Author Archives: paulpeaceparables

“Dime con quien andas y te dire quien eres” “Entre menos burros, mas elotes” Wawrzyniec* meditated peacefully that Thursday morning in the iconic place of Holy Family, along with 10-20 percent of the population of the village of Nazareth (rural, mostly Catholic German-Americans; population, 309). And then suddenly! … An epiphany!! (Wawrzyniec has many.) Wawrzyniec’s […]

“Gottamnit Leroy!” exclaimed Fritz very irately.  “Ju may play goot pitch. But ju’re a tamn disgrace ta da Jerman race!! … I vent down to Haby’s store and bought some of dat Alsatian sausage vit goot coriander for a nickel-a-link.  Din I cuuked-tit-up and ate dat link sausage. … Din I pooped tit out, and […]

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/10/14/human-existence-wilson As a young budding scientist of thirteen years of age, E.O. Wilson may have been the first to report on the occurrence of the red imported fire ant in the U.S. He went on to become a prominent ant research scientist and sociobiologist. As pasture entomologist in southern Georgia and western Brazil who has […]

The 4 major threats to industrialized agriculture — Fred Kirschenmann speaks http://www.non-gmoreport.com/articles/january-2015/fred-kirschenmann-on-farming-as-a-self-regulating-self-renewing-system.php Fred Kirschenmann is a leader in “organic” agriculture and a pragmatic practitioner. In this short reading (first url) upon which to reflect, and which I am hopeful leads to your reading of his Cultivating an Ecological Conscience and listening to his YouTube presentations—we […]

http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/153031/ http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/socec/downloads/HH_Publi_Feb2013.PDF http://ourenergyfutures.org/profile-n-Helmut_Haberl-mid-8.html In the early 1970s David Pimentel introduced me to energetics of agricultural and other living systems … and largely because of an energy crisis at that time, I listened. This was amplified and reinforced shortly thereafter by H.T. Odum and Erich Farber, and then many others, who forced me to study and […]

Agroecology, Small Farms, and Food Sovereignty Old friend, Dr. Miguel Altieri, and “Vía Campesina believe[s] that in order to protect livelihoods, jobs, people’s food security, and health as well as the environment, food production has to remain in the hands of small-scale sustainable farmers and cannot be left under the control of large agribusiness companies […]

http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/living-nets-in-a-new-prairie-sea In the beginning there was Nature*. With the addition of humans, we added the Land** and the Commons*** and Artificial****. After agriculture ten thousand years ago (see the previous post/reflection), then with industrialization a few hundred years ago, and now with the electronic/information age … humans have become the dominant species and have begun […]

http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html Some of what is outlined in Jared Diamond’s “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” has been seriously challenged. However, his opening statement rings true, i.e., “To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image.” Agriculture has contributed–at least at times and in places—to: • social and gender inequality, • […]

http://energy-reality.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/04_Faustian-Economics_R2_032713.pdf [http://energy-reality.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/04_Faustian-Economics_R2_032713.pdf] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNV0xXy5oSg If there is one author our young and old youth should read, it is Stanford University graduate/Wallace Stegner-Writing-Fellow/farmer, Wendell Berry. One of my favorite quotes of his (which I plan to have on my simple flat tombstone) is: “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. […]