Farming
A great video that covers most of the big issues around small food production (in this case raw milk) Infuriating and inspiring all at the same time. Please take 20 minutes to watch it.

Saturday February 18, 2012
House Chamber of The Vermont State House
Montpelier, VT
12 noon-3pm
Peace – Love – Liberty
Join us as we fire up the Ron Paul
in Vermont and respond to the status quo, party line rhetoric with REAL CHANGE: the message of liberty, freedom and a return to the Constitution...

Bioterrorism is back in the news. The FBI just closed its investigation of the anthrax attack in 2001 that killed 15 people and sickened 17 others. More recently, we have concerns that the laboratory-created highly infectious and lethal H5N1virus might fall into the hands of terrorists. It is, thus, highly propitious the new director of the FDA, Margaret Hamburg, the former Health Commissioner of the State of New York is an expert on bioterrorism. In his remarks at the appointment ceremony President Obama noted that the FDA, as it is presently operating has failed to protect the quality of the American food supply from microbial...
On December 4, 2011, farmers and activists from across the country joined the Occupy Wall Street Farmers March for "a celebration of community power to regain control over the most basic element to human well-being: food."
The Farmers March began at La Plaza Cultural Community Gardens where urban and rural farmers addressed an excited crowd about the growing problems in our industrial food system and the promise offered by solutions based in organic, sustainable and community based food and agricultural production. This was followed by a 3-mile march from the East Village...
The “Food Landscape” of the Social, Political and Economic World is changing fast. Trying to keep up on all that is happening is a challenge.
Introducing my new e-News Paper The Food Watch Daily. It is an automatically generated news paper from selected RSS feeds and Twitter accounts covering food; issues, regulation, legislation and solutions.
The paper is released every day at 10 am Eastern Standard time. After it is released I will be hand selecting articles and videos to publish as well as edit the overall content, when my time allows...
In this fine article, Tom Philpott regales us with the sordid tale of wanton whore bags from the industrial food lobby successfully preserving regulations that allow the lilliputian smear of tomato paste on a frozen pizza to count as a vegetable when calculating the nutritional merits of school lunches.

This inspired me to spend part of the morning peppering Governor Shumlin's twitter feed with perky pellets of 140 character cleverness asking why the fuck Vermont feeds our wee ones the bleached, irradiated,...
The System of Debt is the System of Death:
Examining the intertwined root causes of the crises we face
A workshop and dialogue hosted by Anne Petermann and Orin Langelle of the Hinesburg-based Global Justice Ecology Project
Saturday, Nov. 12th
11am City Hall Park
“We live in a toxic crisis-ridden world because choices are driven, not by ethics or morals, not by justice vs. injustice, not even by objective science. Choices are driven by the bottom line. The 1% who run corporations make their decisions based on profits--on advancing their own self-interests to the detriment of all other life on Earth.”
The...

As of October 31, 2011, the demographers at United Nations recently proclaimed, the population of the Earth reached 7 billion. Just a dozen years ago, it passed 6 billion. As disturbing as this event was, it was not nearly as upsetting as the UN’s projection that the Earth’s population will be an estimated 9.3 billion by 2050. In effect, by mid-century, the Earth, already overburdened with one India, will be asked to bear the burden of two more.

I am a trained social-scientist...
Our work with www.CompostPower.org is heating up with several projects happening in VT, MA and NH this fall. We've finally figured out how to manage the details to make this concept work in a predictable way, and this winter there will be several systems in use to heat greenhouses and buildings.
The best example yet is a Compost Power project that was integrated into a radiant-floor heating system and a solar hot water system in New Hampshire. Cecil Smith of Polar Solar did this project by himself in one day with a small tractor. He learned how to do this by taking my CompostPower class through Yestermorrow.org. See pictures below.
...
This past Tuesday, the 13th of September, two migrant farm workers were arrested during a “routine traffic stop”. VT Governor Shumlin has ordered an investigation. Excerpts from The Seven Days Blog article with my responses.
According to Hoag (the Driver a US citizen),...