FRESH celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system. Among several main characters, FRESH features urban farmer and activist, Will Allen, a 2008 MacArthur’s “Genius Award” fellow; sustainable farmer and entrepreneur, Joel Salatin, made famous by Michael Pollan’s book, the Omnivore’s Dilemma; and supermarket owner, David Ball, who is creating a new market model for our family farmers. FRESH’s focus on these inspiring individuals and their initiatives around the US provides the audience with actionable solutions. FRESH is a call to action.

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Environmental activist network argues that the oil industry might be approaching a tipping point from fall in the price, advances in technology and policies on climate change
David Teather guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 July 2009

A long-term decline in the demand for oil could undermine the huge investments in Canadian tar sands, which have been heavily opposed by environmentalists, according to a report published today.

The report, by Greenpeace, will make uncomfortable reading for the companies that are investing tens of billions of pounds to exploit the hard-to-extract oil in the belief that demand and the price would climb inexorably as countries such as China and India industrialise.

Citing projections from the oil producers' cartel Opec and the International Energy Agency, as well as various oil experts, the report casts doubt on the conventional assumption that consumption and prices will begin gathering pace once the world pulls itself out of recession.

It argues that alongside the cyclical fall in the oil price there are more fundamental structural changes taking place. These are driven by advances in energy efficiency and alternative energy, cleaner vehicles, government policies on climate change and concerns over energy security. Greenpeace has posted the report to 200 shareholders in Shell and BP, including pension funds, in an effort to put pressure on the companies to think again. BP reports quarterly results tomorrow and Shell on Thursday.

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'Government Efficiency, The Case For Local Control' is a new report from the Association of Towns of the State of New York that rejects the case made by the New York State Commission on Local Government Efficiency and Competitiveness for consolidation of government services. The Association of Towns argues the best government is often the smallest government unit and that there are efficiencies to small government. [introduction to report from http://www.syracuse2020.org]

Read the Report

June 16 Community Water Forum invites citizen input on cutting-edge law

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 05, 2009

CONTACT:
Ami Marcus, 530.918.9444, for more information about the ordinance and community forum.

Shannon Biggs, Global Exchange, 415.575.5540, for information on rights-based ordinances

(Mt. Shasta, CA)— Local concern has been growing about corporate control of local water though groundwater withdrawl and chemical weather manipulation more commonly known as cloud seeding. Following a series of well attended public events, a group of concerned Mount Shasta residents began to examine strategies to ensure that local residents — not corporations — make the policy decisions around local water resources.

The result is a cutting-edge draft ordinance that would assert the rights of the community to protect water systems by prohibiting cloud seeding and resultant chemical trespass, banning corporate extraction and export, and increasing citizen participation in the decision making process for the Mt. Shasta headwaters.

Full article

By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY

ROCHESTER, Wash. — Joseph Gabiou walks the fields of Wobbly Cart Farm with a practiced eye. He kicks dirt into place to keep the wind from blowing the protective covering off a row of organic broccoli. The seedlings are vulnerable to the flea beetles that came in the spring, just as longtime farmers in this valley told him they would.

To a new farmer, that's crucial information. The farm, started five years ago, is young. But so is the 33-year-old Gabiou at a time when the average age of the American farmer is 57, according to the Department of Agriculture. The 2007 agriculture census found that more than one-quarter of all farmers are 65 or older.

Wobbly Cart is also tiny, just 6 acres. Nationwide, the average farm is 449 acres.

But Gabiou and business partner Asha McElfresh, 32, differ from typical farmers in another way. Wobbly Cart, say agriculture specialists, is part of a movement in which young people — most of whom come from cities and suburbs — are taking up what may be the world's oldest profession: organic farming

"I'm seeing an enthusiastic group of young people all across the country who want to get into farming," says Fred Kirschenmann, a longtime farmer and fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University in Ames.

Full article

Recording of Wendell Berry's statement at recent USDA NAIS Listening Session held in Kentucky.

Testimony of Wendell Berry at Kentucky NAIS “Listening Session”
May 22, 2009

The need to trace animals was made by the confined animal industry – which are, essentially, disease breeding operations. The health issue was invented right there. The remedy is to put animals back on pasture, where they belong. The USDA is scapegoating the small producers to distract attention from the real cause of the trouble. Presumably these animal factories are, in a too familiar phrase, “too big to fail”.

This is the first agricultural meeting I’ve ever been to in my life that was attended by the police. I asked one of them why he was there and he said: “Rural Kentucky”. So thank you for your vote of confidence in the people you are supposed to be representing. (applause) I think the rural people of Kentucky are as civilized as anybody else.

But the police are here prematurely. If you impose this program on the small farmers, who are already overburdened, you’re going to have to send the police for me. I’m 75 years old. I’ve about completed my responsibilities to my family. I’ll lose very little in going to jail in opposition to your program – and I’ll have to do it. Because I will be, in every way that I can conceive of, a non-cooperator.

I understand the principles of civil disobedience, from Henry Thoreau to Martin Luther King. And I’m willing to go to jail to defend the young people who, I hope, will still have a possibility of becoming farmers on a small scale in this supposedly free country. Thanks you very much. (applause, cheers)

Listen to Wendell Berry's Comments

For more information on this and other threats to local food/small farms visit the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund.

Intentional Communities Website: provides information on the intentional communities movement including a searchable Communities Directory and hundreds of articles on community. Published by the FIC

Vauban hopes to forge a model community without that great staple of modern life – the car. Now the sound of birdsong has replaced the roar of traffic and children can play in the street

By Tony Paterson

Friday, 26 June 2009

The Germans may have given the world the Audi and the autobahn, but they have banished everything with four wheels and an engine from the streets of Vauban – a model brave new world of a community in the country's south-west, next to the borders with Switzerland and France.

In Vauban, a suburb of the university town of Freiburg, luxuriant beds of brilliant flowers replace what would normally be parking outside its neat, middle- class homes. Instead of the roar of traffic, the residents listen to birdsong, children playing and the occasional jingle of a bicycle bell.

"If you want to have a car here, you have to pay about €20,000 for a space in one of our garages on the outskirts of the district," says Andreas Delleske one of the founders and now a promoter of the Vauban project, "but about 57 per cent of the residents sold a car to enjoy the privilege of living here." As a result, most residents travel by bike or use the ultra-efficient tram service that connects the suburb with the centre of Freiburg, 15 minutes away. If they want a car to go on holiday or to shift things, they hire one or join one of the town's car-sharing schemes.

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Composting commode is first to gain official stamp.

by Asher Price

It took more than four years of negotiations and construction, but this month an Austin Water Utility inspector gave final clearance to a glorified outhouse that is on the vanguard of down-and-dirty environmentalism.

Known as a composting toilet, the East Austin commode relies on the alchemy wrought by bacteria to transform human waste into a rich trove of soil. Specialists in so-called humanure have hailed the approval of the toilet as a watershed moment for common-sense environmentalism.

Who Will Control It: the Corporations or the Public?

By ERNEST CALLENBACH and HARVEY WASSERMAN

This free-ranging conversation between Ernest Callenbach, author of the legendary Ecotopia (1974), and Harvey Wasserman, author of SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030 (2007), about our green-powered future was filmed by EON and can be viewed here. The transcript can be read here.