“Composting and growing carrots is a nice start, but we need to get rid of the growth economy, make the global economic system work to meet needs, and replace capitalism with a different economic system that works for people. Most Green people are stuck at the level of compost heaps, which don’t have a chance of saving us. We don’t want to be a society full of compost heaps heading for disaster. Growing carrots locally is just the first step to changing the economy.”
Andrew’s comparison of the global consolidation of media with the global consolidation of food, gave me an idea! I’ve been applying the model of the local food movement to local objects. What about applying the model of the local food movement to recovering the media! Just as we’ve learned to buy direct from farmers, we need to figure out how to deliver our money directly to journalists. As food activists have innovated new economic institutions [...read the rest]
Alana has studied one of the many vibrant alternatives to this juggernaut, the movement for food sovereignty, conceived and led by La Vía Campesina. Vía Campesina is typical of contemporary social movements in its recognition of the common interests of first and third world farmers, smallholders and laborers, producers and consumers and in its recognition of the centrality of women, indigenous people and culture to forming truly liberatory alternatives.
Today my beloved MacBook Pro fried its logic board…Why is there so much consumer choice but not what I want?…But my real question is why aren’t companies somebody refurbishing the beautiful, solid old hardware chasses of these classic designs. Convert those BMWs and Mercedes to electric systems? Design lightweight guts for those beautiful PowerBooks and Communicators. If corporate design can’t match vintage classics, then innovative small companies should be designing custom kits to keep these beauties on the road.
As a budding Australian, I learned this week that right-wierdo Tony Abbott’s budget cuts are spurious. The agenda of the cuts is to eliminate the deficit, but it’s not a big deficit and it’s not particularly a problem. Having invented a problem, Abbott has cut “across the board”, implementing Australia’s first user fees for healthcare (including children’s immunizations!) and cuts to profitable investments in innovative enterprise. During the same week, I was lucky to attend [...read the rest]
The prison industrial complex is based on the insight that bodies can be made profitable without their consent. You just need the right regulatory framework. Governments come in handy for corporate schemes. Nutritionists’ longstanding warnings that processed food is unhealthy are beginning to materialize as public health crises. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Food announced this week that “unhealthy diets are now a greater threat to global health than tobacco.” The carcinogenic tendencies of agricultural [...read the rest]
Both vertical and horizontal integration being tedious, the new business model is getting out of the business of making things and into the business of control. So many people are already good at running little sweatshops and raising cattle, why bother? To capture the profit in the beef industry, you don’t need to actually raise animals. Indeed you don’t even need to sell them. The key is to seize control over killing and chopping up [...read the rest]
Ok people this is like knowing about your bank account. It’s time to learn. You need to keep track of lots of different usernames and passwords. This is an introduction to url, hosting, wordpress, and coding, so you know what’s what.
This is my second project for the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, with whom I’m just thrilled to be working. The piece is co-authored with Nick Rose, as a follow-up and expansion to a piece he wrote to introduce to Australians a policy instrument, the Local Food Act, which has been implemented recently in Ontario Canada. The original article was in The Conversation. Because of its popularity and attraction of a lively debate, we decided to provide more [...read the rest]
LAB lab A Lab for Interventions, Innovations, Iterations to facilitate: Local Food, Objects, and Quality of Life – Artisan Economics and Meaningful Work – Biospheric ecological technologies and institutions. As Robert Pekins of Food Connect said to me “Academics need to get right out of the way. What they’re good at is asking questions. We need fora with practitioners in the audience practitioners doing the speaking, and academics asking the questions.”
The first map is a graphic representation of my analysis of the US movement, and the other denotes the comparable elements existing in AU (to my very limited knowledge).
“People see eggs and they ask ‘are these barn raised or free range raised?’ ‘Are they organic or not?’ It baffles me that wine is not the same. Where did it come from? How was it grown? Is it organic? People should be interested in the process and provenance of wine, the same way they are with food.”
![About [high] fashion](http://web.archive.org./web/20140616011958im_/http://amorystarr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/vogue11-150x150.jpeg)
I’ve never written, or even articulated, anything about fashion before. But we just saw Mademoiselle C, which displays the eccentricity and waste of high fashion both honestly and sympathetically. And in the conversation afterward I found myself articulating a stronger, more coherent, and more pro-fashion viewpoint than I knew I had. Fashion serves four purposes Clothing Seduction Ritual/incarnation (choice of clothing to maximize your power in a given context) Expression I am concerned here with [...read the rest]
Australia’s state government of Victoria has pledged $25 million in subsidy to Coca-Cola/Amatil to keep the SPC/Ardona produce cannery open in Shepparton. The federal government refused to match the funds to meet Coca-Cola’s demands. But even if the factory stay open for another period, with the farmers dependent on short-term contracts from the factory, their farms are insecure and their future precarious. Without domestic production, Australians become dependent on imported produce and global market prices. Here [...read the rest]
Social change happens when new ideas and desires are incubated in open spaces of experimentation. Local Objects invite customers into a space of meaning beyond the artist’s identity, into a landscape of reverence for materials and craftsmanship. A movement for artisan objects can ignite desire to invest in lasting objects and relationships with makers. The digital internet version of the exhibit is here.