related news:

At this year's Soil Association conference I was chatting with Mike Small of the Fife Diet in Scotland. He told a story about how a film crew from Sky News came up to Fife to do a news story about their work. While they were filming, Mike chatted to the director and asked him what was the angle on the story. "Well", said the director, "it's about a community eating local food". "Amazing to think that that's now seen as news!" said Mike. Of course, now such a thing is news, so bizarrely distorted has our food system (and our media, but that's another story) become. Unfortunately the sprawling monster that actually now feeds most of us isn't news, but only because it is so well hidden, something that the excellent new film "Food Inc" tries to change.

When a friend told me of two of the proposed discussion topics for a major agricultural conference--"What is so radical about radical agriculture?" and "Is small the only beautiful?"--I told him that that I thought both questions had the same answer. Let me see if I can explain.

Back in October, I participated in the 2^nd International Biophysical Economics Conference at SUNY-ESF in Syracuse, New York. Charlie Hall had written to me, inviting me to come and give a talk. Specifically, he wanted me to go back to my post from January 2008 called Peak Oil and the Financial Markets: A Forecast for 2008 and explain why my forecasts had turned out pretty close to correct, while many others widely missed the mark. The title he suggested for the talk was Delusions of Finance.

None of [the major papers] thought that the IPCC's statement that the Himalayan glaciers would likely melt by 2035 was in itself worth mentioning, let alone basing a story around. So how much effort should the same papers spend reporting on the withdrawal of this claim? That depends on whether you think melting glaciers, or scientific misstatements about melting glaciers, are the bigger threat to humanity.

-Defusing the Methane Greenhouse Time Bomb
-Think-tanks take oil money and use it to fund climate deniers
-China: Prince of Denmark
-Loss Of Species Hits Economy

-A High School For Green Teens
-Climate change and the West
-DIY Life: Urban Homesteaders at Kitchen Table Talks

-The population crash
-Getting connected: Europe's green energy 'supergrid'
-Pro-Moscow Yanukovych 'to win Ukraine election'

-What’s Missing from the New Clean Energy Agenda?
-Soaring cost of healthcare sets a record
-America Is Not Yet Lost
-Seven States of Energy Debt

-Fears of 'Lehman-style' tsunami as crisis hits Spain and Portugal
-G7 tries to ease fears over Greek contagion
-Europe On The Brink