Nanotech on the Menu
From In Good Tilth magazine: January/February 2009
Interest in nano is also fueled, in an aberrant way, by the visions of a fringe element of futurists who muse on biblical life spans, on unlimited wealth and, conversely, on a holocaust brought about by legions of uncontrollable self-replicating robots only slightly bigger than Einstein’s sugar molecules.
— Gary Stix, in Understanding Nanotechnology (Warner Books, 2002).
Just when you thought it was safe not to sweat the small stuff, it turns out the truly small stuff may be infinitely worse than the large stuff—if, by truly small, we mean nanoparticles, which have come… Read More »
Code Oranges
From In Good Tilth magazine: July/August 2009
The Department of Homeland Security’s lime green website recommends that each home-preparedness kit include a can opener. The agency, not well known for linking cause and effect, goes on to state that a can opener is used for food. And then, just to be sure you don’t put your eye out with it, or attempt to paddle it past the broken levees, the agency observes that your disaster preparedness kit should include a can opener if your kit contains canned food.
What the agency doesn’t recommend, but that we’re hearing more and more these days, is that your disaster kit should include a… Read More »
Sowing the Vine
From In Good Tilth magazine (July/August 2011)
Photos (on this website) by the Staff and Volunteers of the Homeless Garden Project, Santa Cruz, Calif.
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit. (Matthew 7:18; King James Version)
Janet O’Brien did what she was supposed to do—what any loving, desperate mother would do—and in less than 21 days will be homeless.
Simple, yet convoluted. It’s not supposed to be that way, of course. It’s an unspoken rule that narratives about the chaos that ultimately lands a person on the street must open with a list of moral breaches, self-destructive acts, tearful confessions … and conclude with… Read More »
Preparation 500
Preparation 500
From The Bear Deluxe magazine (June 2011)
1912 words
To our modern way of thinking, this all sounds quite insane.
– Rudolf Steiner, Lectures on Agriculture, 1924
Allan Balliett got sick in 1980. It came on as a flurry of symptoms, all of which seemed to take roost at once, and no one knew what was wrong or how to fix it. A systems analyst for the U.S. Department of the Treasury in Washington, D.C., Balliet suddenly found himself fatigued, his hair falling out “by the handfuls,” too weak and unfocused to adequately unravel the federal computer network. He says he “serial napped” on weekends 40 hours or… Read More »
Are biofuels fueling hunger?
From Sound Consumer magazine (Sept. 2010)
The U.S. Navy celebrated Earth Day this year by running a biofuels test on a supersonic F/A 18 Green Hornet fighter jet powered by a mixture of traditional jet fuel, and oil pressed from Camelina sativa, a relative of the mustard plant.
The test underscores two trends in U.S. energy policy: an almost fanatical reliance on biofuels as a substitute for oil, and the misconception that anything ‘green’ is good — even if it sports Sidewinder missiles and makes the Hummer look fossil-fuel efficient.
Some experts on food security claim otherwise. Once touted as a panacea for America’s energy… Read More »
Asparagus Now
From In Good Tilth magazine: March/April 2010
“Thank you for taking the time to produce this film. I pray that it will spread like modified canola seed to all parts of our culture and open some eyse [sic].”
— Email, from ‘Tyler’, to Deborah Koons Garcia, writer, producer and director of The Future of Food
“I was the East Coast distributor of ‘involved.’ I ate it, drank it, and breathed it … Then they killed Martin, Bobby, and they elected Tricky Dick twice, and people like you must think I’m miserable because I’m not involved anymore. Well, I’ve got news for you ... I have no more pain for anything. I gave at the… Read More »
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