“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, April 24, 2011

Green Tech Food Innovations


One word that sums up the problem: Agriculture.
Our food and agriculture system is particularly broken, but we can’t simply wait for the government to fix it. As with clean energy, there are many opportunities for private enterprise to stimulate progress while making a profit. Some of the short-term opportunities in food might be to leverage consumer awareness and build a brand that stands for environmental consciousness, while aligning for longer-term regulatory changes to level the playing field.


A great piece by Ari Partovi. Anyone who helped make Dropbox is okay in my book. He thought to invest in a company that puts greenhouses in the roofs of supermarkets.

4 comments:

Ross Wolfe said...

Well, at least we have moved away from the days of the small family farm. Big, factory farming produces its own problems -- but at least it makes production more efficient. What is needed is command of the means of production through radical social reorganization. Only then can the haphazard, chaotic and dangerous hyperexploitation of agriculture, as well as other fields of production.

Permapoesis said...

efficient?

we have ecological crises because we have moved away from small diverse family farms to polluting, monocultural, energy intensive, animal cruel, factory farming.

factory farming:

let's throw more idiotic, urban-centric, cartesian problem solving technology at food production and see how we can maximise profits. shareholder science isn't ecological intelligence - it's brown tech all the way. dumb and dumber; hyper-mediated and vulnerable to expensive oil and climate instability. small biodiverse family farmers (permaculturalists et al) are generalist ecologists, factory operators are thugs. i know who will be more resilient in a post-city future.

post city:

with reruralisation of populations due to energy descent and climate chaos, many of us will gradually return to distributed food supplies - ie relocalisation of food and energy – marking the efficient/global/hyper-exploitative legacy of high ascent industrialism just an end chapter in the historical period we can label 'late pathological anthropocentrism'.

bring back the generalists i say - the poets, foragers and small plot farmers who know the world through understanding again the local. industrialised global art, science, academia, governments and corporates are collectively the very nub of the problems we face. climate chaos and energy declines will attend to inane human progress myths, and may even mark the end of the historical age - an end to organised violence; woof woof

xx

Ross Wolfe said...

Permapoesis: Pure Romantic anti-capitalism. You'd prefer a return to the feudal mode of production. The small family farm has been romanticized to the point where its reality is almost unrecognizable. It was a haven for provincialism, backwardness, darkness, and ignorance. It was not this pastoral paradise that you'd like it to be.

Permapoesis said...

no ross, that's just your bleak and limited interpretation of what i wrote.

a return to sexually repressive old testament agrarianism has never been a response I’d champion in order to attend to current energetic and ecological crises.