...an alternative food culture is emerging. We now know that the industrial food system has been at least partly responsible for the deterioration of our rural communities. At the same time, there is a growing interest in moving back into rural areas and reconnecting with some aspects of that quality of life. As energy costs spiral upward, more urban dwellers may migrate to rural communities to produce some of their own food and enjoy the quality of life that comes from being more intimately connected with nature. Richard Heinberg calls this the “reruralization” of America, which he sees as the “dominant social trend of the twenty-first century.”

An Interview with Michael Shuman

The problem in the United States is not that we’re not producing enough food. It’s a problem of food access, and it’s a problem of food price. To me this represents the failure of the current industrial ag system. I think that what’s going to happen is that as oil prices rise, all commodities that are relatively heavy, with a relatively low unit value, we’re going to start producing for ourselves. That is the ultimate problem with the industrial commodity ag system right now, that this massive buying and selling at a national and a global level is just going to fall apart economically because foodstuffs don’t make sense to ship thousands of miles.

It doesn’t take high-level math to realize if we’re serious about averting the climate crisis, we need to add the food chain to our conversation. (Of course, we should be talking about agriculture’s impact on the environment for a host of other reasons, too. Agriculture is the world’s single largest user of land and water, using up 70 percent of the world’s freshwater resources every year. Agriculture is also responsible for widespread air and water pollution and agricultural chemical runoff that causes aquatic dead zones around the world. At last count, there are more than 400, including one in the Gulf of Mexico that swells every year to a size three times larger than the BP oil spill.

Over the next twenty years the US and the world will need to transition from an industrial agriculture model to one based on permaculture and more organic, labor intensive approaches to growing food. Oil is going to decline, meaning that diesel fuels to run tractors and combines will become increasingly costly. And natural gas, meaning fertilizers, will also go into decline. The era of agribusiness is coming to a close sooner than anybody might have imagined. And we are not prepared for what follows.

...EAT LOCAL! Week begins with publication of the Fall Edition of Boulder County’s EAT LOCAL! Resource Guide and Directory (30,000 copies to be distributed; online edition at www.EatLocalGuide.com), featuring the 10% Local Food Shift Challenge and Pledge, and continues for a full eight days of fun activities aimed at raising awareness about the benefits of eating locally: including food film screenings, restaurant specials, outstanding speakers, chef demonstrations, cooking classes, farm and garden tours, and potlucks.

At the moment we're spending about $700 million a year on food. From all that we can tell from the limited data that's available, less than 1% of that is being spent on food being grown in Boulder County. That's a tiny, tiny amount. So currently, our foodshed, which is kind of like a watershed, stretches across the globe. We're bringing in food from China, South America, Europe, and as the industrial agricultural system begins to fail, we have no choice but to shrink our foodshed to be much, much more local. And it looks like we don't have much time to do that...

The Transition movement in Colorado was the focus of an hour-long prime time PBS show in Denver on Aug. 18, in a program titled "Transition Cities" on the weekly Studio 12, featuring Transition Colorado co-founder Michael Brownlee, Dave Greenwald of Transition Louisville, Ann Cooper ("The Renegade Lunch Lady") of Boulder Valley School District, and Shannon Francis, Indigenous Permaculturist from Woodbine Ecology Center.

A federal district court judge revoked the government’s approval of genetically engineered sugar beets Friday, saying that the Agriculture Department had not adequately assessed the environmental consequences before approving them for commercial cultivation. The decision, by Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco, appears to effectively ban the planting of the genetically modified sugar beets, which make up about 95 percent of the crop, until the Agriculture Department prepares an environmental impact statement and approves the crop again, a process that might take a couple of years.

...Farming by hand can be a meditative occupation. If I allow it, my mind and body begin to synchronize with sun and earth time. Ordinarily, the wavelength of change in maturing plants is imperceptible to modern people raised on restlessness. In a garden, nothing discernable to human senses happens in an hour or a day, much less within our ever shrinking attention span. That’s a shame, because the amplitude of this slow moving, verdant wave—that is, its capacity to carry creative energy and information—is enormous, practically limitless.

WHY Hunger has released a brand new online film called “The Food and Climate Connection: From Heating the Planet to Healing It,” that highlights the impact of today’s global food system on the climate and how a community-based food movement around the world is bringing to life a way of farming and eating that’s better for our bodies and the planet. Featuring interviews with farmers, community leaders, and sustainability advocates, the film highlights how the industrial food system is among the greatest contributors to global warming and how sustainable farming practices can pose a powerful solution to the crisis.