environmental issues

SOURLANDS WORLD PREMIERE

 

SOURLANDS WORLD PREMIERE
When: June 27, 7 p.m.
Where: Off-Broadstreet Theatre, Hopewell, NJ
Tickets: $20 (includes light refreshments & glass of wine or beer)
How to Get Tickets: sourland.org
(Note: This is the website of the Sourland Planning Council. Tickets not available quite yet!)

Celebrities: After the screening, stay for a Q&A with director Jared Flesher, Mercer County Naturalist Jenn Rogers, and Princeton University Energy Plant Manager Ted Borer.

Details: All proceeds from ticket sales will benefit the Sourland Planning Council, a local non-profit organization working to protect the ecological integrity, historical resources and special character of the Sourland Mountain region.

SOURLANDS FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE
When: July 11, 7 p.m.
Where: Princeton Public Library
Tickets: Free and Open to the Public
How to Get Tickets: Just show up!

Celebrities: After the screening, stay for a Q&A with director Jared Flesher, native plant expert Jared Rosenbaum and Wattvision CEO Savraj Singh.

Details: A special summer event of the Princeton Environmental Film Festival.

Here’s their trailer:
Sourlands

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Rehabilitating vacant lots improves urban health and safety

Details for grant proposals when you are greening a vacant lot with a new market :

Report.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Another educational food production platform, if nothing else….

When I worked at marketumbrella.org, one of the many projects that I helped design and run was our White Boot Brigade, the roaming shrimper market for added seasonal seafood sales. Rouse’s Supermarkets was an early supporter of the WBB, and we genuinely enjoyed working with this Houma-based family company. Since they gamely took on being the main grocery store chain in our city (when Sav-A-Center decided that post-Katrina New Orleans wasn’t for them), I for one was very happy as I knew them and knew their stores. New Orleanians are VERY picky about their “markets” (as stores are often called) and yet, the Rouse family has mostly met their needs. As for buying locally, they do buy, they do support local entrepreneurs. Farmers have a harder time getting their produce in there, but value-added farmers market vendors seem to be doing well.
They just opened a store a few blocks from the flagship Saturday farmers market in downtown New Orleans, and I think it will help both the market and the store. That store is the subject of this excellent story on their new rooftop garden.

The only supermarket in downtown New Orleans is the first grocery in the country to develop an aeroponic urban farm on its roof.

What exactly is an aeroponic urban garden?

Think vertical instead of horizontal. The garden “towers” use water rather than soil, and allow plants to grow upward instead of outward. It was developed by a former Disney greenhouse manager, and is used at Disney properties, the Chicago O’Hare Airport Eco-Farm and on the Manhattan rooftop of Bell Book & Candle restaurant.

Rouse’s downtown

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Sourlands Trailer

Please keep your eyes and ears out for a new film called Sourlands by Jared Flesher, who also did “The Farmer and The Horse” another agricultural film many of us supported through Kickstarter.
I urge everyone to support this important movie, a documentary film starring food, energy, habitat, crazy weather, global climate change and — most important of all — the people these issues impact.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Toronto trip #1

I just returned from giving the keynote at the Greenbelt Farmers Market Network Market Manager Day in Toronto Canada. I know, how lucky does one person get…

Spending four days with my peers to the north taught me a great many things and confirmed some others. I will post a few different stories and highlights about the trip this week, but let me start today with some generalities:
1. The deep awareness of the importance of civil society in Canada serves the market and food system well. Those working on these issues know that in order for change to be calibrated correctly, it is important for citizens to constantly act as “civic agents.” They are not afraid to be oppositional when needed (when dealing with government especially) but also understand that they need to “assist each department in achieving their particular mandate” as eloquently stated by Barbara Emanuel, Manager of the Food Strategy at Toronto Public Health. (That civic agent term was defined again for me in an article I read on the way home in the latest Democracy: A Journal of Ideas in a series called Reclaiming Citizenship which I heartily recommend as well.)
2. Every food organizer I met on that trip understood that the farmer/producer needs to remain as the central partner in all projects. In other words, I didn’t come across lip service to the needs of the farmer. That lip service is usually found in code words or phrases such as “scaling up” or “elitist farmers markets” in food system conversations that I find myself in across North America and in other Western countries. Those code words tell you that the sayers are content to ignore the facts of the relative age and sophistication of our work and the intractable nature of the industrial food system so far.
I instead heard complex, thoughtful responses to the needs of farmers while balancing health equity needs for shoppers. I wish I found that more often in my travels.
3. A set of organizers who recognize that they all must remain at the same table. More specifically, that they all sit at the table but may not have the same menu of choices in front of them. Debbie Fields, the extraordinary Executive Director of FoodShare Toronto said as much to me about her colleague Anne Freeman (my host, the organizer of the Greenbelt Farmers Market Network and founder of the Dufferin Grove Farmers Market) “Anne and I understand that we have the same goal but have to use different avenues to get there.”
4. Internal evaluation is becoming known and necessary. I can’t wait to tell you more about the dynamic presentation (and later meeting of the mind) I experienced through Helene St. Jacques, a Food Share board member and marketing research professional showing results of the research done on behalf of the markets. . And, I look forward to doing some of that US/Canada evaluation sharing with Helene as well.

So much to tell you….

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Study Links Honey Bee Deaths to Corn Insecticide

As evidence piles up on honeybee decline, I think it’s important for markets to share this with their shoppers and their farmers. In many cases, market managers are the only the link between emerging news, global research and their community.

Study Links Honey Bee Deaths to Corn Insecticide | Care2 Causes.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

SoulFire4TheGulf | Turtle Women Rising

SoulFire4TheGulf is a Gulf Healing Ceremony inspired by New Orleans Medicine Person and Musician, Dr. John. In Solidarity and Support of his vision, Turtle Women Rising and the tribal communities of Isle de Jean Charles, Pointe aux Chien, the Dulac Bands of the Biloxi, Chitimacha, Choctaw and the Atakapa Ishak Tribe join in Unity to welcome the Grandmothers, Elders and People of All Nations to support a Stand For The Earth April 16-20, 2012 in Mandeville and New Orleans, Louisiana.

SoulFire4TheGulf | Turtle Women Rising.

Support this wonderful work

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Mushrooming diapers (or diapering mushrooms?)

Allowing mushroom vendors in markets can be more complicated than it seems to outsiders. Since many mushroom vendors forage their product (which in turn means markets cannot inspect their sites) markets have to be creative while they practice what they preach (producers only rules!) The growing practice in this article may address although it seems to increase the need for production of diapers!


“Oyster mushrooms, Pleurotus ostreatus, can devour 90 percent of a disposable diaper within two months, observed Alethia Vázquez-Morillas of the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City in the journal Waste Management. (1) What’s more, the mushrooms grown on diapers are edible. Vázquez-Morillas has dined upon them herself.”
Conservation Magazine

0 CommentsLeave a comment

extreme weather

This may cross farmers and market organizers minds at times, but in my experience few have prepared for the possibility of having interruption in the food system. Being a New Orleanian, I have personally experienced it twice, with the 2005 levee breaks and then the BP oil spill. Even after restarting the food system twice, we still have no master plan for another crisis, although a few organizations like marketumbrella.org have some systems in place.
If we are having such a difficult time, I can imagine what those regions who have not seen a crisis in the past 30 years have done in preparation! Do they have a back up plan for contacting farmers and producers when the internet and main phones are out? Do they know what their community foundations have planned? Is there any emergency funds built for food system people? Who are the state and regional government leaders they need to know?
Watching the informal sisterhood of food NGOs in Vermont recover from Irene has shown me what collaboration can do within a single political entity. However, I have heard little about what the multi-state approach has been to that same disaster.

Extreme weather is happening in more states and in more ways with the global weather instability that our carbon emissions have brought. What then is YOUR plan in YOUR region? Who are your key players? What is the sequence of events that will unfold if (or can I say) WHEN it happens in your food system?

Top 10 extreme weather events by state

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Bakers dozen of carbon mile trips

My Toronto colleague Wayne Roberts has written an excellent piece on the miles it takes to get food to you. Even though I can imagine how many of these that most of us have seen, this one really breaks it down so “civilians” can get the enormity. Another good piece to add to your market newsletter…

Roberts

0 CommentsLeave a comment