We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit.
— Audre Lorde (via nirvikalpa)
(Source: womenorgnow, via tranqualizer)
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.
— Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (via thefemmeinistmystique)
(via foxxxynegrodamus)
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Up to one-third of all of the foods grown and consumed by humans are pollinated by honeybees. Bee’s work in pollination is responsible for literally feeding our entire planet. -Ashley English
Yet soil is miraculous. It is where the dead are brought back to life. Here, in the thin earthy boundary between inanimate rock and the planet’s green carpet, lifeless minerals are weathered from stones or decomposed from organic debris. Plants and microscopic animals eat these dead particles and recast them as living matter. In the soil, matter recrosses the boundary between living and dead; and, as we have seen, boundaries-edges-are where the most interesting and important events occur.
— Toby Hemenway, Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture (via fuckyeahpermaculture)
(Source: sleikas, via fuckyeahpermaculture)
The mistake of the modern food empire is to accept three apparently self evident assumptions. The first is that the Earth is fertile. For the last eighty years, human being have been plowing, sowing and reaping with a fury that the planet’s soil has never before experienced. Past food empires farmed as frantically as they could, but modern advantages put them to shame. Today’s bumper crops, even more so than historical harvests, deplete the earth, drawing down what ecologists call “natural capital.” By spending our geological endowment, we’ve been able to feed billions of human beings. But we haven’t replace the fund. When older food empires depleted their soil, they either expanded onto fresh ground or concocted new technologies to resuscitate the land. Then, when these strategies inevitably faltered, the food empires had to retreat, leaving abandoned cities and memories of wealth.
Our own food empire has yet to stall. For a hundred years, we’ve beefed up our soil with clever fertilizers and planted it with breeds of engineered crops. The question that bubbles under the Bunsen burners of the world’s agricultural laboratories, though, is whether we can indefinitely cook up new biochemical fixes. Farming does violence to nature. Will we always have enough Band-Aids on hand?
The second undermining assumption for the stability of food empires is that the forecast calls for sunny, mild weather, with a possibility of showers….Our third mistake is to assume that it’s good business to do one thing well…Nature is most resilient when it’s diverse. The fourth assumption…like everything else in our civilization, takes cheap fossil fuels for granted.
Our own food empire has yet to stall. For a hundred years, we’ve beefed up our soil with clever fertilizers and planted it with breeds of engineered crops. The question that bubbles under the Bunsen burners of the world’s agricultural laboratories, though, is whether we can indefinitely cook up new biochemical fixes. Farming does violence to nature. Will we always have enough Band-Aids on hand?
The second undermining assumption for the stability of food empires is that the forecast calls for sunny, mild weather, with a possibility of showers….Our third mistake is to assume that it’s good business to do one thing well…Nature is most resilient when it’s diverse. The fourth assumption…like everything else in our civilization, takes cheap fossil fuels for granted.
— empires of food; feast, famine, and the rise and fall of civilizations. by evan d.g. fraser and andrew rimas
Posted May 15, 2012 at 8:57am in the three gorges dam empire of food evan d.g. fraser and andrew rimas feast famine and the rise and fall of civilizations farming does violence to nature delusion of superabundance
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It seems to me that the best art is political and you ought to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
— Toni Morrison (via lover-root)
(Source: jamielynn, via lover-root)
