Take a tea break to listen to Dr Vandana Shiva interviewed on Lateline.
Listen to her full address after receiving this years Sydney Peace Award at Vandana Shiva's Website
There is also a free download ‘ Manifesto on the Future of Seeds’ on the Navdanya International website.
Check out her new book “SOIL not Oil”.
Dr Vandana talks about many issues in this speech including the future of food and seed for humans and the essential role we must play in caring for this precious planet.
Dear friends,
The Malnad Mela is back in Bangalore for the third year running!
Come and join us in this celebration of produce and local art from the Western Ghats. Explore the importance of seed biodiversity and supporting conservation oriented livelihoods that seek to preserve and enhance age-old practices. Take home traditional seed varieties and enjoy fresh vegetables from your very own home garden.
Date: February 27-28, 2010 (Saturday & Sunday)
Time: 10 am to 6 pm
Venue: 4, Ashley Road, Off Brunton Rd (behind Hotel Ajantha on M.G. Rd),
Bangalore: 560025
Some of the produce and products from the forest home gardens this year include
Thank you to Patrick for this link.
UN Secretary General Welcome Message for the 2010 International Year of Biodiversity
We are so lucky here in Australia, in so many ways. In relation to biodiversity and things of natural wonder, much of our country is still in its pristine state and none more so than the Lake Eyre Basin of the inland , which covers 1/6 of Australia, an area about the size of France, Germany and Italy combined. The flood waters in eastern Australia last year have been making their way inland ever since, not out to sea, and have filled Lake Eyre for the first time in 50 years or more.Thousands of people go to see it; it is like a pilgrimage. It defines Australians. Watching this on TV even, makes me feel something I cannot describe....
The ABC screened a documentary on it and it is now on iView. It is worth watching on this hot, dry day in South Australia.
I subscribe to the free e newsletter called Eco eNews. Here is a snippet from the May edition today...
TWO leading Australian companies will join forces and build Australia’s largest solar power system at the Adelaide Showgrounds.
Australia’s largest solar photovoltaic power system will be designed and installed by an alliance partnership between National building and engineering company, Built Environs and Solar Shop Australia, a National provider of grid connect solar systems.
The 1MegaWatt (MW) rooftop solar system will be installed over six separate buildings at the Adelaide Showgrounds and is approximately two and a half times the size of the Singleton Solar Power Station in NSW, which surprisingly has remained Australia’s largest solar system for the last 11 years.
Once completed, the solar system is expected to produce approximately 1435 MWh of electricity annually which is enough energy to power over 230 households.
In addition it will prevent the release of 1500 tonnes of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere annually and is the equivalent of taking 450 cars off Australian roads......
For the last 50,000 years or so, as humans have been evolving and changing, so have the foods we eat. Humans have also taken some seeds with them on long journeys and planted them in new lands. The new conditions have meant different characteristics have developed. Land masses have shifted and animals and plants have become separated and consequently evolved differently. All the time large gene pools have supplied enough variation to ensure that many survive and continue to evolve.
Presently, humans are taking the very dangerous route of attempting to control evolution, by controlling seed availability and literally stopping the evolution of major food crops. This is being done in various ways. I don't want to discuss here who is doing this and why but merely to explain how we home gardeners and consumers can help keep evolution alive. The seeds, seedlings and vegetables you buy in supermarkets are becoming so removed from being whole organisms that they are verging on artificial versions of their ancestors. Selection is made for shelf life and appearance and once this is achieved, seed production becomes fixed and no more evolution is allowed to occur. Every year the same seed with the same name produces the same crop.... as long as conditions remain the same!
Research is beginning to show how devoid of nutrition mass-produced vegetables have become and how weak the plants are when even slight changes occur in their growing conditions. Should a particular chemical ingredient become unavailable,or average temperatures change, whole crops would fail. For example, so much of agricultural fertilisers are products of oil. What happens as oil becomes more expensive and less available? Already in Australia farmers are having difficulty accessing artificial fertilisers and are struggling to find other varieties to sow with a reduced chemical input requirement because the gene pools of some grains have been allowed to dwindle and in some cases we are almost down in numbers equal to polar bears, with the fittest already extinct. There used to be thousands of varieties of rice and wheat but now agri-business has destroyed the individual seed saver's diversity and in its place has sown a limited range of varieties world wide which are always the same and never evolve.
Grow your own vegetables and get your seed from local seedsavers exchanges or small, independent seed companies, like those in the side bar of this blog. Try growing something different and save the seeds yourself. Be part of the solution not the problem.
Read websites such as Bioversity International and see what is being done to maintain food biodiversity in little nooks and crannies of our world. The paragraph of this piece which is in italics, and its accompanying photo, are from the section called Agricultural Ecosystems and is worth reading in more depth.
And Maggie, there'll be a test later!
Australian Seedsavers Jude and Michel Fanton have finished their wonderful DVD, called Our Seeds: Seeds Blong Yumi
You can buy it direct from the Seedsavers website, along with other dvd's and books or elsewhere online....
......
It shows that common global threats to food quality and food security have local solutions in which we can all participate......
This excerpt is from the
New Internationalist online catalogue of ethical gifts.....and it is only $25....
I am buying it for my unethical relatives!
And I wondered if we should spend some of our group savings on a copy and share it around..... it is beautiful.
I wanted to write a thing about special foods of the areas I visited but I had forgotten until this moment.....now I hope I can remember what I discovered!
I was reminded of this idea while just now reading the October/ November edition of Sumptuous (a magazine all about South Australian food and wine) where there is a thing about black rice which reminded me of wild rice.....
I was staying in Agassiz, an hour or so east of Vancouver, with Kathy-from-my-garden-group's parents. Agassiz is in the Fraser Valley, a food growing area for Vancouver and beyond. Rosemary and Garth took me to a house that simply had a sign outside saying .....Coffee Roasting and Pottery..... sounded interesting! Inside was a woman sitting at a potting wheel, who barely spoke at first, while we followed the signs about the coffee roasting going on behind the glass screen. She heard my accent and, as we were leaving, asked me what I was doing there, in a little town like Agassiz. We got talking and she was so wonderfully interesting I would like to have stayed longer, and written a whole thing about her.....but we were heading for the airport as it was my last day. I have her email address somewhere in my as yet not-completely-unpacked suitcase.....I must write to her.
Anyway, the gist of the whole wild rice thing is that she has a friend who is from an Indian tribe further north in Canada, where wild rice grows.....wild....it is native to Canada.....I didn't know that! Anyway, only the Indians from that area are allowed to go out and collect the wild rice, and she had some for sale in her coffee, pottery and now wild rice house/shop! Rosemary bought some of the wild rice, which is not rice at all actually, and I must ask her how she got on cooking it, but as I couldn't bring it into Australia I had to leave it for next time! It is so lovely to come across such stories quite by chance, rather than by taking some touristy trap....I mean .... trip! She also talked about her chooks and her vegetables garden and how there is an annual bike ride that takes in her place and other local growers and crafts-people during summer. She has a daughter in Japan.... and so the links went on and on.....until we just had to go. As I have written before..... the earth connects so many of us.
Some people may see may see Kitchen Gardeners International mostly as an American group but I am here to tell you that Roger Doiron's campaign to put a vegetable garden on the White House lawn is a symbol of the future for all of us. The USA president is a powerful man and we have seen how much George Bush has affected international relations, climate change, free speech and human rights etc etc....all of these effects ricocheting around the world everyday. Every person in the world has been affected by American policy and will continue to be so if we can all band together to force some change for the better in the USA, even in the smallest ways, it will be magnified as it ripples around the globe.
One thing we vegetable gardening bloggers and readers can do is to support the concept of the White House promoting vegetable gardening by supporting Roger's campaign any way we can, no matter how distant and small it seems. There are a lot of us and together we can help America to be a leader in promoting local, organic food.
Please, take a moment to read this KGI's latest newsletter and follow the link to making your contribution to the health of the people and the environment and in fact the future existence of our civilisation. It is an important step in the future for every life form on earth.
Dear Kitchen Gardener,
This October has had an international flavor in our household. My family and I recently hosted Australian gardener, blogger and seed saver, Kate Flint, for a few days. Kate is a member of KGI's small board and is better known these days as the globe-trotting "vegetable vagabond." She is on the last leg of gardening world tour where she's been staying with various people from Asia, Europe and the US, all of whom grow some of their own food. Check out Kate's blog to get the full story on who she saw, what she ate and where she managed to fit in some gardening. As you can see from the photo above, we put her to work digging our Belgian endives out of the ground for winter forcing- thanks again Kate for helping and visiting!
I also want to thank all of you for helping out on a group gardening project that is really starting to bear fruit. Rather than explain what I mean, I'll let this e-mail I received earlier this week do the talking:
....................."I wanted to write to inform you that we are announcing the winners of the Climate Matters Video contest and that your video, This Lawn is Your Lawn, has won third place. Our judges loved your video and the very simple and yet powerful message of a garden outside the White House. The story, announcing our winners, will break on nytimes.com through Andrew Revkin's blog and through a nationwide press release. Over the coming days it will broadcast on LinkTV, FSTV, and be highlighted in an email blasts to over 80,000 Brighter Planet and 1Sky community members. It will be offered through SAYSME.tv as an ad to be shown in districts around the country and distributed to every member of congress and each presidential campaign alongside the other winners. We are also working on having it air at the eco-film festival prior to the San Francisco Greenfestival as well as the Wild and Scenic Film Festival."
Your mouseclicks and views of our This Lawn is Your Lawn video helped propel it into the finals where it was then judged a winner by a star-studded panel. So, give yourself a pat on the back for helping to get the word out IN A BIG WAY about the "First Garden." The Campaign has now been written up in over 450 papers nationwide and, via this contest, will soon have a TV audience of close to 50 million households. And, if all that wasn't enough, the sustainable food superstar, Michael Pollan, recently wrote a long article for the New York Times which ends with an "eat the view" recommendation of his own to the next president.
So, you might be asking what tricks, if any, we still have up our sleeve. We have just one and the most challenging one of all: keep it all going and growing! Kitchen Gardeners International doesn't accept advertising money or grants from large corporations or government sources because we want to pursue our healthy agenda free of any philosophical constraints. So that means we count on kitchen gardeners and local food advocates like you for 98% of our modest operating budget (the other 2% of last year's budget came from book sales, in case you're curious).
I recognize that the global economy is iffy at best, but I'd like to ask for your participation in our end of the year funding drive, even if it's just a symbolic donation. Since organic gardeners are strong believers in biodiversity, we're offering a diverse selection of ways to give.
1) Our new brand new 10 day eBay auction: we're hoping to raise some money and awareness for our Eat the View! work by auctioning off a 1 square foot piece of the "White House Lawn"...MY WHITE HOUSE LAWN! The auction will end on November 2nd just 2 days before Election Day. We're hoping that if we can get a few large bids in that it will generate some funds and some media attention at a critical moment in the election cycle. Because we're a tax-exempt charity, all proceeds go to KGI (eBay waives its fees for nonprofits selling directly). The winning bidder can take a tax deduction on the difference between the fair market value of the item (which we estimate to be $10...it's organic!) and the amount paid. It is possible to submit a bid anonymously for those for whom discretion is important. For those who are wondering, we have the written approval of eBay to conduct a charity auction in this way. Click here to go to our new e-bay auction page.
2) $10 as a donation to KGI and a symbolic statement of support for the Eat the View! campaign. This is for people who want to make a smaller gesture of support on behalf of the campaign. Our goal with this part of our drive is to sell 1000 square feet of the White House (symbolically only!) by the time the next president takes office. This donation can be made online with a credit card or by mailing in a check. There is no link with eBay. There is also a possibility to do this as gift in someone else's name by making the donation and then filling out a do-it-yourself "certificate of ownership" which can offered as a thoughtful and eco-friendly holiday gift. Click here to go to our White House Lawn sale page at EatTheView.org.
3) A regular, ol' fashioned tax-deductible donation to KGI with no connection to the Eat the View! campaign, the White House lawn or eBay. This donation can be made online by credit card or bymailing in a check.
Whatever way you choose or have already chosen through a contribution made earlier this year, thank you for your support. Together, we are really making a difference.
Roger Doiron
Compost-Pile-Turner-in-Chief, Kitchen Gardeners International
Seed Sower, "Eat the View" campaign
Our son Alex has been working for Google in Sydney these last few months before he heads off to Oxford late September and he has been telling us of the things they do there for the benefit of the employees, the local community and also the earth, surprisingly enough.
Last week he took part in a local (to the Google office) effort to rehabilitate a misused and now disused area next to a tramline at Pyrmont with a group of local residents who,with a bit of council funding, have been doing bush regeneration there over the last 18 months or so. All Google employees world wide are encouraged (and paid by Google to do) half a day a year of community service like this. That doesn't sound like much, but with tens of thousands of employees, that is the equivalent of one year's full time work for one person per 700 or so employees, or more than 10 years work per 7 thousand employees.
Imagine if every company with a few employees did this, 
all we could get a lot of good stuff done all over the world and, at the same time, introduce these people to places and experiences and contacts they would never otherwise have known about. This in itself could have a snowball effect as some may decide to offer their help on weekends or, through their initial good experiences of planting things, they may decide to start growing some things for themselves and maybe even start a vegetable garden or join a community garden.
We have a small company that writes computer software and I think we should start doing this and telling other businesses in the building about it...sounds like plan. Here come those enthusiasms that I am still liable to...could you do something like this where you work? Could we all do this? I think this needs to become the norm, instead of all these carbon-trading schemes where you just pay someone else money to suck up your carbon through some dodgy tree-planting scheme which, from what I understand, only serves to take over good agricultural land and make profits for investors, with no actual commitments or research into what are the benefits towards solving the carbon problems. People should have to get out and DO something, so they can talk to those who already understand what needs to be done at the same time providing the man-power to get good projects going.
Alex has managed to get himself into a weekly sailing race on Sydney harbour, through some people he is sharing an apartment with...here they are on a windless day with time to take photos!
What a life!...
Today it looks like Feedjit has measles...nice!
...Meanwhile Hugh and Amelia came around to work on some art for my birthday party...so, while Amelia did the work, Hugh read some of my recipe books - in particular one called 'Cooking and Travelling in South-West France' by Australian, Stephanie Alexander...Typical boy!
Here are some real news items about what people are doing in the world to help themselves reduce their dependence on foreign foods, oil, agri-business and to improve their nutrition at the same time.
| | http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=dsK3V04LAvw |
| International day for Biodiversity in Africa Read this article too, from 'Biodiversity International' | Seeding Deep Democracy - Vandana Shiva |
| | |
| Seedsavers Australia trailer for 'Guardians of the Seed' | Vandana Shiva - Reclaiming economy, culture and politics |
Here I am sitting here writing this stuff at 8pm on a Saturday night and you may well ask why am I not out on the town or even why am I not watching TV with Roger or just relaxing. It is because I just had to get into this - it is THE most important thing in the world today, I think. That is making a big claim but I have written about it from various angles before and I will keep on doing it.(Wild Food Biodiversity, Sowing the Seeds of Civilisation, Saving Seeds, Saving Lives) I find it very exciting, but also frustrating,that people in countries such as Africa and India are getting on with these things while we in Australia and other western countries are way behind in our thinking. Maybe by 2010 and the Year of Biodiversity, we will have caught up (and pigs might fly too!).
Let me just assume that you agree with me that biodiversity is a good thing to have. For a minute, then, lets look at how it came to be, in the first place. As evolution was taking place over the last few million years, every organism created, whether from seed or egg, for example, has had a unique set of genes - unlike any other that has ever existed. Now that is a lot of genes and a lot of combinations of genes, when you think of millions of years and many millions of generations, for some organisms. Every time 2 individuals cross, a new individual is therefore formed. After all these years of this happening you can imagine that, like in the game 'Chinese whispers', the last individual created would be nothing like the original, thousands or millions of generations before. And sometimes this difference is enough to make a new species but sometimes, if only a few of the genes are different, it becomes a new variety of, for example, bean or apple or bacteria or fish etc. Each development has only been possible because of the existence of the many before.
Now, if we go on the way we are at the moment - destroying not just varieties but actual species at an ever increasing rate (read Greg's recent post about this) you can see that whole sections of the gene pool are being erased. Once they are gone, we can never go back to their forbears and re-evolve them. Those genes specific to those species are extinct. So, evolution gets big holes in it, like a web with whole sections missing and unable to be re-connected, ever. If varieties disappear in this way so the next generation of beans or apples or bacteria or whatever can only be formed from an ever-decreasing supply of genes, until the gene pool may be so small that no viable off-spring are possible and then the whole species goes. Or there are no genes available to allow for adaptation to changing conditions - maybe only cold-hardy beans are left in a world heating up, for example. Because beans evolved from other pre-bean life-form which has now evolved so much it no longer exists itself, we cannot get the heat-resistant bean back! We are stuffed, big time! No beans...then no apples...no bananas..etc etc.
To keep evolution going forwards so it can adapt to climatic changes and so on, we need to keep everything we can reproducing and throwing up new combinations of genes which will select for new situations. By doing a simple thing like saving seeds from the strongest / most productive / earliest/ latest/ fastest / best tasting etc etc plants in our vegetable gardens we are ensuring that all those genes are being kept alive. This year I want us, as a seedsavers group, to start mixing our seeds together before redistributing them again. For example, we all have Kath's fabulous broccoli that is fast, has a big main head and lots of side shoots of excellent quality. If I just grow a few each year, they only have the chance to cross with each other and this is OK for a while. But ideally, I would like to mix my seeds in with another 4 or 5 people's seeds from the same variety of broccoli, all in Adelaide, so the genes get some new input each year but are still being selected for similar conditions. Already I have done this by accepting and planting out some seedlings from Sally in my garden group, who grew Kath's broccoli last year and saved the seeds. Now that we grow some of the same varieties we can start to really make use of the size of our group for this type of endeavour.
Somehow I wish I hadn't started on this now because I am too tired to think any more (now its 10pm) and am going to retire to watching The Bill !! Trouble is, I can never go back and get the same thread going again another day, just like with evolution, you can't go back! Oh well. I have probably said enough anyway. Now the darn thing won't align properly.Sorry!
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