Tag Archives: urgent

This Time We Are the Asteroids

Friday evening at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe we heard Pulitzer Prize winning author Elizabeth Kolbert speak about her book, The Sixth Extinction. As expected, the realities she presented were super sobering. She named the five previous extinctions that have occurred on Earth, and their causes. Then she talked at length about the extinction currently well underway, an unprecedented biological annihilation that we human beings are wreaking upon our home planet. “This time,” Kolbert said, “we are the asteroids.”

CSA Farms as a Sober Response to Political & Climate Chaos

I’ve written this message often before, and I shall write it again. Community Farms (CSAs) are a sober and intelligent response to accelerating political and climate turbulence. Economic turbulence may follow. Time to act.

Regarding our overall situation as urgent, I’ve reported extensively about the ominously active factors bearing upon us all & the potentials of positive community action in collaboration with local farms. I’ve also recorded a ½-hour narrated slide show on these issues for Youtube (Awakening Community Intelligence) freely available to all for personal or community education.

Now at the start of February, we are just a few weeks away from national CSA Signup Day, Friday, February 24. It is a golden opportunity for existing CSA farms to expand the community that supports what they are doing: clean land, clean food, enhanced local food security.

CSA Signup Day is also a golden opportunity for communities – neighborhoods, workplaces, churches and temples, suburbs, and so forth – to get busy building community farms right now, by the hundreds of thousands. It takes time to get a community farm together, but they can make a big stabilizing difference.

In conjunction with CSA Signup Day, February 24 will be marked by the launch of a CSA Charter, which will set out the principles and practices that guide CSA farms in the USA and Canada. In my view, that’s a big step forward for evolving the community farm web in North America, in a time when big steps are immediately needed.

Global Food Crisis Expands – Project Censored

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Project Censored has identified the dramatic expansion of the global food crisis as one of the Top 25 ‘censored’ stories of 2011. The food crisis was ranked #4 on the list in terms of its importance and low degree of media coverage

For over 30 years, Project Censored has examined the coverage of news and information, define ‘modern censorship’ as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in mass media outlets. One way of manipulating reality is to ignore it. That is where Project Censored places its focus. And this year, one story given scant media attention is the global food crisis, something of critical importance to everyone.

“A new worldwide spike in agricultural commodity and food prices is generating both predictable and extraordinary fallouts,” Project Censored reports.

“Over the past year, food prices around the world shot sharply upward, surpassing the previous price surge in 2007-2008 to set a new record, as measured by UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization…

“…The search for causes once again leads to a conjuncture of flawed policies in trade, environment, finance and agriculture that is likely to produce more dangerous volatility in years to come.”

Of note, Reuters News Service just this week – December 15 -brought a facet of the story into focus when it reported that a growing number of families in the United States are struggling to put food on the table. Poverty is on the rise in America. Hunger is increasing greatly.

The land is calling loudly, urgently at home and all around the globe. Time to respond creatively and intelligently.

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