A 50 Year Farm Bill

Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry have a short op-ed in the NY Times today (logins if needed):

Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological “solutions” for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.

Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities.

For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.

Not unrelated, Salon has a review of Mark Bittman's new book, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, which is described as "applied Pollan."

Church and State

Recently released report from Pew on the religious makeup of Congress and contrary to race and gender it looks a lot like the rest of the country it purports to represent. The full report here and some summary from USA Today.  Of Interest at first glance:  the rise of Catholics (+11.3%) and Jews (+6.1%) and the decline of Protestants (-19.4%) over the past 48 years; and the fact that you apparently still can't get elected without claiming some faith tradition (0% unaffiliated compared to 16.1% of the population).

Urban Hunger in Africa

If I remember correctly, somewhere around 40% of Africa's population live in urban areas, a number that was in the low teens circa 1950. So it's no surprise that the U.N. is struggling to find solutions for the rising problem of urban hunger across the continent and in doing so finding that it's a different beast altogether from the rural hunger that the international development industry has principally been "designed" to combat:

Escalating hunger in African cities is forcing aid agencies accustomed to tackling food shortages in rural areas to scramble for strategies to address the more complex hunger problems in sprawling slums.

The United Nations World Food Program, the world's largest food-aid group, has plenty of experience trucking food into rural Africa, responding to shortages sparked by drought, famine and war. But in urban areas -- where, despite widespread poverty, hunger wasn't a significant issue until recently -- the hurdles are different.

In the vast and crowded slums, with many unnamed streets and dwellings without running water or electricity, it is difficult to identify who's most in need of help. Simply handing out food can disrupt cities' informal markets, cutting into the livelihoods of those who earn a few dollars each day selling peanuts or fresh fish, or of small farmers who haul their produce to the city.

As Bill Easterly is fond of saying, poverty is more than a technical engineering problem that is simply waiting for the right answer to come along. Effective ground level solutions have to find ways to knit together the socio-cultural fabric that has been torn apart by poverty and hunger, unfortunately that is a really hard task to accomplish if the needed threads have been left behind in the village.

In rural areas, aid groups can rely on the communities to help single out the neediest people and quickly distribute aid. That's more difficult in cities, where more nuanced surveys are needed to find the most vulnerable.

One suggestion, Ms. Sheeran, might be to call the church.

NPR Hearts Me

We finally got around to becoming members of our local NPR affiliate this year and if I had known that they were going to cater to my musical tastes so well I would have done so much sooner.  There was a nice interview with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver on NPR this afternoon discussing their new EP, Blood Bank, due out on January 20th - they've also got some nice live performance audio up as well.  Even better they've just started streaming Andrew Bird's new album, Noble Beast, also due out January 20th.  

Both mentioned previously here.

Update:  Long profile of Andrew Bird in the NY Times. (user: beatbox/pword: beatbox)

Links

1.  Ranking rich countries' commitment to the developing world:

I suppose this means most countries just aren't "earning" our help.

2.  Boy Scout earns all 121 possible merit badges.  You only need 21 to make eagle scout.  Here's a list of the 121 current merit badges, here's a list of those that have been discontinued since 1911.  If nothing else it's a good record of the rise of the urban, technology dominated culture of modern America and the decline of the agrarian. 

3.  Best of 2008: Blogs.  One of my favorite newly discovered blogs this year has been Kim Wolhuter's video/photography blog, Wildcast.  Wolhuter is a wildlife filmmaker (with quite a pedigree as both his father and grandfather were the head ranger at Kruger) operating along the Zimbabwe/South Africa border and he updates his blog with amazing frequency with video and photography of incredible quality.  It's a can't miss for wildlife geeks and today's post is a good example. 

4.  When a phillips is not a phillips, an exhaustive guide.

5.  Penguin's favorite book designs of 2008 and Robot 6's 25 best comic book covers. 

Belated Tennyson

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out false, ring in the true.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;

Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the shapes of foul disease,

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be. 

Sadly, the old is already new.

The Science of Shopping

From the Economist:

Then there is the in-store bakery, which can be smelt before it is seen. Even small supermarkets now use in-store bakeries. Mostly these bake pre-prepared items and frozen dough, and they have boomed even though central bakeries that deliver to a number of stores are much more efficient. They do it for the smell of freshly baked bread, which makes people hungry and thus encourages people to buy not just bread but also other food, including frozen stuff.

Links

1.  White farmers in Zimbabwe are looking to the tribunal of African judges set up by the SADC for legal help in ongoing conflicts over land redistribution.  I've wondered if this could be an opening for the southern African nations to demonstrate their displeasure with Mugabe, but given the volatility of the issue across much of southern Africa maybe not.  Land tenure is messy, messy stuff.

2.  Paste has a piece on the newest addition to Sufjan's Asthmatic Kitty label, The Welcome Wagon.  The group is a husband wife duo from Brooklyn, he's a presbyterian pastor (Aside: I like the simple clean look of their church website).  Sufjan, who produced, arranged and contributed, sums up their record, which I like, quite well:

It’s a Presbyterian ordained minister and his wife, playing religious songs. Take it or leave it.

3.  From Salon:  In defense of pie (a defense I am in whole hearted support of, though at my wedding we opted for cheese cake which is, I suppose, a sort of pie/cake hybrid compromise). 

4.  I'm still catching up so here is the Big Pictures year in photos part two and part three. 

5.  Amazon is selling their top 50 albums of the year in mp3 format for five dollars each.  My favorite album of 2008 is there if you don't have it yet as well as a few others that would be in my top 10ish:   Gnarls Barkley, Santogold, and Girl Talk.

6.  Happy New Year.