Ya Basta!

via: Casaubon’s Book

After “Where should I live?” the next most frequently asked question I get is “How much land do I need?” And just like “Where should I live” is a deeply personal question, shaped as much by who you are, where your family is, what you do for a living, etc… as by any rules of thumb, the same thing is true of “how much land do I need.” That is, it depends on where the land is, what kind of land it is, how much rain you get, what you want to do with it. The one absolute truth is that with a few exceptions the answer is almost always “less than you think.”

Now when I went looking for land I did what a lot of people did - I wanted as much as I could afford. I got 27 acres, and in many ways, that’s far too much. Now don’t get me wrong - I’m delighted I have it. It gives me choices that other people don’t have. But I very quickly realized that 3 intensively managed acres could probably have done me nearly as well and that 1/2 acre could do an astounding amount. There have been times when the only part of this property we’ve used is about an acre of it.

Ok, so the first set of questions applies to you - let’s say you want some land to grow food on. What’s your situation? I’d suggest you ask yourself these questions. I won’t offer any real answers, just things to think about.

more

Yes! This is resistence! This is how we fight the global tyrants, the moneyed elite, the banking cartel! Barter! Trade organic produce, stop using fiat currency!

via: Money

Credit crunch pinched residents of one Norfolk village have been taking advantage of an inventive means to save the pennies without cutting back on nights out. Thanks to the resourcefulness of their local pub, ‘The Pigs’, they can now barter fresh produce in return for pints of beer.

The pub, in Edgefield near Holt, is one of the few to see business boom since the start of the credit crunch as it encourages locals to trade their home grown produce in return for alcohol.

The sign outside the pub reads: ‘If you grow, breed, shoot or steal anything that may look at home on our menu, then bring it in and let’s do a deal.’ True to their word they’ll negotiate on anything, agreeing a barter price based on the size, quantity and quality of the produce presented.

Green fingered residents have been trading fruit and vegetables for pub meals and drinks, while others have swapped freshly laid eggs and fish or meat they’ve caught themselves for a pint.

Pub manager and brain child of the popular scheme, Cloe Wasey, enthused “We find the home-grown stuff is often much better than what we can get from the suppliers. When we get the good stuff, and it gets on to the specials board, it’s brilliant.” Continue Reading »

via: CNN

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) — Larry Horsley loves that he doesn’t buy much gas, even though he drives his ‘95 Chevy S-10 back and forth to work each day.

Horsley, a self-described do-it-yourselfer, simply plugs his truck into an electric wall outlet in his Douglasville, Georgia, garage and charges it overnight, instead of buying gasoline refined from mostly imported oil.

“If I can keep a dollar from going overseas, I’ll spend two dollars,” he said. The whole conversion, including the truck, cost him about $12,000, which parts dealers say is about standard.

Another Atlanta-area tinkerer, David Kennington, converted his Honda Civic del Sol from gasoline to electric for a different reason: “I’m a raging greenie,” he said.

Both Horsley and Kennington are fed up. They’re among a growing number of Americans who are refusing to wait for big-car manufacturers to deliver mainstream electric vehicles, called EVs. Not only have they rebelled against the status quo by ripping out their gas-guzzling engines and replacing them with zero-emission electric motors, they say just about anyone can do it. Continue Reading »

I am no techno-utopian. These people who think technology will solve all our problems are fucking nuts and drive me crazy with their idealistic salivating over gadget-solutions to what are structural political-economic-mental issues. Nonetheless, there is a lot to be learned from intelligent thinking and non-traditional approaches to serious issues. This guy has some good ideas. Some great ideas. And that is why none of them will be implemented. The powers that be have no interest in de-centralized solutions to global problems, only solutions that consolidate control. Buckminster Fuller had hundreds of ideas that could have revolutionized the world and almost none of them were implemented because they were too good, and most dangerously, they were too liberating. We can though, take the ideas of idealistic engineers who are busy creating technical solutions to what are principally political problems, and implement their ideas ourselves. Local solutions, community planning, self sufficiency. No gains are ever made because of the benevolence of the powerful, all gains are earned, demanded, and taken by the people. The police state is looming but thoughtful revolutionaries can judo flip the Enemy’s goose step.

via: New York Times

by Susan Saulny

CAMPTON TOWNSHIP, Ill. — In an environmentally conscious tweak on the typical way of getting food to the table, growing numbers of people are skipping out on grocery stores and even farmers markets and instead going right to the source by buying shares of farms.

On one of the farms, here about 35 miles west of Chicago, Steve Trisko was weeding beets the other day and cutting back a shade tree so baby tomatoes could get sunlight. Mr. Trisko is a retired computer consultant who owns shares in the four-acre Erehwon Farm.

“We decided that it’s in our interest to have a small farm succeed, and have them be able to have a sustainable farm producing good food,” Mr. Trisko said.

Part of a loose but growing network mostly mobilized on the Internet, Erehwon is participating in what is known as community-supported agriculture. About 150 people have bought shares in Erehwon — in essence, hiring personal farmers and turning the old notion of sharecropping on its head.

Continue Reading »

via: Washington Post

Over four decades, Russell Means has led an insurrection, posed for Andy Warhol, aspired to be an assassin and been arguably the most influential public figure in fighting racism against the American Indian. Now, in his quest to start his own country, the road to success might run down Embassy Row.

By Bill Donahue Sunday, June 29, 2008; W08

The voice was booming and imperious as it came out of the bathroom, wafting over the blandly hip decor of the Dupont Circle hotel room. “If you excuse me a moment,” said Russell Means, “I’m going to braid my hair.”

I knew that Means was not talking about some quick twist-and-tie ponytail job, but rather the painstaking culmination of a resplendent costume. Means is 6-foot-1, with a powerful broad-boned physique. He is the actor who played the last Mohican in the 1992 film “The Last of the Mohicans,” and he is the onetime leader of the revolutionary American Indian Movement, or AIM. Arguably the most famous living Indian activist, he performs his role with panache. Already on this bright, cold morning in February, he was wearing dangling turquoise earrings, a crimson wool Navajo vest and black silver-tipped cowboy boots. His broad, truculent brow was creased with wear.

Means’s life has been something like a Johnny Cash song. He has done prison time for inciting a riot, and has been stabbed, accused of murder, hit by two bullets and divorced four times. Long ago, he was a fancy dance champion and a rodeo star. Even now, at age 68, he remains a forceful presence — a warrior. Continue Reading »

via: Financial Times

<

div id=”floating-target” class=”clearfix”>Mexico City, one of the world’s most populous and polluted metropolitan areas, is working on its own solution to the rapidly rising cost of food: grow your own.

Led by Marcelo Ebrard, the city’s leftwing mayor, the local governmenthas decided to expand a “backyard agriculture programme” launched last year to encourage the capital’s residents to use all available space to grow crops.

“We want to make people realise that they can use their gardens, yards and roof terraces to grow food,” says Adolfo López Villanueva, the programme’s director. “With the climate we have in Mexico City you can get between two and three harvests a year and that would help families keep costs down.”

Continue Reading »

via: CBS

“Buy local. Eat seasonal. Eat organic.” All now commonplace admonitions in the United States.

But while none of these slogans are household words in Cuba, 70 percent of the vegetables and herbs grown on the island today are organic and the urban gardens where they are raised are usually within walking distance of those who will consume them. So in one blow Cuba reduced the use of fossil fuels in the production and transportation of food. And they began doing this nearly 20 years ago. Continue Reading »

Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Climate change alarmists have never been apt to shy away from courting controversy with their dire forecasts of coming environmental apocalypse, but their latest “solution” takes the biscuit - they want to pollute the air with sulphur and cut down pristine beautiful old growth forests to stop global warming!

No you didn’t read that wrong - scientists really are proposing to obliterate majestic canopies of forest that are hundreds of years old while pumping the upper atmosphere full of an acid-rain causing pollutant, changing the very color of our serene blue skies, all in the name of saving the environment.

“Australian scientist Tim Flannery has proposed a radical solution to climate change which may change the colour of the sky,” reports The Age.

“Professor Flannery said climate change was happening so quickly that mankind might need to pump sulphur into the atmosphere to survive. The gas sulphur could be inserted into the earth’s stratosphere to keep out the sun’s rays and slow global warming, a process called global dimming.”

Flannery says the process of adding sulphur to jet fuel in aero planes needs to happen within 5 years, but admits, “The consequences of doing that are unknown.”

Oh yeah sure - makes perfect sense! We don’t know what the actual consequences will be but let’s just start dumping a compound that causes “substantial damage to the natural environment” into the atmosphere willy nilly in order to save the environment!

After all, New Scientist tells us that acid rain reduces global warming so why not accept a little environmental degradation in order to…..save the environment!

We can also look forward to enjoying the following goodies should Flannery’s proposal gain support, all of which are associated with exposure to sulphur.

<

p align=”left”>- Neurological effects and behavioral changes - Disturbance of blood circulation - Heart damage - Effects on eyes and eyesight - Reproductive failure - Damage to immune systems - Stomach and gastrointestinal disorder - Damage to liver and kidney functions - Hearing defects - Disturbance of the hormonal metabolism - Dermatological effects - Suffocation and lung embolism

As we reported last month, Government scientists have already been experimenting with the feasibility of bombarding the Earth’s upper atmosphere with microscopic glass particles to dampen the effects of “global warming,” despite warnings that the process could damage the ozone layer.

<

p align=”left”>

	Goodbye blue sky? Scientists propose mass spraying of sulphur despite admitting “the consequences are unknown”.

But that’s not enough. According to climate alarmists, to save the planet we also need to rip out its lungs - old growth forests.

<

p align=”left”>Since trees absorb carbon dioxide - that evil gas that we breathe - but then begin to give it off as they age, why not just cut down all the trees and turn the planet into one big landfill? That’s effectively what atmospheric scientist Ning Zeng recently told New Scientist magazine, urging the process of “thinning forests and burying “excess wood” in a manner in which its didn’t decay could sequester enough carbon to offset all of our fossil-fuel emissions.” Continue Reading »