Ed Dowding

Category: Agriculture & Food

Monarch butterfly numbers fell by 86% last year alone

Monarch butterflies, whose numbers have already declined an estimated 97 percent since the 1980s, fell 86% last year alone in California. You can help butterflies by: – Don’t buy GMO food – the leading cause of their decline. (This is mainly for the Americans – there’s not a lot of GMO in use elsewhere.) Don’t ...

What price a tree?
two silver fishes on round white ceramic plate

First rule of Corporate Club

First rule of Corporate Club: If you teach a man to fish, you’ve lost a customer.

Why doesn’t Monsanto fix energy?

There’s a very simple way we can tell that GMO companies (a) don’t understand genetic modification very well, and (b) aren’t interested in solving humanity’s biggest challenges. Ask yourself what you would do if you ran Monsanto. If it was me, I’d look at the reasons people don’t like my work: it’s tampering with complex ...

A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales to the Future for Food Conference, Georgetown University, Washington DC

“President de Gioia, Ladies and Gentlemen. Having such fond memories of my last visit, it is a great joy to be invited back to Georgetown to speak at this conference. It certainly makes a change from making embarrassing speeches about my eldest son during wedding receptions…!” Source: https://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/media/speeches/speech-hrh-the-prince-of-wales-the-future-food-conference-georgetown-university

“The Great Feast” – TEDxOxbridge

This is the transcript from my talk at TEDxOxbridge last weekend. —————–   If you a have a phone, take it out and hold it up. This device makes us magicians: At any time, from any where, we can know almost ANYTHING that is known to mankind. Ok – hands down. But what is truly ...

Petition fatigue: in defence of clicktivism.

Every. Single. Day. Every single day there’s another damned petition to sign. Is it about anything sensible or reasonable? No. It’s about trying to prevent only the most stupid / villainous / malicious / self-serving people from doing the most ludicrous and outrageously stupid things they could ever possibly dream up to do. It makes ...

The world is on track for disaster. Who wants to buy a farm?

Written by MIT researchers for an international think tank, the Club of Rome, the study used computers to model several possible future scenarios. The business-as-usual scenario estimated that if human beings continued to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and precipitous population decline could occur by 2030. However, the study ...

Manifestos for life

Posters in the Hub Westminster with typographical design by Robert Reed. Source: This is Reed

Building on allotments

@SaveFarmTerrace tweeted me yesterday: @eddowding Our mayor wants to sell our fab beautiful allotments in Watford UK to developers to build more houses on. Pls follow and rt us! — Sara jane trebar (@SaveFarmTerrace) December 26, 2012 So I’ve written a letter to the Mayor. Right now the comment is held in moderation so I’m ...

Have you quit your stupid job yet?

This is a copy of a letter I’ve just written to a chap who works as a “Finance Analyst – Environmental” for BP. I post it here for reference. — Hi James I promised to send you some bits and pieces about how there *is* a real alternative to the tiresomely immoral, impractical, unnecessary, well-paid ...

Permaculture principles

It seems this list can bring wisdom and insight to pretty much everything we do. Apart from the more specific ones (like ‘keep water high on the land’, but maybe just try to metaphor these as taoist haikus to trigger bewildering insights.) Relative Location Components placed in a system are viewed relatively, not in isolation. ...

Top 5 reasons NOT to buy organic

1. It’s too expensive (and I’ve got a family to feed.) There are two separate issues here: Is it too expensive – or does your regular shop charge too much for it? Is it too expensive – or is the other food too cheap? (Or more to the point: are you just paying the extra ...

How we feed ourselves

You may have seen a recent report saying that going meat free one day per week saves more greenhouse gas emissions than eating a fully local diet. It seems kind of dubious, doesn’t it? You’re telling me that shipping grains and fruit half way around the world has less environmental impact than raising it locally? ...

I love the Soil Association, I really do – you will rarely meet a finer bunch of sensible, noble, inspired, and passionate people than at a Soil Association conference. But boy-oh-boy has the organisation been holding them back! The Soil Association’s position and principles have been well intentioned, but the way they’ve gone about their ...

The Food Movement: getting better or worse?

Both. As food growers, sellers and eaters, we’re moving in two directions at once. The number of hungry people has soared to nearly 1 billion, despite strong global harvests. And for even more people, sustenance has become a health hazard—with the US diet implicated in four out of our top ten deadly diseases. Power over ...

Amen

The most rational way to feed ourselves is as locally as possible. This means fresh, nutritious, sustainably-produced food. Such a food system also creates jobs, livelihoods, and a strong local economy; more people know each other, education and health standards rise, crime falls, wildlife flourishes, and people are more fulfilled. Not A Supermarket

Shades of green: should there be more organic licencing options?

Organic food shoots itself in the foot with its elitist principles, say a recent article in Farmers’ Weekly. Organic isn’t yet what one might call ‘mainstream’, so they may have a point. For too many of us, being organic comes at too high a cost: at the till, in labour costs, paperwork, effort, and time. ...

Visualising an economy of plenty

New Dream Mini-Views: Visualizing a Plenitude Economy from Center for a New American Dream on Vimeo. via Visualizing a Plenitude Economy on Vimeo.

Federated networks of food providers

Music to my ears: It was always felt by the group that technology might exist (or be developed cost‐effectively) that could allow individual group members to place orders directly with suppliers whilst consolidating these orders and providing the supplier and the distribution company with consolidated bulk orders for ease of transport. Joining the Dots, Sustain ...