Binary thinking, collapse and food systems

A white light switch on a white wall. Photo by Isabella Fischer on Unsplash.

There’s a disturbing trend towards thinking of systemic collapse as being the inevitable and even necessary precursor to a more ideal future. It’s all coming down. Empires must fall. Only that way can we usher in better things. We must make good ruins, as Dougald Hine put it. Chris Smaje imagines cities emptying out in …

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All the small things

A very small door snail on a tree.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost;for want of a shoe the horse was lost;and for want of a horse the rider was lost,being overtaken and slain by the enemy,all for want of care about a horse-shoe nail. Traditional proverb Can you get repetitive strain injury from non-stop facepalming, or brain damage from …

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Farming the Flood

This needs more views. Excellent film produced by Nick Viney and Harrison Wood on management of water around Dartmoor and the Tamar Valley and the brilliant work of some progressively-minded farmers and landowners.

Blink and you’ll miss me in it.

Throwing away perfectly good milk

grayscale photography of three cows

Some UK social media users have been pouring milk down their sinks and toilets in protest at the trial of a new feed additive that claims to significantly reduce the emission of methane gas in dairy cows, reports BBC News. Since Arla announced that it was trialling Bovaer on 30 dairy farms, “social media users” …

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Week-ish notes 02/12/24

An open lined notebook with three pens placed diagonally across the pages. The pens are light blue, dark blue, and black, arranged from top to bottom on a white surface.

On the 23 September I went along to LandAlive, a regenerative farming and food conference for the South West. The second day was themed around food. Caroline Grindrod opened the plenary with a beautiful talk about our ‘story of separation’ – how our fear, driven by from separation from land and nature, drove us to …

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