Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed

If you are interested in the topic of maintaining biodiversity on this planet, I highly recommend that you read Manifestos on the Future of Food & Seed, edited by Vandana Shiva. It is published by South End Press www. southendpress.org

Here is an excerpt from Shiva's introduction to the book:

"Terre Madre was a gathering of small producers who refuse to disappear in a world where globalization has written off diversity of species and cultures, small producers, local economies, indigenous knowledge. Not only are small farmers and local food communities refusing to go away, they are determined to shape a future beyond globalization. As Granny Almanac, the Italian Minister of Agriculture and Forestry stated in his introduction to `Terra Madre?:
What is original and truly revolutionary about Terra Madre is that by selecting the Food Communities least susceptible to industrial process ? hence distinctive for the authenticity and quality of their produce ? it attempts to place small-scale food producers at center stage.
Diversity is the ground for the turn around of our food systems ? diversity of crops, diversity of foods, diversity of cultures. Diversity is both the resistance to monocultures and the creative alternative. Building on our uniqueness and variety is our strength, a strength that can be eroded only when we give up on it ourselves.
Another paradigm of food. "

To read the complete article, visit: http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/2004-11/26shiva.cfm

Biomimicry: Using biological adaptation as a model for sustainability

Here's an excerpt from an essay on biomicry by Janine Benyus:

"Another of my favourite examples is the humming-bird, an organism about the size of my thumb. It flies up to thirty-five miles an hour (faster than you can get around most cities in a cab) and migrates about 2,000 miles a year. Those journeying down the eastern flyway reach the lip of the Gulf of Mexico and then pause for a while, fuelling up on 1,000 blossoms a day. Finally, they burst across 600 miles of open water without stopping, on a whopping 2.1 grams of fuel. And that's not jet fuel: it's nectar.
But here's what amazes me even more: in the process of fuelling up, the humming-bird manages to pollinate its energy source, ensuring that there will be nectar next year - for itself, for its offspring, or for completely unrelated species of nectar feeders.
In the process of meeting their needs, organisms manage to fertilise the soil, clean the air, clean the water, and mix the right cocktail of atmospheric gases that life needs to live."

To read the whole article, visit: http://www.resurgence.org/2005/benyus230.htm

Do Not Mail List & Western Pharmaceutical Companies In China

My friend Per Terje inspired me to look for this, and I was happy to find it does exist! Reduce the amount of junk mail that comes to you! Register your address here, though for some of these, they ask payment:

https://www.directmail.com/directory/mail_preference/
https://www.optoutprescreen.com/opt_form.cgi
http://www.41pounds.org/

This one stops catalog mailings:
http://www.catalogchoice.org/

Here's a link to send Congress a message requesting a government sponsored "Do Not Mail List", but who knows how effective these things actually are:
http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/newdream/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=5076&t=default.dwt

Also, here's an interesting article:

Western drugs sell slowly in herb-happy China

Colleen Cheng and Angel Chen, Chinese marketing executives in their 30s, should be the ideal customers for U.S. and European drugmakers. So far, they are a tough sell. Glued to cell phones at an expensive Beijing restaurant, the working moms would fit in at any cafe in New York or London with their fluent English and stylish clothing. They spend hundreds of dollars monthly on herbs, acupuncture and supplements. What they don’t buy are Western pharmaceuticals, like Johnson & Johnson’s cold medicine Sudafed and Sanofi-Aventis SA’s sleeping pill Ambien.


“With Chinese medicine, it is all about balance,” Cheng says. For a cold, she boils ginger root in Coca-Cola. Rather than take a sleeping pill, Chen drinks Chinese white wine. “The effect of the Chinese medicine is very slow, but we continue to take it because we believe it is better for our overall health,” Cheng says. While China’s middle class has fallen for Buick cars and Starbucks coffee, medicines made by Western drugmakers haven’t caught on as quickly. The average Chinese spends $10 a year on pharmaceuticals compared with $900 for each American. The world’s biggest drugmakers, including Pfizer Inc., Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline Plc, need to court customers like Cheng and Chen as sales growth slows in the mature U.S. and European markets.

Read more at: http://www.telegram.com/article/20071230/NEWS/712300333/1002/BUSINESS

I have to try

Maybe this is the most pointless task I could pursue, but there is always that little weakly glittering thing at the bottom of Pandora's box.
http://windofourlittlewings.blogspot.com/

Benazir Bhutto-From BBC

Benazir Bhutto killed in attack Pakistani former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in a suicide attack.
Ms Bhutto had just addressed an election rally in Rawalpindi when she was shot in the neck by a gunman who then set off a bomb.
At least 16 other people died in the attack and several more were injured.
President Pervez Musharraf condemned the killing and urged people to remain calm so that the "nefarious designs of terrorists can be defeated."
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attack.
Ms Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), had twice been the country's prime minister and had been campaigning ahead of elections due in January.

It was the second suicide attack against her in recent months and came amid a wave of bombings targeting security and government officials.
Nawaz Sharif, also a former prime minister and a political rival, said her death was a tragedy for "the entire nation".
"It is not a sad day, it is [the] darkest, gloomiest day in the history of this country," he said, speaking at the hospital where she was taken.
The United Nations Security Council is to meet for emergency consultations shortly to discuss the situation in Pakistan after the killing.
Scene of grief
The attack occurred close to an entrance gate of the park in Rawalpindi where Ms Bhutto had been speaking.
Read more here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7161590.stm

Trillium

Public sectors fail, private sectors fail. Some cheery economists believe that non-profit organizations will step in to fill in the holes. Others say the market will do it by itself. Either technologies that could fill those holes will advance and become cheaper/more efficient, so investing will naturally be funneled towards them, or humans will once in a while deviate from the generic economic formula of making decisions based on self-interest alone. An example of investing for both self interest and for reasons that computers and economic models don't usually predict: http://trilliuminvest.com/ I met a lady who worked for this company a few years ago. It was the first hopeful thing I had come across in a long time. Otherwise, how else could anything (other than some beautiful supervirus) rein in the Foucauldian decentralized power mess of the world. (There is absolutely no single person, thing, or event to point fingers at, or to uproot.)

What you can learn from someone who’s trying to hide from the world on the floor of a bus.

My friend Warrick says that a person’s personality is pretty well set by the time they turn 25. If that’s the case, I’ve got about 3 months to wring some bitterness out of myself and cram a little more compassion in. I have a heart that’s filled with so much impatience and criticism. But I heard something on NPR (half of what moves me on a daily basis comes from NPR these days) yesterday that made me think twice about sneering when people say “being kind is truly the most important thing we can do on this earth”.

I heard photographer Michael Nye speak about his “Fine Line” project. He got to know people around his city who are considered to have mental illness. He photographed and interviewed them. You can see his project at this site: http://www.michaelnye.org/fineline/photoaudio.html
The words that made me think more about kindness came from the lady in the photograph on the bottom row that is second from the left.

The other interesting thing I heard on the same radio show was about the documentary “The Bridge”. The maker of the film had heard that the Golden Gate Bridge is the number one suicide spot in the world. People worldwide travel there to die. So he and his crew filmed the bridge every day for one year. Apparently they stirred up a lot of controversy, but also a lot of awareness with the film.
http://www.thebridge-themovie.com/new/index.html