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Watch your land carefully, folks in countries with room to grow. The wealthy want your soil. “Food security will dwarf climate change as the world’s most pressing issue in the next few decades, and New Zealand may have seen the first signs of rich or powerful nations trying to secure food supplies for their people.” NZ feels push to feed global population – Business – NZ Herald News.
The U.K. government plans to launch a “grow your own” revolution by encouraging people to set up temporary allotments or community gardens on land awaiting development or other permanent use. via Grow your own food revolution plans to seed unused land | UK news | guardian.co.uk.
It’s called The Miracle Tree. It’s about a tree that might make wishes come true. And also about reality, race, politics, ecology, trees, love, redemption, spirituality, hope and miracles. It’s supposed to be funny. Buy the eco-friendly, plant-saving, guilt-assuaging, electronic version here. Offered at the low-low price of $5, for which you get your choice of seven digital formats (no DRM) to be used on your new Kindle and/or home computer and/or Ipod or whatever. A tree-killing print version will be available in a few weeks for $20. Listen to a Miracle Tree Author Interview I did with Robert Ouimet of Brainpicker, a cool site of ideas that “won’t hurt a bit.”
Not so with award-winning American journalist Amy Goodman. She not only got stopped on the way up to give a public speech in Vancouver. She was questioned for an hour and half about…her speech. The border guards, to her amazement, were not interested in her opinions on the economic meltdown, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They wanted to know what she intended to say about the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Is this what the Vancouver Olympics are going to be remembered for? We know we’re going to spend $1 billion on security, not just to keep terrorists from blowing things up but apparently also to crush the idea of free speech and eliminate the prospect of political dissent. I wonder how many gold medals it would take to get the bad taste of that out of our systems? Here’s her report on the fabulous Democracy Now! show. Of all the smoke-churning, oil-sloshing, toxin-weaving, carbon-spewing, lie-mongering nations of the world, which one is the most despicable? Read it and weep, Canadians. We’re a menace.
I thought it might be cool to be able to drop into conversations at cocktail parties that I was the new opera critic for The Tyee. Then I remembered that I don’t go to parties. Too late, though, I’d already landed this gig. It starts with this: 10 (Bad) Reasons to Hate Opera.
The snappy term “agro-imperialism” doesn’t appear in Andrew Rice’s NYT Magazine piece on the rich buying the earth from under the feet of the poor. Although Rice does mention GRAIN, a dedicated non-profit supporting small farmers and social movements, his article leans heaviest on the side of the capitalist investor who simply wants to “help people” by appropriating their land for factory farming.
Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism? – NYTimes.com.
The always entertaining Hastings Folk Garden (a VCAN pilot project) gets the journo-job in this article from the Vancouver Province. It’s often a double-edged sword having something you know written up in a daily: nice to get the recognition, but dismaying to know how much they miss. All the same, it’s worth reading, and the pic of James the gentleman is cool. What will your city do when bike commuting gets so popular there’s no more space to park them at transit stations? Check out this fun video from Japan showing a robotic parking facility. The monthly fee of 1,800 yen equals about $21 Cdn. Video: The bike tree – the 21st-century cycle shed | Environment | guardian.co.uk. Ten years from now, if your kids ask: “What did you do in the war against global climate weirdness?” You can point them back to events like this: Tomorrow (Saturday Oct 24) is going to bring people all over the world out to say the same thing to the politicians about to meet in Copenhagen over the climate crisis: act now. Here’s a link to the Vancouver version, which will stop traffic over Cambie Bridge starting at noon. Hope your city comes out in droves too. Bridge to a Cool Planet – Home. |
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Copyright © 2010 David Tracey
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Sometimes the headline writer gets it more than the journalist.
