Community solutions for food security and urban health, Part 2.0: The global food crisis
It figures it’s been a month and a half since I wrote Part 1 and said it would be “a couple weeks.” I have a legitimate excuse, however: the topic on which I desperately wanted to write was (is!) getting bigger and bigger as news stories and blog posts flooded the papers and internet on the topic. An overwhelming amount of information to sort through, half of it’s out of date by now and much of it I haven’t yet read.
My blogging has been sparse at best lately, and this behemoth of a topic isn’t helping. Of course I’d also like to write about everything! But whilst I muster up the energy/time to do this, here are my key points:
– global food crisis overview
– modern agriculture… permaculture… what our monoculture system + pesticide/herbicide use did to our natural systems: reducing yield, damaging and polluting the earth, losing diversity, bringing in GMO which is proven to harm humans
– hoarding: it’s human nature
– food wastage (also see BBC article)
– oil: peak oil, pesticides, the benefits of local eating
– community and personal gardening
– developers get (potentially large) tax credit by turning land into “public land” while waiting for a project to get underway, then can install a community garden, makes them look socially responsible
PHEW!
Well, now that I’ve got a few hours of my life per week back from the brain-sucking, life-wasting machine called the Television (I watch mostly intelligent programming, but it’s TV nonetheless), I should have few excuses not to sit down and churn this out. Unless, of course, I get distracted by Stephen Rees’s blog.
And now it’s time for bed, but I will leave you with this tidbit and links, and inform you that I’m still alive!
