published August 31, 2010 and has No Comments
All Images: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) have released a follow up document to their 2005 publication, Setting Up and Running a School Garden. The newer manual is a School Garden Teaching Toolkit, comprising a bunch of step-by-step lessons to "engage learners actively and encourage them to observe and experiment." ...
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published August 30, 2010 and has No Comments
photo: Forest Peoples Programme Take this one as reinforcement of what plenty of environmental NGOs have been saying for some time: The commercial palm oil industry in Indonesia and Malaysia is trampling the rights of indigenous people and destroying rainforests as it rapidly expands. A new report from the Forest Peoples Programme details the damage.... Read the full story ...
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published August 30, 2010 and has No Comments
Image credit: OrganicNation I've been thinking a lot about scale recently. "Small is Beautiful" has long been a rallying cry of the green movement—and yet in light of the massive challenges we face, I'm thinking we shouldn't turn our backs on "big" either. It's true, my post on more sustainable industrial monoculture was met with derision from some, and ...
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published August 30, 2010 and has No Comments
Image credit: OnEarth Magazine When I wrote about the NRDC's new Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops, and asked whether industrial monoculture was the real path to sustainable farming , the response from many of our readers was unsurprisingly lackluster. "Lipstick on a pig", said Bert Harvey. "A misguided attempt at prolonging a faulty paradigm," said John. So I'm unlikely ...
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published August 28, 2010 and has No Comments
photo via flickr There's rising awareness about the hard place that the mighty bluefin tuna are in, but some people just haven't gotten the message. Take Sinju Restaurant, in Portland's Pearl District, which still has bluefin on the menu even though many environmental groups, including EDF and Seafood Watch , say to leave it off because the bluefin is ...
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published August 26, 2010 and has No Comments
Image credit: The Association to Preserve the Earth, via Japan for Sustainability Harris Teeter may be stretching the concept of local food more than most, and industrial agriculture may be making efforts to go green , but with the 100 Mile Diet still going strong as a cultural phenomenon, the idea of labeling... Read the full story on TreeHugger ...
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published August 25, 2010 and has No Comments
Image credit: Amanda Friedman/ OnEarth Magazine Some have been wondering whether Obama is really on the side of sustainable farming or industrial agriculture . Others, however, are busy wondering whether industrial agriculture really is sustainable farming after all. In a provocative OnEarth Magazine piece written for the NRDC, one reporter argues that large-scale monoculture must be part of the ...
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published August 24, 2010 and has No Comments
Richard Heinberg is going to have to write a volume two for his book Peak Everything, because things keep getting added to the list that ranges now from petroleum to rock music to olive oil. Now we have two more to add to the list: Helium and Paint.... Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Peak Helium: Get Ready ...
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published August 24, 2010 and has No Comments
Image credit: Kanu Hawaii /Creative Commons Aquaponics usually stirs up a good deal of interest and debate here. From the awesome urban aquaponics of Growing Power to industrial-scale aquaponics operations , plenty of people believe in the idea of recycling fish poop into plant food in an efficient semi-closed-loop system. And yet questions remain—I've asked before whether
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published August 24, 2010 and has No Comments
All photos: Reuseit.com Three years ago we ran a piece on ReusableBags.com and their cloth shopping tote bag. In a world rife with product churn (out with the old, in with the new) it's pleasing to see they still offer the exact same bag for hauling your groceries without need of plastic or paper carry bags. What has changed, ...
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