant, for the well-being of those who eat the food, and ultimately for the whole environment. One of the goals and commitments of Natural Agriculture farmers is to bring physical, mental and spiritual benefit to people, helping those who have health problems as well as mental and emotional challenges. The ingestion of food grown by Natural Agriculture brings a balance to the bodily systems that ultimately affects one’s whole well being.

Thus Natural Agriculture involves more than agricultural technique; it means changing the way one thinks about Nature. It means relating to the natural world through one’s heart, not only one’s head. And it means listening, respecting and responding to, rather than dictating, the needs of Nature. It leads to the development of a lifestyle that creates a harmony with oneself, one’s community and environment.

Through the practice of Natural Agriculture the producers and consumers of food develop a unique relationship, based on a support system of deep appreciation and gratitude. The exchange of gratitude within this community becomes a key element to its success. Indeed, consumers suddenly realize their relationship, through the farmer, to the soil, seed and subsequent agricultural product. Similarly, as the farmer works the soil, he or she is mindful of the consumers who will eventually eat the produce. This process of exchange forms a bond that benefits each person in the chain.

The farmer/consumer relationship is a vital link, which when activated can lead to a much healthier, more wholesome and aware mode of living, as well as a greater understanding of community.

Snow falling silently on cedars

2010-03-09T10:17:00.000-05:00

The end of February, Saturday morning. The softest snow is slowly descending from an empty sky. It appears to come from nowhere, out of the grey. The fields are blanket white. The bare trees’ dark limbs, the cedars’ bulky body are clearly defined by the contrasting lightness that garnishes them. Cotton-wool balls perch on the pines, then disintegrate as gravity tugs them downward.

Animal tracks snake across the landscape, sinking deep into the yielding surface. The birds are quiet, on low energy, observing. The silence is all-consuming. It is a winter scene of delicate grace, transitory in nature. Temperature changing, sunlight bursting through, wind whipping up will transform it. The moment is nature’s gift which stirs this human soul. If only more souls could see it and share in the wonder…

On the other side of the world, buildings are lives are turned upside down by convulsions from deep in the earth. The young Nazca tectonic plate moves violently under the South American Plate. The ground shakes violently and a tsunami ravages the coastline in a display of mammoth upheaval, voices scream in terror, cracks appear, houses and highrises collapse, waves demolish villages. Instantaneously, the devastation is colossal. Communication with the outside world is dead, concentrating the mind on the surreal scene. On the other side of the world, snow is falling silently on cedars…

Hubris

2010-02-25T09:41:00.000-05:00

In the mainstream media we are inundated with statistics, surveys, studies, claims that purport to tell us the truth about developments in science, medicine, crops, foods, economics, climate, resource use. As consumers of foods, medicines, materials, and money, we need to read very carefully between the lines. Sometimes, we need to reject untruths, distortions, biases out of hand, and we need to be increasingly vigilant and smart at this, as ploys to make us consume more of the same swill are becoming increasingly brazen and devious.

The mainstream media has become an ethical minefield where we must tread very prudently to avoid explosive lies and deceit. This is the propaganda forum dominated by large corporate concerns with considerable clout. He who shouts loudest gets the point across to the widest audience. It is up to us as individuals to sift through the fallout of bad ideas and poor practice based on greed and fear-mongering.

We resist as individuals and groups, but above us, committees, councils, governments, blocs cave to the pernicious proddings of vested interests. We could give up, yielding to our collective powerlessness. Yet the world is filled with individuals who have started, and continue to start, unimaginably bold initiatives at the grassroots community level. The Grameen Bank, Gaia Hypothesis, the Hippocratic Oath, Slow Food, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, bio-dynamics, organics, non-violence, small is beautiful, truth and reconciliation were seeds started in the creative minds of individuals like Hippocrates, Vandana Shiva, Carlo Petrini, James Lovelock, E. F. Schumacher, Rudolf Steiner, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela …….. Each ethical code set roots and caught the imagination of a broad group of followers. Now, many codes have been co-opted, diluted, by those out to corrupt their followers and convert them to something totally at odds with the original pure precept.

In farming, bio-dynamics, permaculture and organics staked out the moral high ground. To my mind, organic certification should confer credibility to the way a farm operates in the eyes of the consumer. It should establish a level of trust that means that the customer does not need to dig deeper – she knows that the salad greens she is buying are natural, full of nutrients and devoid of chemical additives. She should not need to wonder if they have been bathed in chlorine or gassed with ethylene to last the long trip. To accommodate the big boys of rampant capitalism, regulators have diluted standards to such an extent that consumers don’t know what is organic any more, what natural means. How can they, with all the competing and misleading claims? When new pharmaceutical products lay out the results of their latest study (carried out by their own experts and specialists, and certainly not independently verified), and small-scale producers of natural remedies are prohibited by law from making any health claims, what does this say about the ethics of our society as a whole?

Protecting the honeybees

2010-02-15T16:35:00.000-05:00

It’s happened before of course. Our greed has wiped out vast herds of bison, swarms of passenger pigeons, teeming fish in the oceans, and mussels in our rivers. Now we have turned on the billions of honeybees that provide us with so much of our food through the simple act of pollinating fruits, berries, nuts, and vegetables. As humans, we have a symbiotic relationship with bees (through foods from plants), so it is critical that we protect them.

In the pursuit of higher yields, industrial agriculture is now so dependent on the pollinating powers of honeybees that continued precipitous decline in bee populations threatens our very food system. It is hard to imagine a world with way pricier and scarcer coffee and tea, orange juice with our morning breakfast. Nor can we begin to envisage the impact of much-reduced production of apples, oranges, lemons, grapes, peaches, cherries, melons, nuts, squash, beans, carrots, sunflowers and yes, honey. Just one pollinator, the Western honeybee, tends over 130 food crops.

Bees are now bred to perform on an industrial scale, to help produce astounding harvests of all these crops. In the U.S, fruit farmers pay commercial beekeepers to truck bees thousands of miles to pollinate their crops. In the face of disastrous declines in bee populations they have been replenishing with stocks from Australia. In China, in the province of Sichuan, pear trees have been pollinated by hand after the overuse of pesticides in the 1980's wiped out the honeybee population. Is this the road we are heading down?

Around five years ago, honeybee populations started going into a tailspin, a trend that continues now. Why so precipitous? Although the bees had been in a slow decline for years, something happened between 2005 and 2006 that changed everything: a sharp and catastrophic collapse of bee colonies in dozens of countries simultaneously. This was unlike anything seen before, even by the oldest beekeepers in the U.S, Canada and Europe. In the USA, approximately one third of all hives have collapsed over the last two years. These losses are account for the loss of around 800,000 colonies in 2007 and a staggering 1 million colonies in 2008.

The European Parliament voted late in 2009 for tougher controls on bee-toxic chemicals. Hoping to avert a growing catastrophe, it has approved the creation of bee "recovery zones" across Europe. Intended to boost plummeting bee numbers – as well as stave off further agricultural losses – the measure garnered the support of an overwhelming majority of members when they voted on the measure. The recovery zones will provide bees places to buzz that teem with a diversity of plants rich in nectar and pollen, as well as free of pesticides.

In another significant stand, the Co-operative Group, which owns 25,000 hectares of farmland in Britain, recently banned the use of neonicotinoid pesticides on all its farms to protect honeybees. Simon Press, senior technical manager at the Co-op group said: "We believe that the recent losses in bee populations need definitive action, and as a result are temporarily prohibiting the eight neonicotinoid pesticides until we have evidence that refutes their involvement in the decline."

Movement to stem drastic honeybee population declines in North America has been much slower. Now, in light of the mounting evidence that new seed chemical coatings are deadly to bees, Sierra Club has been urging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to ban the use of specific chemical treatments to protect our bees and crops until it obtains scientific evidence that sublethal effects do not cause harm to America's critically important honey bees.

At issue are neonicotinoids being used in a new way - as seed coatings. For years, farmers have been spraying neonicotinoids onto their crops to stop insect infestation. Now huge agribusiness corporations have acquired patents to coat their proprietary corn seeds with these neonicotinoids. These “neonics” are extremely persistent. They enter the plant and are present in pollen and on droplets of water on leaves. As plantings have grown larger, the need for concentrated pollinators at bloom time has grown. Any changes in their health, abundance and diversity will influence the health, abundance and diversity of the prevailing plant species. This is a mutual dependency as bees rely on a steady nectar source and pollen source throughout the year to build up their hive.

The State of California has required that almost all 282 nicotinyl pesticide products be immediately re-evaluated because of toxic concentrations in pollen and nectar, and high residual concentrations in soil. Unfortunately, the EPA is moving too slowly to take action to suspend nicotinyl pesticides.

Kevin Hansen and Krista Keenan have just released a new documentary film called Nicotine Bees, on these catastrophic die-offs of the honeybee. They filmed across the US, in Germany, in Canada, and in India. To Kevin Hansen, neonicotinoids are implicated as the most important factor in the bee die-offs. He thinks the situation is grave, worsening, and has very direct explanations - contrary to earlier reports.

The Sierra Club is urging the American public to view Nicotine Bees. They suggest showing the 45-minute film at organizational meetings, home parties, classrooms and community events. To purchase the video or request a screening, see http://nicotinebees.com/.

After viewing this documentary, you are invited to add your voice to demands to protect our pollinators. Contact EPA's Steve Owens at <owens.steve@epa.gov> or call him at 1-202-564-2902 to request a suspension of the neonicotinoid seed coatings until independent scientists verify safety.

Another documentary film, The Vanishing of the Bees, warns that if our favourite foods and flowers such as broccoli, cherries, onions, melons, cucumbers and sunflowers do not get pollinated, our diets will consist of lots of rice, wheat and corn, which happen to be the main crops that the chemical giants have huge financial stakes in. It can be no coincidence that the commercial beekeepers who isolated their hives from the crops being sprayed with chemicals have reported no bee losses. Similarly, the organic and biodynamic beekeepers who work on diversified systems of food production and improving the immune systems of their bees have not suffered significant losses in their hives.

Beekeepers have been meeting with representatives of pesticide companies in an effort to re-focus how new pesticides are tested for harm to honeybees. Registration requirements for most new chemicals don’t require those tests to determine the long term effects of pesticides that adults eat or store to feed to their young later. It’s already known that some of the newer nicotine pesticides are deadly to adult bees if sprayed directly, and now it is suspected that, when taken back to the hive and stored in nectar and pollen, they are causing problems later.

Beekeeper Kim Flottum notes “… honey bees that pollinated, flew by, or even thought about crops sprayed with the new systemic nicotine pesticides did worse than honey bees that did not come in contact, fly by or even think about them. At first it seemed to be mostly eastern bees that were having this trouble, but when beekeepers actually looked, it is obvious that bees and nicotine don’t mix anywhere on the map. Nicotine Bees is pretty damning in its presentation and accusations, but it’s probably not the whole story yet. Still, it is becoming increasingly clear that these chemicals, either by themselves or as a contributing factor, are causing all sorts of hell for honey bees everywhere they are. And you can be pretty well assured that if honey bees are at risk, so are all the rest of the pollinators out there. All of them.”

David Hackenberg, former president of the American Beekeeping Federation, has been urging the U.S. regulatory agencies to suspend these seed treatments. "Look at what's time based. The massive bee decimation started when regulatory agencies rubber stamped the use of neonicotinoid spraying and coating," he said.

Honeybees have lived successfully on the planet for 20 million years before the arrival of humans up until this point in time. Bees are the ultimate selfless workers that have provided humanity with the miracle of honey; the full implications of its contribution to medicine are still emerging.

As individuals, we can help the honeybee. Apart from working to ban indiscriminate spraying of pesticides and promoting organic agriculture, we can plant native flowers, trees and shrubs that are bee-friendly in our gardens. We can learn about beekeeping and start hives going in our own backyards. We can grow, buy and eat food that supports local, organic and small-scale agricultural practices and producers. When we take care of the honeybee, we take care of ourselves.

Wild Places

2010-02-04T14:27:00.000-05:00

Every year as summer ebbs into the memory and fall is in full flow, it feels good to get a break from our civilized world. It is my time to recover flagging energies and truly connect with nature and the wild. In Temagami, after a long day’s paddle across large lakes and along narrow rivers, the reward is to discover an ideal island at which to set up camp. A waterfall roars off in the mid-distance, beyond the bend. The sun is going down as we gather wood for the evening’s campfire. Dusk is magic hour as our canoe draws us past ancient rockfaces. We bear mute witness to the spirits of the ages, their reflections dancing wistfully on the waters as night descends. These custodians of the canyon wrap us in fog as we glide along the waterline, transients, water-boatmen on the silky surface, a liquid bond straddling the twilit heavens and the dark untapped depths beneath our paddles.
We have been guided in to this old-growth sanctuary by ravens, and now loons announce their welcome. At this season of change marked by the onset of cold nights, the odd shower or flurry, gusty winds and the continued shedding of foliage, there are likely no other humans in our midst, but deer and bear, beavers, fish, frogs, ducks and birds are around. To share time and space with them is to feel a definite spritual connection to the wild and to those who have trodden these paths, paddled these waters before us. At dawn a cluster of pines stands sentinel over the misted lake. A stroll reveals the island to us. Pink rocks are partly cloaked in moss and lichens, partly bare but drenched in early morning moisture. The sun suddenly pierces through the trees across the lake. The ground between the towering white pines and clumps of birch is soft with decomposing matter.
I try to make nature part of my every day but there is no substitute for raw exposure to the wilds and the elements. Temagami transports us into a magical realm where the cycle of life and the vision of death are seen stark and true. Seeds germinate, struggle for survival; plants live long, age gracefully, and finally return to the earth, embraced by the living forest floor which nurtures the cradling soil for a successor seed blowing in on the wind. Plants, wildlife and weather perform an absorbing, never-ending play, in which we are incidental participants rather than masters. We soak up the charged energy; nature challenges us and rewards us with fleeting epiphanies and visions of great beauty.
Native peoples endured the extended cold of long winters out here in the woods because they embraced nature, respected it, and gave thanks to it. They were part of it, and it became them. The blowing snows, the numbing cold, the evolving climate are a reminder how intimately connected we all are to the Earth, and how we meddle with it at our peril. As a ‘civilization’, we are accelerating the extinction of species; toxins in the air, water and soils; an altered climate; irresponsible resource exploitation; unfettered corporate greed.
We should be preserving every wild place, setting them aside for future generations. Our wide-eyed wonder is the key to our souls, and our intimacy with nature in the wild enables us to affirm all life. After all, “Once wonder has been chased from our thinking about the land, then we are lost ” (Robert Macfarlane – The Wild Places).