Paul Hawken gave a keynote address in Seattle last month at the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum. I recommend you take 50 minutes and watch it all. I’ve seen nothing like it for a usable perspective on the challenge and the opportunity facing us.
Hawken gives the state of play of our global footprint as humans, and a view of how rapidly we’re using up the legacy sunlight easily available to us as fossil fuels. From this he outlines the steps we’ll need to take to replace these fuels with real-time solar – and nuclear – energy.
We need optimism to get through all the bad news about the way of the world. Worldchanging has an interview with Paul Hawken that reminds us of this very thing.
What I discovered was people, themselves. And really just the number, and the breath, and depth of the ingenuity and authenticity in which people really applied themselves to being problem solvers and alleviate suffering, to addressing the ills of the world, and innovating and re-imagining what was possible. And they are organizing around different ways and different issues around different cultures and different manners. And when you stand back and you really get to see, if you will, not visually, not directly, but see it in a conceptual way, how large and diverse this movement is, then you just have to either laugh, or grin or smile.
If you haven’t seen The Future of Food you can now watch the whole film at Hulu.com – it has a commercial every 15 minutes but otherwise it’s the best quality view online. The movie homesite is here.
The story tells of the Monsanto corporation in its incredibly ruthless drive to create a monopoly of seed and insecticide through genetic patents. Hear how framers in Canda were successfully sued for growing Monsanto’s genetically modified grain after the seed had blown into their fields. No word of trespass by the Monsanto seed, or how genetic modification is entering the food supply chain in this unregulated way.
How do we take back our imprinting and teach ourselves and our families to like wholesome food? What good practices do we repeat to make the change in taste?
Our friend Sara at the Down To Earth blog shares two of the key factors that help her family keep their taste for good foods. At the heart of it is the family garden where the kids play a role in bringing food to the table. And outside, good old Montessori school reinforces to Sara’s children that food is an event in life worth learning about. See what she says in her post here: Getting your children to ENJOY veggies and fruits
Dr. Alan Greene, the famous pediatrician, whose family eats nothing but natural food, has a great new blog post showing why we’re hooked on junk food. He calls for a delicious revolution back to natural food.
All living things, says Dr. Greene, get imprinted with their survival habits in their early stage of life: during gestation, at birth, and in their first set of life experiences after being born. And human babies today are getting imprinted with all the wrong messages.
A year ago at Farm Aid 2008 Dave Matthews gave a brilliant explanation – in 3 minutes – of what’s gone wrong with our food in America, and how to change it back.
What if bringing the efficiencies of modern corporate methods has poisoned the land and made the crops not worth eating? This model has failed, says Matthews, because it asks, how can we make as much “food” as we can, as cheaply as we can, regardless of what it tastes like, regardless of what it does to our children, regardless of how it destroys the land in the process.
Farm Aid has been doing invaluable work for over two decades to help the family farmer, and to raise awareness about the corporate takeover of the land. Let’s support the organization in every way we can.
What matters to all living beings is getting food they can live on. In America we’re failing at this endeavor. The food in our stores is becoming less and less worth eating every day. The answer is to restore the family farmer, and to reconnect with local food.
We are in a silent crisis in America because our food supply chain is being poisoned, and will ultimately be destroyed. What’s causing this is the action of corporate practices that exist only to strip every last dollar out of farming until the land is dead.
