In no way will we be able to break the hold of corporations until we all ALL growing food and performing useful trades.
I know it goes without saying, but this year you should be growing your own food. Hey, if you've got the time you should be growing food for others. If you haven't got any space, ask someone who does. You might just get what you need. Grow staples like potatoes, edible leaves, onions mushrooms and carrots. Grow carbohydrates, protein, vitamins and minerals.
You'll be surprised how easily plants grow outdoors. Trust that it can happen, mother Earth needs very little help to provide sustenance. If you are wary about certain plants, grow them indoors. Grow medicinal herbs, and learn to keep your community healthy.
There are many other things you can do. Refine clayish soil and make crockery (in many places in the UK you can use clay right out the ground. It's an untapped resource), do up unwanted clothes into things you want to wear, learn glass-blowing or woodturning. Offer your services as a repairman, or make ovens and CD racks from waste metal. Build generators from bikes and alternators, or turbines from guttering. Pick wild fruits, and make jams and chutneys. Distribute your services for free, if you can, to other helpful people (if you can).
Whatever you do will have a two-fold purpose; not only will you be enriching your local social structure, but you will be presenting an alternative culture that many people do not get to see.
You'll be surprised how easily plants grow outdoors. Trust that it can happen, mother Earth needs very little help to provide sustenance. If you are wary about certain plants, grow them indoors. Grow medicinal herbs, and learn to keep your community healthy.
There are many other things you can do. Refine clayish soil and make crockery (in many places in the UK you can use clay right out the ground. It's an untapped resource), do up unwanted clothes into things you want to wear, learn glass-blowing or woodturning. Offer your services as a repairman, or make ovens and CD racks from waste metal. Build generators from bikes and alternators, or turbines from guttering. Pick wild fruits, and make jams and chutneys. Distribute your services for free, if you can, to other helpful people (if you can).
Whatever you do will have a two-fold purpose; not only will you be enriching your local social structure, but you will be presenting an alternative culture that many people do not get to see.
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Comments
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Useful?
20.02.2008 15:26
DW
waste of resources
20.02.2008 16:18
thoughts
social change
20.02.2008 17:26
not lifestyle change
to Thoughts
20.02.2008 17:29
minty
Inefficiency!?
20.02.2008 17:44
DW
No, but seriously, social change not lifestyle change
20.02.2008 21:28
This is not enough
water usage in alotments ...
20.02.2008 21:41
thoughts
Allotments
21.02.2008 03:24
You mean industrial farming. Water isn't scarce in the UK. Contact with the land is healing, at least when there aren't any of the pesticides/ nerve poisons that 'professional farmers' use. Eating fresh fruit and vegetables is beneficial. Knowing how to grow food should be a basic skill imparted to infants. That is not a 'life-styler' issue. Being able to feed yourself is liberating both emotionally and socially. We've got a big country. Every unlanded person should be offered their own allotment free of charge, even if that means seizing land from the gentry.
'Professional' famring is 100% reliant on fertilser that is produced from finite, unustainable fossil fuels. Our western demand for fuel is spiralling food prices and contributing to both global warming and mass-extinction partly thanks to biofuels.
dp
Homepage:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html
don't just fight the system. first, stop supporting it
21.02.2008 14:45
Thoreau said it best:
"It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous, wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too."
- Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
emigre
Mass Movements...
21.02.2008 15:24
Personally, all those who don't list a name I view as a troll:
If you have a point to defend, feel proud of it. Or else, everyone will ignore you and you are wasting your energy defending it.
Yarrow
e-mail:
yarrow@mail.com