After a hideous winter living in abysmal circumstances in a rented house with a psycho landlady whom we had to take to the tenancy tribunal we now live in a house that is at least up to health and safety standards and is in fact one of the best houses we have ever lived in. Thanks to the help of my in-laws who made this possible we now have a home with a piece of land that will hopefully see our dream of a Perma-culture Food forest come true.

After we have settled in we are going to plan our food forest according to Perma-culture principles and we are looking forward to seeing wwoofers live and learn with us to achieve a self sustainable eco-system that will provide us and our visitors with all the food we need.

The future looks bright again.

Of all occupations,” observed the Roman philosopher Cicero, “there is none better than agriculture, nothing more productive, nothing sweeter, nothing more worthy of a free man.” It is a sentiment that still holds true in the popular imagination – despite the many well-documented travails suffered by British farmers in recent years. For while the 20th century saw the rapid decline in the importance of agriculture in all its forms – today it accounts for just 0.5 per cent of our GDP and employs barely 500,000 people – the yearning to own or work a patch of land remains as strong as ever and is felt, it seems, most keenly among urban professionals for whom the ultimate lifestyle choice takes them straight back to nature.

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I don’t believe in Carbon tax. I don’t believe that carbon is our biggest problem. Carbon is a naturally occurring gas we all breath out and is absorbed by plants. I’m happy to accept that there is more carbon in the atmosphere and I’m happy to accept that we are the cause of that increase.

I’m equally easy with the fact that our way of live is unsustainable and we need to adapt to a more eco sustainable lifestyle.

But when the likes of Al Gore go from $ 2 million to a $ 100 million dollars because he owns a company which sells carbon credits and live in very eco unfriendly houses I smell a rat.

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The carbon emissions of Bono’s band’s world tour are equivalent to the waste created by 6,500 average British or Irish people in an entire year.

What if celebrity news carried its own version of a nutrition label? But instead of calories, or health risks, how about a label that gets at celebrities’ impact on the planet?

Imagine if each time a tabloid or movie or TV show fed our celebrity addiction by running the image of Angelina, Bono or Gisele Bundschen, they also were required to put the celeb’s eco-footprint in the corner of that image? If the tabs really wanted to knock themselves out, they could also run a kind of eco-ingredient list — the number of hours the celeb spends in the air, the square feet of housing she owns, number of children he has, and so on.

It’s an idea with real timeliness, if I do say so myself. A few weeks ago, uber-feminist Naomi Wolf praised Angelina Jolie’s independence, symbolized by her ability to fly her own plane, without even mentioning that if every woman did that, we’d need a million planets worth of resources to support the human population.

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The carbon emissions of Bono’s band’s world tour are equivalent to the waste created by 6,500 average British or Irish people in an entire year.

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What if celebrity news carried its own version of a nutrition label? But instead of calories, or health risks, how about a label that gets at celebrities’ impact on the planet?

Imagine if each time a tabloid or movie or TV show fed our celebrity addiction by running the image of Angelina, Bono or Gisele Bundschen, they also were required to put the celeb’s eco-footprint in the corner of that image? If the tabs really wanted to knock themselves out, they could also run a kind of eco-ingredient list — the number of hours the celeb spends in the air, the square feet of housing she owns, number of children he has, and so on.

It’s an idea with real timeliness, if I do say so myself. A few weeks ago, uber-feminist Naomi Wolf praised Angelina Jolie’s independence, symbolized by her ability to fly her own plane, without even mentioning that if every woman did that, we’d need a million planets worth of resources to support the human population.

Flying High

Anybody with a garden would be wise to start growing their own food again. Soaring oil prices and a collapsing global economy will make importing food a very expensive enterprise. Added to that why would you want an apple grown in Chili or porc grown in Canada if you can get it from around your place of living.

Food prices rocketed by 2.8 percent last month – the biggest increase in 20 years.

Figures from Statistics New Zealand show that food prices have soared by 8.4 percent in the 12 months to June.

The bad news for those picking up the weekly supermarket bill is in sharp contrast to the official figures for overall inflation – which show that the annual rate has dropped to 1.9 percent.

SNZ said that the big lift in grocery bills in June was the biggest monthly increase since a 3.8 percent rise in July 1989 – but that rise was fuelled by a lift in the rate of goods and services tax.

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If you thought domination of the world’s software market was cool, get a load of Bill Gates’ next technological vision: giant ocean-going tubs that fight hurricanes by draining warm water from the surface to the depths, through a long tube.

A second tube could simultaneously suck cool water from the depths to the surface.

Microsoft founder Gates and a dozen other scientists and engineers have a patent pending for deploying such vessels, which they say would collect water through waves breaking over the walls of the tub. Some variations have the water moving through turbines on their way down, which would in turn generate electricity to suck up the cooler water.

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Another local economy destroyed by “free” trade.

Canadians need to understand the context of today’s announcement that Mexican citizens will require visas to visit Canada.  We also need to understand the root cause of the rising number of Mexican refugees coming to Canada.

Food products—staples such as corn and beans—are flooding into Mexico.  Since the 1995 implementation of NAFTA, US corn exports to Mexico have quadrupled.  These products are flowing south at prices below Mexican farmers’ cost of production, and below the cost of production in the US.  Subsidies enable farmers to produce below cost.  NAFTA dictates that Mexico must allow this food in.  The NAFTA timetable required that on January 1, 2008, Mexico remove its final restrictions on the imports of staple food products—opening its border completely to imports of corn and beans.

Mexican farmers have been devastated by low prices for corn and other crops.  Farm families have been forced off their land, and forced to relocate to large cities and border-town maquilidoras.  NAFTA’s body-blow to Mexico’s farm sector has meant a rapid rise in the number of Mexicans who are landless, unemployed, poor, and desperate.

This growing number of desperately poor Mexican citizens has created social unrest and instability and, in some cases, a pool of people willing to work for the drug cartels.  Expanding drug cartel violence, the attendant corruption of some police and justice officials, a growing sense of lawlessness, declining safety, and declining economic prospects have driven many Mexican families to flee their homes—some have come to Canada to try to obtain refugee status.

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PACIFIC POLLUTION: A grubby scene on Funafuti in Tuvalu is repeated elsewhere on Pacific islands, says Waitakere Mayor Bob Harvey.

He was part of Prime Minister John Key’s four-countries-in-four-days Pacific junket and claims the trip left him fearing for the future of some of the Pacific’s most pristine tourist destinations.

Unchecked pollution and poor management has left many beautiful spots in jeopardy, he says.

He singled out Tonga and the Cook Islands in particular, saying these places should be seen as world heritage sites, but their government officials were failing to give attention to the rapid degradation of their environment.

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And those farmers who voted for National thinking that the fart tax would disappear. I pity them. Welcome our new masters, the ruling banking elite; The New World Order.

The Emissions Trading Scheme, as it stands, would sink Fonterra’s plans to grow milk production by between 1 and 3 per cent each year.

“If you put the system that was in against the dairy industry then you would have a 5 per cent drop-off in production because of the extra cost to the farmer and the extra costs to Fonterra,” said Fonterra chief executive Andrew Ferrier.

It’s Ferrier’s view the cost of carbon emissions should be carried by the farmers rather than by Fonterra.

“If it’s paid on-farm every farmer gets treated the same and it’s the farmer who can adjust.

“If you want to push change we can’t change it, the farmer can.”

However it works, a drop in production was counter to Fonterra’s growth plans, he said.

NEW YORK (AFP) – Monsanto, the agricultural giant known for developing biotech corn, said Tuesday it acquired WestBred, LLC, a company that specializes in genetic material for wheat.

“The investment will bolster the future growth of Monsanto’s seeds and traits platform and allow farmers to benefit from the company’s experience in drought-, disease- and pest-tolerance innovations,” Monsanto said in a statement announcing the 45-million-dollar deal.

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The “world food crisis” of 2007-08 was the tip of an iceberg. Hunger and food crises are endemic to the modern world, and the eruption of a rapid increase in food prices provided a fresh window on this cultural fact. Much like Susan George’s well-known observation that famines represent the final stage in an extended process of deepening vulnerability and fracturing of social reproduction mechanisms, this food “crisis” represents the magnification of a long-term crisis of social reproduction stemming from colonialism, and was triggered by neoliberal capitalist development.1

The colonial era set in motion an extractive relation between Europe and the rest of the world, whereby the fruits of empire displaced non-European provisioning systems, as the colonies were converted into supply zones of food and raw materials to fuel European capitalism.

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