– will corporate allotments be more than briefly fashionable?

We hope they will. The New York Times says growing food at work is a real trend. And it’s one our editor called for in his own town just the other month.

Will it last though?  There are so many reasons for it not to: liability worries, managers facing pressures to keep employees at their desks, disillusionment when things don’t grow, bugs.

Read Full Post »

– reinventing neighborliness

We’re hearing a lot about the end of suburbia right now.  Take this item in yesterday’s New York Times.   It leads with ideas that jibe with the return of survivalism that we recently noted.

But, as Alison Arieff goes on to say in her Times piece, plenty of positive re-imaginings of the suburbs are appearing to counterbalance these dystopian visions.

We EarthQuakers are particularly interested reinventing neighborliness — and how supposedly isolating information technology enables new levels of real-world social interaction on street-by-street level.

The cul-de-sac Commune group that Arieff mentions is doing that, but so is the Vermont-based Front Porch Forum and the Bay Area’s Playborhood, among others.

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a fascinating article on Monday about urban foraging — where people pick the fruit from city-owned trees that would otherwise be left to rot.   It mentions the wonderful Village Harvest, whose volunteers pick unwanted fruit from homeowners’ yards and give it to local food banks.

As the Chronicle headline puts it, efforts like these help us imagine that we can change “the way we live and eat, one fig at a time.”

Read Full Post »

– time for an update

Lots to share all of a sudden:

Need a little perspective on ‘the new frugality‘?

Everyone has high hopes for Obama’s ‘green team.’

Also from the NY Times, a spotlight on a cult eco-novel that predicted the ‘locavore‘ movement — as well as the succession of the Pacific states from the Union!

Sign a petition to persuade President-elect Obama that we need a sustainable agricultural policy.

Read Full Post »

– 10 tips for a sustainable Thanksgiving

Something seasonal — from Sarah Newman at takepart, c/o alternet.

Read Full Post »

– let your cows free!

Another reason to drink organic milk: A British report finds that “milk from cows which graze outside on grass and clover contains more antioxidants and vitamins than that from conventional dairy farms,” the UK Independent tell us today.

Read Full Post »

– gardening, as well as eating, like we’re at war

The ‘Victory Garden’ idea is getting a lot of play these days.  We’ve already noticed appeals for us to ‘eat-like-there’s-a-war-on.’

Now the UK Independent is excited by the same idea — hooking its version of the story on a new exhibit, ‘Dig for Victory: War on Waste,‘ at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms.

Read Full Post »

– more of us are plowing up our lawns

“This year, 39 percent of people with backyards told the Garden Writers Association they planned to grow vegetables,” the Christian Science Monitor tells us.

Recent spikes in gas and food prices this spring are turning many in the USA to home-food production, it seems.

We welcome that, of course. We’ve been excited about the whole ‘eat your lawn’ trend for a while now.

The struggles we’re having with our own EarthQuaker garden (much of the plum tree just collapsed thanks to heat and too many plums), also have us looking forward to the renewed appreciation all this home farming should bring the people who do it professionally.

Read Full Post »

– obese people worsen global warming!

It stands to reason that larger people eat more than smaller ones, which means that it takes more agricultural production — a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions — to feed them, too.

Basic physics also tells us that it takes more energy to move larger people around in planes, trains or automobiles. And unless that transport is driven by sustainably-sourced power, it makes sense that the bigger people are, the bigger (on average) are their contributions to transportation-derived climate change.

That thesis is codified in this week’s edition of the medical journal, the Lancet, by a team from the London School Hygiene & Tropical Medicine which finds that global obesity is a contributing factor to global warming.

“The researchers pegged 40 percent of the global population as obese,” reports Reuters. That’s a lot of extra food and fossil fuel being consumed that could be saved if people just had healthier body mass indices.

This statement of the somewhat obvious might have the unfortunate effect of contributing to prejudices against the obese, for whom achieving a healthy weight is often far more than a mere matter of will power.

But it might drive something positive, too, in the shape of further pressure upon us all to ask hard questions about why so many people make the kind of nutritional and lifestyle choices that result in their becoming obese. If this research helps further discredit the US subsidization of ‘junk’ calories that reside in products like high-fructose corn syrup, for example, we might be able to both help slow the warming of our planet and give its human citizens a healthier, and longer, life upon it.

Read Full Post »

– real urban farming

‘Urban farming’ can mean many things.  For some people it amounts to little more than growing herbs on their window sill — admirable, of course, but hardly what you could call a commercial enterprise.

Other urban growers, though, really are farming — in the sense of raising crops in volume that they then sell on to other city dwellers.

Here’s a recent profile of one such farm in Brooklyn, NY.  As journalist Tracie McMillan points out, the result is not only that environment gets beautified, residents gain a new source of fresh produce, and children get to see where their food comes from — people (often with very low incomes) are also making real money from these enterprises.  No wonder that after years of seeing agriculture and urban life as essentially incompatible, many cities are starting to look upon urban farming positively and developing policies to encourage it.

Read Full Post »

– contra organic food

It’s always worthwhile having one’s most deeply-held convictions challenged. That must have been the thinking behind the UK Independent’s decision to publish today an article arguing against organic food.

“The great organic myths: Why organic foods are an indulgence the world can’t afford,” is by ‘environmental expert’ Rob Johnston.

Among the ‘myths’ Johnston lists are that organic farming is good for the environment, that it is pesticide free and produces healthier food than conventional farming.

Judging from the general tenor of the many comments that the piece has already received, not too many Independent readers were persuaded by Dr. Johnston’s logic.

Read Full Post »