PowerSwitch

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... mentpage=2

CAP reform is the crux of it.

Gota love 'lake Cameron'.

Good that someone's had the courage to say this.

You can't really blame those affected by the flooding for being angry. At the end of the day, all roads point back to leadership, both in the short and longer terms. And what we have here is a triumph of politics over leadership.

Sometimes what people want (e.g. cheap food, £1 lasagnas) is not what's best for them, and what's good for an individual is not what's good for a community as a whole. That's where leadership comes in.

Tarrel wrote:Good that someone's had the courage to say this.

You can't really blame those affected by the flooding for being angry. At the end of the day, all roads point back to leadership, both in the short and longer terms. And what we have here is a triumph of politics over leadership.

Sometimes what people want (e.g. cheap food, £1 lasagnas) is not what's best for them, and what's good for an individual is not what's good for a community as a whole. That's where leadership comes in.

Of course, but it isn't the majority of folk that drive and initiate trends or market forces, rather....they get what they're given and adapt to it as opposed to being the masters of policy.

If we had any educational input to speak of, such as ecological, energy and economic literacy we would of instilled some kind of social check and balance to ward us off such paths.
As it stands, we have mass ignorance that follows where it's lead and takes what it's given, no-one aspires to a £1 lasagna, unless of course you're the one profiting from selling it and can therefore afford to buy real food.
Unfortunately leadership has been monatised, just like everything else and doesn't include 'externalities' such as our soils.

This is a handy visual.

http://vimeo.com/53618201

This animated film tells the reality of soil resources around the world, covering the issues of degradation, urbanization, land grabbing and overexploitation; the film offers options to make the way we manage our soils more sustainable.

All good points. Video looks interesting. I'll have a look later. Haven't time just now.

ETA; I still don't think we can let the leaders off the hook though.

Monbiot does seem to have a habit of getting things right rather a lot of the time.

biffvernon wrote:Monbiot does seem to have a habit of getting things right rather a lot of the time.

Dunno about that, Biff.

There's been a lot of people actually doing the work that, George, is just slooowly edging his way towards familiarising himself with.


Here: http://www.monbiot.com/2009/11/16/if-no ... e-farming/

'A switch to forest gardening and other forms of permaculture is trickier, especially for producing grain; but such is the scale of the creeping emergency that we can’t afford to rule anything out'

He alludes to the fact that he's at least aware of other methods.

And here: http://dark-mountain.net/blog/systems-t ... e-monbiot/

GM:' Why can’t we say: ‘If you’re going to get this money, here is a radical change you’re going to make to how you farm’? If farmers want to farm without subsidy, that’s one thing, but if they’re going to farm with subsidies we should demand at the very least that they do so in ways that don’t destroy the hydrology, the soil, biodiversity. I see permaculture as being highly compatible with rewilding, actually: rewilding zones could be seen as the outer zone of permaculture, or permaculture as the inner zone of rewilding, and there are a lot of permaculturists who have said that.

SW: It’s fascinating how this idea reoccurs – that if we get out of nature’s way, things work better, and in this country, nature wants to become a forest, so if we stop trying to kill off the forest and grow what are essentially R-series weeds like wheat and other grain crops, then we will produce much more for much less effort.

GM: That has to be demonstrated. I don’t know if that’s always true; I would need to see some comparative figures. I’m sure that for some kinds of production it’s going to be true, I’m not sure if it’s true for all kinds. But certainly the current model of agriculture could not be more destructive or alienating, and could scarcely produce food of lower quality than it does at the moment'

Again he's on the mark, but no in-depth description of demonstrable methods.
So he's got to up his game and get interviewing and visiting these places. He needs to be working with the likes of Holzer, Mark Shepard, Darren Doherty, Joel Salatin, Wes Jackson (perennial grains), Elaine Ingham, Philip Rutter, ColinTudge etc etc.
Get words and concepts like 'keyline' dropped into the lexicon and package it all forward for policy change.

Yes, he's right, but there's a lag with the timing and he's wasting a lot of that time continuing to repeat what the problem is, he now needs to be detailed in what he's for to outshine what he's against.

peaceful_life wrote: There's been a lot of people actually doing the work that, George, is just slooowly edging his way towards familiarising himself with.

Oh surely that's a bit unfair. He published his first book, Poisoned Arrows, a quarter of a century ago, in 1989.

biffvernon wrote:

peaceful_life wrote: There's been a lot of people actually doing the work that, George, is just slooowly edging his way towards familiarising himself with.

Oh surely that's a bit unfair. He published his first book, Poisoned Arrows, a quarter of a century ago, in 1989.

Come on, Biff, it's clear that I'm talking about a complete shift in food production and the fact that, George, hasn't forwarded the pinnacle of these practitioners to the public consciousnesses.
He has the platform to do this, it might also prevent him being alienated from farmers that may well feel he's just all stick and no carrot.

I'm not judging his earlier works, let's not conflate the two.

We pay £3.6bn a year for the privilege of having our wildlife exterminated, our hills grazed bare, our rivers polluted and our sitting rooms flooded.

Exactly.

emordnilap wrote:Removal of trees and other water buffers, from fields and uplands.

Draining of land.

Building, tarmacing and concreting over land (noting particularly the large areas farm buildings cover).

Compacting of land by heavy machinery and stock.

These practices have been carried on with a vengeance over here in Ireland and paid for largely by you and I. Then we have to pay for flood prevention measures in towns and cities.

We are crazy indeed.

The Moonbat circumnavigates Lake Cameron. Brilliant.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... oods-video