I should have posted it a while ago, like before the date of the presentation on May 27th but never the less, here is the blurb for my presentation at City Repair's 8th annual Village Building Convergence.

Here are the photos of the compost which took quite a bit less time to move then you might expect, I'll hopefully be posting the after photos this weekend.

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5302

The increase in world agriculture prices caused by the global boom in biofuels could benefit many of the world’s rural poor—one of many conclusions of a landmark new 450-page book, Biofuels for Transport: Global Potential and Implications for Energy and Agriculture, authored by Worldwatch and published by Earthscan.

http://www.energybulletin.net/25315.html

by Sharon Astyk
"It is well that thou givest bread to the hungry, better were it that none hungered and that thou haddest none to give."

St. Augustine

There are many questions that have come up for me in writing a book about food, energy and climate, but the one that I find most engaging is the question of exactly what was gained and lost in the transition to industrial agriculture and the green revolution. While there have long been critiques of the Green Revolution, many, many people assume that without the work of Norman Borlaug and the other scientists who brought us new hybrids and who convinced much of the world to convert to nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides based on fossil fuels, we cannot feed the world. I am suspicious of this claim, and have been musing on it for some time. It is certainly true that grain yields rose dramatically during the Green Revolution, but how much does and did that actually matter?

 http://www.energybulletin.net/23428.html

We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.

- Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1500s

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

- Arthur C. Clarke

"Magic" is how humans have customarily described the soil's natural cycles of decay and growth. Without a scientific understanding, our ancestors relied on observation and traditional practices to grow crops.

Modern chemical agriculture has been only marginally better at understanding the soil. Unable to control the natural cycles, it bypasses them with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Despite the outward successes of modern agriculture, its heavy-handed approach brings with it pollution, soil degradation and other ills.