In the USA, the organisation responsible for implementing and checking on pollution etc is the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). The following report on TreeHugger throws things in a different light:
EPA Doesn’t Want To Know About Factory Farm Pollution
Some people think that EPA stands for Environmental Protection Agency; for the Bush Administration, it might be Evidence of Pollution is Annoying. Right now a factory farm has to report to federal, state and local officials when ammonia emissions exceed a hundred pounds per day, which in 2004 the EPA said could irritate the respiratory tract, eyes and mucus membranes for a few days. Hydrogen sulfide at that level could have the same but longer-lasting effects accompanied by memory problems, headaches and dizziness, and have to be reported as well.
But there are no limits or rules on this, so the EPA says that the reports create an unnecessary burden on the giant factory farms like the one in Oregon that puts out 15,500 pounds per day. Said a spokesman: “It is…consistent with the agency’s goal to reduce reporting burden where there would likely be no federal, state or local emergency response to such release reports” Because we know the EPA is there to save paper and energy, don’t we.
According to Erica Werner in the Associated Press:
There are no federal laws or regulations capping release of these substances from animal waste so EPA critics argue that the reporting requirements are the only way for communities to know what they’re being exposed to.
“If the public doesn’t know that the emissions in their area are hazardous to their health how are they going to find out unless the sources are required to report?” asked Bill Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. Becker said the reports are used by some states to respond to local concerns about farm pollution.
Of course the cattle people disagree. “In the end what we’re talking about here is not a hazardous substance,” said spokeswoman Karen Batra. “It’s not toxic sludge or a chemical spill. It’s cow manure.”
The UK’s chief environment scientist has called for a delay to a policy demanding inclusion of biofuels into fuel at pumps across the UK. Professor Robert Watson said ministers should await the results of their inquiry into biofuels’ sustainability. Some scientists think biofuels’ carbon benefits may be currently outweighed by negative effects from their production.
The Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO) is to introduce 2.5% biofuels at the pumps from 1 April. Professor Robert Watson warned that it would be insane if the RTFO had the opposite effects of the ones intended. He said biofuels policy in the EU and the UK may have run ahead of the science.
His comments in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme appear on the day when a coalition of pressure groups from Oxfam to Greenpeace writes to the Department for Transport (DfT) demanding that the policy be delayed until after the review. More
As reported in The Guardian, the UK Government’s new Chief Scientific Advisor , Professor John Beddington gave his first major speech at the Govnet Sustainable Development UK Conference in Westminster:
“There is progress on climate change. But out there is another major problem. It is very hard to imagine how we can see a world growing enough crops to produce renewable energy and at the same time meet the enormous increase in the demand for food which is quite properly going to happen as we alleviate poverty.”
He predicted that price rises in staples such as rice, maize and wheat would continue because of increased demand caused by population growth and increasing wealth in developing nations. He also said that climate change would lead to pressure on food supplies because of decreased rainfall in many areas and crop failures related to climate. “The agriculture industry needs to double its food production, using less water than today,” he said. The food crisis would bite more quickly than climate change, he added.
But he reserved some of his most scathing comments for the biofuel industry, which he said had delivered a “major shock” to world food prices. “In terms of biofuels there has been, quite properly, a reaction against it,” he said. “There are real problems with unsustainability.”
Some of the biofuels are hopeless. The idea that you cut down rainforest to actually grow biofuels seems profoundly stupid.
Hiliary Benn, the environment secretary commented that the relative wealth of people in developing countries is increasing, but this leads initially to an increase in demand for meat and dairy products, and ultimately processed and packaged foods - all of which are detrimental the the environment.
Moving forward with minimal impact
As unappealing as this may sound to some people, the message from Benn and others is that to help everyone around us, including the earth as a whole, humans should adopt a low or no meat diet, low or no dairy, avoidance of processed and over-packed foods and quickly remove our reliance on fossil fuels. What I’m describing will be a complete lifestyle change for many westerners, but there will be no alternative - things like biofuels only serve to give the green light for people to ‘carry on as before’, but with perhaps less guilt, whereas what is needed is a total re-think - it is no longer OK to carry on as we have been doing - that old way has clearly not worked.
In the UK, a new movement has been growing at grass roots level called ‘Transition Towns’. Started by Rob Hopkins, the purpose is to create a plan or framework to move a town or city towards oil independance by looking at the likely implications of ‘peak oil’ on the services and products a town uses. Doing this, creates resilience within the town to drastic change.
I have just bought Rob’s book ‘The Transition Handbook‘ and will be penning my thoughts on it in due course.
An article in today’s Independent shed interesting light on the good/bad biofuels debate. A scientific study looked at the carbon dioxide released when land was converted to biofuel production and came to some shocking conclusions.
A cornfield in South Africa
“All the biofuels we use now cause habitat destruction, either directly or indirectly. Global agriculture is already producing food for six billion people. Producing food-based biofuel, too, will require that still more land be converted to agriculture,” said Joe Fargioine of the US Nature Conservancy who was the lead scientist in one of the studies.
The study found that when peat-lands in Indonesia are converted to palm-oil plantations, it would take 423 years to pay off the carbon debt. Cutting down amazonian trees to grow soya beans immediately creates a carbon debt of 319 years. Some production has more indirect effects such as in the US where farmers used to rotate between soyabean and corn crops and now just grow corn for biofuel - the has led to increased production of Soya (to meet the supply deficit) in the Amazon and hence even more trees are lost.
“Such conversions of land to grow corn (maize) and sugarcane for biodiesel, or palm oil and soybean for bioethanol, release between 17 and 420 times more carbon than the annual savings from replacing fossil fuels, the scientists calculated.
One of the choice paragraphs in the report is; “In finding solutions to climate change, we must ensure that the cure is not worse than the disease”.
Well it’s been an interesting time for the oil industry! Last week, Shell announced record annual profits of £13.9bn, whereas this week BP saw profits fall sharply to a ‘disappointing’ £8.76bn. These figures however have been dwarfed by Exxon Mobil, who announced profits of $40.6bn - a record for a US firm.
Of course, big profits for UK-based companies are a good thing for the government - Shell’s profits will land around $1bn into the lap of the treasury by way of taxation. All of this makes me a little skeptical about the real effort the government is putting into tackling climate change - with the treasury getting money from all fuel sales, plus the profits from the companies selling, extracting and refining the fuel, they really do need to look at alternative ways of funding from the taxation of oil if they are going to avoid a deficit whilst at the same time, encouraging people away from cars and our current carbon-consuming lifestyles.
This week, Shell also ‘acknowledged’ Peak Oil could be here within a few years. In an email sent to all Shell employees, Jeroen van der Veer, the chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell said;
“Regardless of which route we choose, the world’s current predicament limits our maneuvering room. We are experiencing a step-change in the growth rate of energy demand due to population growth and economic development, and Shell estimates that after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand”
He went on to criticise policy makers;
“Taking the path of least resistance, policymakers pay little attention to curbing energy consumption - until supplies run short. Likewise, despite much rhetoric, greenhouse gas emissions are not seriously addressed until major shocks trigger political reactions. Since these responses are overdue, they are severe and lead to energy price spikes and volatility.”
Heads up to TreeHugger.com for publishing the above information.
Whatever it takes for the government to react properly and urgently to address energy consumption and curb greenhouse gas emissions, it’s clear that the car lobby is not going to give up without a fight. Governments are pushing the car makers to improve vehicle efficiency, but these moves are being met with huge resistance. Car makers say that owners of less efficient vehicles are already paying their dues with increased road tax duty and high fuel prices.
Shell’s former chairman, Sir Mark Moody Stuart has joined the debate by saying that the rich should not be allowed to ‘buy’ their way out of responsibility for tackling climate change.
On the BBC website, he said; “Nobody needs a car that does 10 or 15 miles to the gallon. In my opinion, it simply shouldn’t be allowed.”
Sir Mark currently owns a Toyota Prius - the MPG is not stunning, but is better than most similar-sized vehicles, and the big bonus is in reduced CO2 emissions.
The SMMT (Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders) naturally takes the view of motorists already ‘paying through the nose’ and how wrong it would be to take away the ‘freedom of choice’ for the motorist. I wonder whether freedom to breathe clean air is a more fundamental right?
Maybe the oil companies are in the last throws of high profitability before their fall from grace? I heard an interview on Radio 4 recently with Jeremy Leggett (a former oil-man who now champions the peak-oil reality and the ‘Transition Towns‘ movement), who said that oil companies need to embrace renewables properly and become ‘total energy’ companies. When asked about the work that BP did with renewables, he said this was pretty much a smoke screen, designed to get some positive PR but lacked any real commitment. Time will tell.
Nearly all the milk, dairy products and pork in the UK supermarkets are being produced from animals fed on GM (Genetically Modified) crops, and none of this is labelled, according to a Soil Association investigation. Tests of animal feed and a survey of company policies have revealed that all the supermarkets are widely allowing the use of GM feed. The report found that around 60% of the maize and 30% of the soya fed to dairy cattle and pigs is GM. Most consumers are unwittingly eating food produced from GM crops everyday.
Although food from GM-fed animals does not have to be labelled, animal feed does have to be labelled if it contains GM ingredients. Most feed (75%) is now labelled as ‘GM’, however, the survey found that most farmers (59%) did not know if their feed was GM. Soil Association tests also revealed a high level of breaches of the EU labelling laws - nearly 20% of feed contained GM soya above the 0.9% labelling threshold but bore no GM label. The Food Standards Agency is responsible for enforcing the legislation but is not conducting any tests to do so.
Due to the fact that at present, no field-scale GM crops are being grown in the UK, the GM feed is coming in from abroad, which massively increases the true food miles of the beef, pork or dairy produce. Both the ‘Red Tractor’ and RSPCA ‘Freedom Foods’ certification permit the use of GM feed to livestock - the only current guarantee is ‘Organic’.
I’m a fan of the video’s produced by PeakMoment on YouTube. They have interviewed loads of interesting people and projects, but the latest one really hit home about the philosophy of extending the environmental and sustainability movement to a broader audience.
They interviewed Alan Seid of Bellingham Co-housing Community (in the USA). You can watch the YouTube video below, under which are some of my highlights.
Alan suggested that the word ’sustainable’ has different meaning to different people. His view is that sustainability is something that would enable man to survive indefinitely, and as such involves looking at the whole environment, but also looking within people and understanding where people are ‘at’.
In order to reach the goal of sustainability, we have to work collectively - creating mutual understanding without coercing people. Human consciousness grows from Ego-Centric to Ethno-Centric to World-Centric (where Ego-Centric is all about ‘me’, Ethno-Centric is about people ‘like me’ and World-Centric is a holistic view of all things and people).
Alan identifies that one of the problems in getting the average person to be aware of sustainability is a psychological one; for example, recycling helps with a small (5-10%) amount of solid waste flow, but helps with 75% of people’s guilt. In other words people feel they have done alot when they haven’t, but telling them this is not easy!
It is therefore important to reach people at the right level to match their own world view. The ‘message’ needs to be framed correctly to match the audience, and in some cases, this means re-framing the same message to target different audiences who are motivated by different factors.
Environmentalists also need to remember that they are not perfect. Everyone needs to be open minded and to learn and progress themselves - it is easy to the ego to take over!
Finally, Alan talks about the importance of information sharing and communication with all interested parties (stakeholders) regarding whatever issue is being discussed.
On a visit to the University of California Santa Cruz’s Farm and Garden a few years ago, I met an apprentice who was trying to grow an entire year’s food supply in one small corner of the farm. He planted wheat, corn, beans, potatoes and a variety of salad crops.
Although it would be several months before the first harvest, he had already put himself on a diet consisting only of the food growing in his garden. He looked skinny, but not malnourished, on his diet of bread made from wheat he ground himself, dried beans and canned tomatoes.
“The only thing this diet lacks,” he told me, “is a good source of vitamin B12. It’s hard to get enough B12 from vegetables.”
I pointed out that his diet was also deficient in chocolate, decaf lattes and fettuccine alfredo, three items I considered essential to my own health and well-being. He just laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and went back to sowing beans.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this earnest young apprentice was a disciple of John Jeavons, organic gardening expert and author of “How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine.”
For more than 30 years Jeavons has been preaching the benefits of small- scale, sustainable farming. Now, on a farm just outside Willits, Jeavons operates the nonprofit Ecology Action and teaches his methods to gardeners from as far away as Siberia, Africa and Latin America.
Sitting in his kitchen one afternoon, Jeavons shows me snapshots from those workshops.
The students stand in a circle around him while he demonstrates his soil preparation technique. He is a distinguished fellow of 60-something who manages, in his trademark tweed coat and cap, to make digging in the dirt look elegant.
In fact, he looks more like an Ivy League professor than an organic gardening visionary, and it is easy to see how he could be effective in both worlds: He recently presided over a worldwide food and soil conference at UC Davis in which farmers and scientists came together to address the looming food shortage that is the focus of Jeavon’s work today.
Jeavons sets the photographs aside and recalls the question that led to the development of his farming techniques.
“In the early 1970s, I went to the San Joaquin Valley, where approximately 30 percent of the food in the United States was being grown at the time, and I asked farmers this question: “What is the smallest area you can grow all your food and income on?’ And they said, “Well, we don’t know, but if it’s a good year, if you have a thousand acres of wheat, you’ll be able to pay your bills. ‘”
“I realized that if I wanted to know the answer to my question, it was ‘tag- you’re it.’”
By 1972, Jeavons had formed Ecology Action and was farming nearly four acres in Palo Alto. Alan Chadwick, pioneer of the French intensive/biodynamic method of farming, came up from Santa Cruz to teach classes. The first edition of “How to Grow More Vegetables” was published two years later. At last, Jeavons was finding answers to the question he’d been asking farmers for years.
“It takes about 15,000 to 30,000 square feet of land to feed one person the average U.S. diet,” he says. “I’ve figured out how to get it down to 4,000 square feet. How? I focus on growing soil, not crops.”
Jeavons took the best of Chadwick’s intensive farming techniques, including double-digging, composting and closely-spaced planting, and added a few ideas of his own.
An organic farm should be a closed system, he reasoned. Off-the-farm inputs like manure, bagged compost, alfalfa meal and liquid kelp all require additional land, water and resources to produce. That, in Jeavon’s view, is hardly sustainable agriculture.
“We have an opportunity to grow very high yields using a fraction of the resources. One of the ways we do this is by growing all the organic matter that we need in the garden, or on the farm, that’s producing the food.”
This closed-system concept is the hallmark of Jeavons’s Grow Biointensive method, a term he registered as a trademark in 1999. It allows farmers to grow large quantities of food with few expenses beyond seeds and manual tools.
And Jeavon’s method is about more than dirt-under-the-nails farming; he has 30 years’ worth of data to back him up. Each edition of “How to Grow More Vegetables” contains more statistical data than the one before: In the latest edition, for instance, you can calculate the precise number of beet seeds you’ll need to grow 30 pounds of beets, along with the protein and calorie content, space requirements, and the percentage of the harvest (i.e., trimmings and inedible portions) that can be returned to the soil as compost.
While this approach may be an interesting experiment for a university student, it could be a matter of survival for people all over the world.
Conventional farming practices, Jeavons explains, deplete the soil of nutrients and lead to wind and water erosion. In the face of increasing populations and a dwindling supply of farmable land, he sees his approach as a sustainable, soil-friendly way to feed the world.
“So we’re talking not just about this fantastic technique for raising really tasty fresh food with only a fraction of the resources, but we’re talking about rebuilding soil. With our methods, you can actually build up to 20 pounds of farmable soil for every pound of food eaten.”
Jeavons gets up from his kitchen table and leads me outside, where we walk down a sunny slope to the mini-farm he and his apprentices tend.
He moved Ecology Action to this site outside Willits in 1982. The nonprofit’s Common Ground Garden Supply store is still located in Palo Alto, but it is here, in Willits, where he teaches most of his workshops, conducts research, and oversees the day-to-day operations of the Bountiful Garden catalog business.
Farming conditions in Willits are far from perfect, but Jeavons sees a benefit to the difficult site. In the new edition of “How to Grow More Vegetables,” he writes that the “heavy winter rains, prolonged summer droughts, short growing season, steep slopes, and depleted rocky soil are similar in many ways to those in countries where Ecology Action’s work is having its most dramatic impact.”
We stand on a rise above his terraced farm. Nestled in the center is a familiar sight: a large circular garden planted with all the crops that would be required to feed one person for one year.
I have begun to recognize the typical Jeavons garden: It is densely planted with carbon crops like corn, wheat and millet that are important food sources but also produce plenty of high-carbon scraps for the compost pile.
Over half of the garden is devoted to these seed and grain crops. Another third is given over to high-calorie root crops like potatoes, parsnips and turnips. These crops store well and produce a large amount of calories in a relatively small space.
That leaves only a few small beds for the vegetables that occupy most ordinary gardens: tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce and broccoli.
Still, Jeavons tells me, thanks to closely spaced plantings and compost- enriched, double-dug beds, these smaller beds produce enough vitamins and minerals to sustain a person for a year.
It’s late in the afternoon. All this talk of food production has made me hungry. Back at his office, Jeavons has stacks of research papers and pages of statistics to give me. But for the moment, we are two gardeners in early spring, looking down on the beds of young fava beans, onions, lettuce and herbs. And like any other gardener, Jeavons is eager to show off his work.
“Come down to the garden,” he says. “There’s a few things here I want you to taste.”
EIGHT STEPS TO GROW BIOINTENSIVE GARDENING
Double-dug, raised beds. Loosening the soil to a depth of 24 inches allows roots to penetrate more deeply and creates a raised bed effect. John Jeavons’ video “Dig It” demonstrates an Aikido-style movement that makes double-digging almost effortless.
Composting. A healthy compost pile is key to replenishing the soil.
Intensive planting. “Ignore the spacing instructions that come with your seeds,” Jeavons told me. Plant seedlings so close that when they are mature, the leaves touch. This keeps soil moist and prevents weeds from sprouting.
Companion planting. Green beans love strawberries, corn provides shade to cucumbers, and fast-maturing radishes grow well in between slower-growing carrots.
Carbon farming. Corn, millet and oats, along with other seed and grain crops, make up an important part of the diet and provide plenty of high-carbon additions to the compost pile.
Calorie farming. Growing a year’s food supply means focusing on high- calorie, space-efficient foods like potatoes and parsnips.
Open-pollinated seeds. Special hybrids aren’t needed in healthy soil, Jeavons says. Using open-pollinated seeds like the ones offered in his Bountiful Gardens Catalog helps preserve genetic diversity.
Use the whole method. Jeavons emphasizes that high yields come from using all Grow Biointensive components together.
On 25th November, five of us from WM PermaNetwork (West Midlands Permaculture Network) visited Karuna, a few miles south of Shrewsbury. Karuna is an 18 acre site, overlooking Long Mynd and has been owned by Janta and Merav and their two children for a year or so. Since taking over the land, which had been used for horses and sheep over the years, they have planted over 5,000 trees.
Amazingly, some of the local people don’t seem to like trees and continue to cause problems for Karuna. I despair when people look at monocultural fields all planted with a single type of plant, or a field of sheep and say that is nature, or consider it to be the natural landscape! The natural landscape of the UK is trees and shrubs, and whilst mankind needs fields to grow food to survive, we should be working towards restoring as much land as possible to it’s original wooded state.
Due to suspected poisoning of some of the newly planted trees at Karuna, Janta took the decision to move onto the land and is currently residing in a former showman’s trailer, without any mains services. Janta and his family are living lightly on the land, but are under the threat of a planning enforcement notice (unauthorised ‘change of use’ for the land, from agricultural to mixed agricultural and dwelling) which, if enforced, would mean they have to leave their home.
The text below was written by Janta and Merav as an introduction to Karuna and their motives for developing it.
Plant Karuna for the Planet
(true sustainability for Shropshire)
Karuna is a Sanskrit word meaning compassion. In “Island” a novel by Aldous Huxley (his last novel) Karuna was a place where people are kind and happy, they have equally without mediocrity, compassion as well as intellect and science side by side with art. Islands happen to be our favourite places.
Karuna is located within an area of outstanding natural beauty (AONB) at Picklescott, on the lower slopes of the Long Mynd, it faces out towards stupendous far reaching open views of the Stretton Hills and surrounding countryside.
The soil at Karuna is fertile, the area was once covered in trees, it is now naked compared to what it once was. Being lovers of trees and the land we have a desire to restore a small part of it.
Trees are one of the most important assets on the planet, contributing to the solutions of many of the problems that challenge humankind. Trees make a positive impact on the environment, playing a vital role in the battle to reduce global warming; they take in carbon dioxide and give out oxygen, they offer a means to meet the needs of an exploding global population from the finite resources of the planet; maintain water supplies, check soil floods and soil erosion. As trees are permanent crops, their cultivation does not require regular ploughing which damages soil structure. Life on our planet could not exist without trees and yet vast tracts of forests across the globe are being destroyed!
It is not enough to criticise the felling of tropical forests - we should all be working to restore our own forests, take positive action towards a sustainable future, by working with nature rather than against it.
At Karuna, an 18 acre site, three separate woodlands (approx 9 acres) of over 50 species were planted in the winter 2006, this year there has been additional planting, including many traditional fruit trees, nitrogen fixing trees, plants and herbs, thus laying the foundations for agroforestry and forest gardening using permaculture and natural farming techniques/principles for production of fruits, nuts, vegetables and medicinal plants, based on interaction between different life forms in order to stimulate and support one another (symbiosis).
The project exists to demonstrate that sustainable land management is the only way forward if the present climate crisis is to be reversed. That is if there is to be any future for our children.
We know, from studying the rocks of our planet, that there was once a time when life did not exist here. Man, in seeing himself separate from nature and taking from it as he pleases is destroying all forms of life as he goes. If he does not change he will soon destroy himself.
Karuna possesses deep mystical magic in its soil, it has great potential, it gives out signals and speaks to those who are receptive to its almost forgotten language. The land is calling out to be healed and be given the opportunity to heal. These two exist side by side. We have chosen to respond to the calling of “the one” at the particular energy spot in order to share our love of the natural world, especially with our children.
Traditionally small wooded areas were often managed on the outer edge of the village, not simply for their raw materials and medicines. Trees offer us the opportunity to recognise inner peace and understanding when we place ourselves quietly amongst them. Developing and raising awareness of sustainability, climate change, wildlife conservation, holistic healing and art are the projects deepest concerns.
There is no better way to reach others than by example, and to offer the opportunity for all of us to develop through direct experience and serve human ends harmlessly while creating conditions conducive to all life.
The positive impact upon wildlife at Karuna is already apparent, Hawks gather in greater numbers to feed upon the increased mice population, due to the long grass between the newly planted woodlands. Threatened species like the once common sparrow also feed from the grass seeds. Hares too take advantage of this valuable situation, the tufts of grass offer herbs a protective environment to thrive in, out of the wind. There is a priority to develop sustainable biodiversity awareness at Karuna and links with local schools and educational groups are being made.
We need to get back to our heritage - our birthright - the land. Karuna aims to fulfill the opportunity for people to lovingly care for the earth which brings us into life, nourishes and sustains us, and ultimately takes us back again.
Agriculture is the very basis of our existence and is likely to go on being so, if we are to survive at all. Even agricultural ‘experts’ can now see and admit that the present system of agriculture in the west is unsustainable. It depends entirely on oil. There is now an agricultural depression, and this industry completely hooked on sophisticated machinery and huge chemical inputs is finding it very hard to carry on. We can make better choices!
The project embraces permaculture techniques, especially temperate Forest Gardening. Robert Hart, Shropshire’s own world famous pioneer in Temperate Climate Forest Gardening, is a great inspiration to us and is held dear in our hearts. Forest Gardening supports the Raw Food Diet (the original diet of humankind). This diet is radically environmentally friendly, any minimal waste created through it is easily recycled into compost. Through adopting this natural diet we save on energy that gets wasted through cooking, a process which robs us of our food’s nutritional value. Eating raw fruits, vegetables, and other plant foods is a major solution to world pollution. Landfills are filled with products directly or indirectly related to cooked and processed foods, such as: packaging, wrappers, bags, old stoves. microwaves etc. The supply system is also dependent at every turn on massive use of motor transport (oil) which poisons and pollutes the environment we live in, the air we breathe.
We hope that the community will benefit from fruit and vegetables organically grown on a small scale at Karuna and sold at the local farmers market in the not too distant future and possibly serve as an additional top-up for existing organic box schemes in the area. We are informed that there simply isn’t enough local organic fruit and veg supply.
The project demonstrates… A) How people can take responsibility for themselves by producing some of their own food, and B) that food they aren’t able to grow is best grown as locally as possible, with no harmful chemicals in its growing or storage.
Buying food that travels unnecessarily funds the polluting , poisoning process that is destroying the quality of our children’s future. Example: an apple flown from South Africa and consumed in Britain puts 600 times more pollution into the air we breathe than an apple grown and eaten in Britain. Apply this logic to all the food transported unnecessarily and the environmental damage is obviously horrendous… beware of food miles!
Karuna is neither politically nor religiously biased as we hope to cross these artificial divides. The project does no have a fixed idea about the multitude of ways it can serve small groups and individuals within the local and broader community.
Karuna is oriented towards the experience of change. We are simply sowing seeds and what is the seeds destiny? We know that any real solutions must embody a change of heart - an emphatic connection with the fullness of life. All of us who preserve the future of life on earth are ‘Bioneers’. Together we are creating an age of restoration, guided by the shared values of interdependence, kinship, cooperation, community and mutual aid. There is a dramatic urgency for us to share ingeniously effective solutions with the widest possible audience, inspiring them to join in this sacred and global work. Your support is needed with advice and assistance in fundraising, practical garden work (aftercare of trees, herbs and shrubs), materials, web site development, constructive creative ideas for new directions within the project etc.
We welcome people who share similar dedicated sympathetic nuturance of nature, and have some vision of creativity. You are invited to offer suggestion as well as participate.
Well it’s been an interesting time for the oil industry! Last week, Shell announced record annual profits of £13.9bn, whereas this week BP saw profits fall sharply to a ‘disappointing’ £8.76bn. These figures however have been dwarfed by Exxon Mobil, who announced profits of $40.6bn - a record for a US firm.
Shell’s former chairman, Sir Mark Moody Stuart has joined the debate by saying that the rich should not be allowed to ‘buy’ their way out of responsibility for tackling climate change.
