About Permaculture Songs and the Food (In)security Narrative

by Elena Louisa The promotion of food (in)security over decades has achieved to govern the way we think about alternatives to industrialised agriculture. Global famine is not a problem of food scarcity but a legacy of unequal power structures which are weaved into past and present agri-food systems. Agriculture based on permaculture can embrace localized …

We need to talk about robots

By Paul Robbins. A political ecology of robots is due, one that is rigorously empirical, dedicated to justice and animal welfare, but unromantic in every regard.

Sustainable integration? Nexus thinking and the foreclosure of progressive eco-politics

by Joe Williams The water-energy-food nexus has become a powerful framework for sustainable development that seeks to integrate the management of resource sectors for increased efficiency. However, its current mobilisation is fundamentally de-politicising, overlooking the contradictions and injustices of resource governance The water, energy and food sectors are, of course, deeply connected. Agriculture accounts for …

Planting the seeds of degrowth in times of crisis – Examples from Greece – Part II

By Marula Tsagkari * In the second of a two-part series, Marula Tsagkari explores how today, we are participants in a complex and severe crisis, and a radical crisis requires radical solutions. Through a number of examples it became obvious that in Greece there is groundwork for a transition to sustainable degrowth. There are seeds …

Desierto Liquído – Liquid Desert

Have we transformed our seas into a liquid desert? The documentary Desierto Líquido - Liquid Desert investigates overfishing through a journey that takes us close to the voices and lives of local fishing communities in Spain, Senegal and Mauritania. On the 25th of November 2016, the conference Blue EcoForum took place in the Maritime Museum …

Agroecología: ¿institucionalizando la alternativa?

By Inés Morales Bernardos, Jon Sanz Landaluze y Marian Simón Rojo* La irrupción de las candidaturas populares, alimentadas por gentes de los movimientos sociales, ha abierto en el movimiento agroecológico nuevas perspectivas de interacción con las instituciones. No veremos una revuelta del pan en nuestras calles. Ser parte, incluso como convidado modesto, del “club de …

The Earth and the people are not inputs to your capitalist system, sorry sir!

An Interview with Vandana Shiva. By Ethemcan Turhan.* There is this fear of intellectual freedom because the old paradigm must be maintained to continue that project of colonising the earth, colonising people’s minds. The minute people are able to think for themselves, that project is over. Vandana Shiva is one of the leading thinkers today …

Is food really becoming scarce?

By Carmelo Ruiz.* The questionable but persistent neo-Malthusian argument of "global food scarcity" serves to conceal the political and economic factors that cause hunger and to deflect attention away from policy alternatives like land reform and food, argues Carmelo Ruiz.  [This piece was first published on October 19, 2015 in the Institute for Social Ecology blog, and is published …

Framing “necessity” and whale-hunting in the Faroe Islands

by Benedict Singleton* Traditional whale-hunting practices are contested by animal welfare groups but may provide an alternative to the Islands' dependency on globalised food supply chains. Over the summer of 2014, the hottest topic on the Faroe Islands (an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark) was the "grindadráp". Grindadráp is the traditional, community-based, opportunistic …

Building alternative economies of food in a context of institutional violence

During a fieldwork interview with two new farmers engaged in agroecological production and alternative food networks in Bizkaia, a province of Euskadi (Basque Country), one said something like "all our young people are in jail". This was a striking comment, but not necessarily a surprising one. While walking through the territory of Euskadi it was common to …