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The Future is Rural: Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification

March 1, 2019

The Future is Rural: Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification

The Future is Rural challenges the conventional wisdom about the future of food in our modern, globalized world. It is a much-needed reality check that explains why certain trends we take for granted–like the decline of rural areas and the dependence of farming and the food system on fossil fuels–are historical anomalies that will reverse over the coming decades. Renewable sources of energy must replace fossil fuels, but they will not power economies at the same scale as today. Priorities will profoundly shift, and food will become a central concern. Lessons learned from resilience science and alternatives to industrial agriculture provide a foundation for people to transition to more rural and locally focused lives.

Jason Bradford, a biologist and farmer, offers a deeply researched report on the future of food that reveals key blind spots in conventional wisdom on energy, technology, and demographics. The Future Is Rural presents Bradford’s analysis from his career in ecology and agriculture, as well as a synthesis of the historical and scientific underpinnings of the astonishing changes that will transform the food system and society as a whole.

Is “resilience” the new sustainababble?

January 18, 2015

Is “resilience” the new sustainababble? | Grist.

Suddenly, “resilience” is everywhere. It’s the subject of serious books and breezy news articles, of high-minded initiatives and of many, many conferences. After Superstorm Sandy, it was triumphantly plastered on city buses, declaring New Jersey “A State of Resilience.”

What’s going on? Does all this talk about resilience mean that we’ve basically given up on averting climate change and other environmental catastrophes — and that our only hope is to roll with the punches? Have we leapfrogged over denial, anger, and bargaining, landing squarely in acceptance?

Not necessarily. Resilience, like sustainability before it, is an idea with potentially transformative power. Resilience is all about our capacity to survive and thrive in the face of disruptions of all kinds. If we were to take resilience seriously (highly recommended in our increasingly disruption-prone world), we would make some far-reaching changes in how we live.

A truly resilient city would look very different from those we now inhabit — in ways that would make Grist readers proud. For example, our resilient city would:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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