Seeds
Ideas that need to be grown …
Eat Local Grown
Check out the Eat Local Grown website here. We encourage New Zealand growers, co-ops and markets to post a listing there – it’s free. Yes, there are already New Zealand wide farmers’ market websites … Famersmarket.org.nz; fmnzmembers.org.nz … and several regionally oriented ones, but at EatLocalGrown small growers from around the world can list themselves for free — as long as they have an address for sales and an email contact. If you on Facebook or Twitter you can enrol these into your listing too.
Global Agrarian Reform
Since colonial times farming in New Zealand has been capital-led and export-focused – most farmers being intent on taking a middle-class living off the land through ‘conventional’ practices. Unlike older countries like Europe, Japan and Africa we do not have our cultural roots in a family/ village-based farming tradition of pre-oil practices. So it is easy to brush aside those struggles of peasants from the other side of the world as distant, irrelevant and backward to the ‘modern’ perspectives of the NZ farmer scene.
But a word of warning to the wise …
Order from Chaos
For humanity to have any sustainable future will require a deliberated change in global direction. The Food sovereignty model of food production is recognised as a self-integrating, bottom-to-top agrarian solution to the global food/land/peak-oil sustainability crises. Of all the agrarian models on the table it alone matches the self-organising, multi-layered systems which occur naturally within the patterns of the ecosphere. Does this best-case solution provide mankind with a model for universal change … ?
Changing the World
Ever get asked, ‘why do you want to change the world?’
Appropriate answers, and there are many which might be obvious to you, never seem to convince the badgering questioner. For me the most sensible reply became apparent only once I got to know my questioners better – “Because I have understood my own suffering.” It points the challenger towards their own misconceptions, away from yours.
Do banks lose money because of inflation?
And could they do something about it if it were true?
There is a lot that could be discussed around the uninspected assumption that value and dollars are intrinsically equivalent. For example people assume that inflation is about prices going up, while avoiding the more obvious reality that it’s the value of money going down, whilst the value of actual goods remains consistent.
This article is about how banks get an extra bonus: value that escapes the accounting process, that no one else can get, but everyone else pays for.
The Simplicity Collective
A grassroots ‘network of imaginations’ dedicated to creatively exploring, promoting, and celebrating a materially simple but inwardly rich life
There is a paradox at the heart of ’the simple life’ and that is that it is not very simple, in the sense of being easy. Indeed, living a simpler life of reduced consumption in the midst of a consumer society is a great challenge – everything conspires against you. This is not to suggest that living simply is impossible in a consumer culture, but the Simplicity Collective does accept that living simply demands a fundamentally creative engagement with life. The world is increasingly structured to encourage ever-higher levels of consumption.
