This article was written for the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network following criticism in February 2014 of community food gardening and farmers’ markets by a representative body of the vegetable industry. ………………………………………………. IN MID-FEBRUARY 2014, community gardeners around Australia suddenly found themselves under attack from the horticulture industry. Ausveg, a national industry organisation, […]
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THE BOOKS YOU SEE in the composite illustration accompanying this story link past and present. They link what was a pioneering social experiment with its refined, socially safer version developed initially by permaculture people. I’m talking about people leaving the cities for a rural life. It’s been a feature of permaculture over its more-than 35 […]
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THINGS ARE NEVER quite the same when you return. They are similar, but not quite as you remember. There’s always something different… something you can’t quite put your finger on. That’s how it was when I returned to the rocking stone. The cloud was low that day. We had left The Springs some time before, […]
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JENNIFER ALDEN, the Victorian food consultant, gave me the book just a few weeks ago — a little A5-size publication with a photo of a bright red strawberry on the cover and the logo of the City of Greater Bendigo below. That was at the national gathering of the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens […]
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Some might call it preaching to the converted, my talk about the work of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance with Permaculture/Transition Blue Mountains there in the community centre in Lawson that night.
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SOMETIMES, the best discoveries are made by accident. I was rummaging through the library of an international development organisation I was working for at the time — that time being the latter half of the 1990s — when I discovered them, a couple journals published by what must have been one of the very first […]
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I’VE READ ONLY one book by Peter Matthiessen, and that was some time in the 1980s. It was his tale of wandering in search of the fabled Himalayan animal, the snow leopard, portrayed in his 1978 book of the same name. The book moved me… it moved me so much that I’ve read it at […]
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THERE's a lot in Philip Ackerman-Leist's book, Rebuilding the Foodshed, but don't expect to come away from reading it with a formula to go and create a viable local food system...
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IF WHAT an article in The Conversation claims is true, then I’m surprised. Surprised that someone of Tim Flannery’s standing appears to know so little about effective advocacy communications. What’s all the flurry about? It’s an article by Rod Lamberts, deputy director of the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at ANU, […]
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A Tasmanian journey… “WHAT’S THIS?”. Fiona holds out her hand as if to catch whatever it is that has started to fall from the sky… small, soft flakes that disappear as soon as they settle on the ground. “It’s snow. Soft summer snow!”, she says. So it is. Just light flakes. It isn’t that wet […]
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