Paleo Grift

...ontains a kind of racism that assumes that this way of living is easy, that it doesn’t involve skill or, as in the case of California native peoples what looks to westerners like hunting and gathering is actually a form of agriculture, just not a form that looks like European farming (See Kat Anderson’s Tending the Wild for more on that thesis). I guess it’s not surprising that our tech bros executives would embrace short work weeks and fictitious...

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The Great Water Conservation Grift

...the Governor of California to describe one of the most powerful forces in farming in the state — a billionaire family that owns something like 300 square miles of Oligarch Valley land, has its own toxic corporate farm worker town, and, from their ridiculous mansion in Beverly Hills, has been on a destructive quest to eviscerate the state’s river system and plunder its aquifers, helping fuel a mass extinction in the San Francisco Bay Delta…all so...

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Saturday Linkages: Comfrey, a Parking Rock Star and Voracious Worms

...hippies http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/marijuana-weed-pot-farming-environmental-impacts … Voracious Worm Evolves to Eat Biotech Corn Engineered to Kill It – Wired Science http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/03/rootworm-resistance-bt-corn/ … Adapting to Climate by Being a Nomad within your own House http://feedly.com/e/M3JFioqL Rock Star or Comedian? Donald Shoup Takes His Parking Show to Berkeley http://la.streetsblog.org/2014/...

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Journal of the New Alchemists

...ottom-up work of refining conventional organic agriculture through no-till farming and integrated pest management had more long lasting influence. One could make a good argument that you need the domes and aquaculture schemes to inspire people to work on the more prosaic stuff. But another criticism of the appropriate technology movement of the 70s is that it focused on technology rather than social and political problems (see economist Richard S....

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Hops in Southern California

...g attached to the east side of the building. Homegrown Evolution’s own hop farming experiment ended in the spring of last year after we accidentally plopped some home built scaffolding on top of the tiny vine while undertaking the heinous task of scraping and painting the front of the house. Planting it in terrible soil doomed it to failure anyways. We’re experimenting with growing both Cascade and Nugget hops in a big self irrigating planter with...

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