WeStrive Chronicle

This Emerging Food Source May Get Banned from Organic (and it's not GMOs)

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Debate heats up about sustainable agriculture.
 
The USDA's National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), which determines which products can be certified organic and carry the valuable organic sticker, is leaning against allowing innovative growing systems, such as aquaponics, from the program.
 
Why? Because, according to their logic, food not grown in soil cannot be organic, even if no pesticides, herbicides or hormones are used. Yet vegetables grown in recirculating systems are proven to have exactly the same nutritional value as any other and are perfectly healthy. Decades of research have shown this. Many vegetables on our store shelves now are grown hydroponically, but this question of plant health or nutritional value has not come up.
 
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La vida locavorea: can you eat locally, locally?

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You may not have noticed it, but nestling between “frenemy”, “staycation”, and the 97 other words that were recently added to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, was the less than silky term “locavore”.

I have said it to several people this past week, and without exception, nobody has had a clue what I was talking about. Yet the movement it describes – one that encourages people to eat only produce that has been grown or reared in their immediate area – has, in the UK, Europe and the US, become one of the fastest-growing food trends of the last few years.

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Interview with Nicanor Perlas on Blogwatch: after COMELEC's re-qualification.

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In this very recent two hour long interview, easily watched in segments, Nicanor Perlas addresses his vision for New Politics and reveals pertinent information regarding the growing recognition of movements coming together to support his presidential campaign.

In it he addresses the diverse challenges the Philippines faces, with a profound and refreshing clarity of thought, all the while answering questions from his audience about the most pressing and urgent of their national concerns by engaging in a living and very down-to-earth dialogue with them.
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Rev. Nelson Johnson, interviewed by Otto Scharmer

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"I think at the base of this new possibility is growing into a higher level of our humanity. I think we have to invent social structures that are reflective of that way of thinking."

Rev. Nelson N. Johnson, Pastor and Founder of Faith Community Church in Greensboro, NC, has been active in the movement for social and economic justice since high school in the late 1950’s. He served as a local and national student leader including Vice President of the SGA at North Carolina A&T State University, in Greensboro, NC in 1970. As a student leader, he worked closely with the local NAACP on voter registration, redevelopment, housing, education, open public accommodations and worker justice. Both survivors of the November 3, 1979 tragedy, he and his wife, Joyce, helped initiate and continue to be instrumental in the groundbreaking Greensboro Truth and Community Reconciliation Project (GTCRP). 
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Nicanor Perlas makes it to the official list of candidates in the Philippines' May polls

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More than a month after being disqualified, Nicanor Perlas and Danny Lim are now official candidates for the Philippine elections in May 2010. 
 
Through Resolution 8743, the Comelec en banc announced that presidential aspirant Perlas and Liberal Party senatorial bet Lim have been included in the final list of candidates for the elections.
 
According to the resolution, Perlas was allowed to participate in the presidential race because of his "distinguished track record in public service" and capacity to launch a nationwide campaign through the environmentalist’s "access to national media" and "organized group of persons… who volunteered to support for his bid for candidacy."
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Making A Life On $2 A Day: Portfolios of the Poor

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On NPR's Planet Money:  
 
Economists at the World Bank calculate that 2.5 billion people live on $2 a day, but what exactly does that mean? In the developed world, living on so little would be almost unthinkable. For 40 percent of the global population, $2 a day is a reality that must, somehow, be made to work.
 
In Portfolios of the Poor, Daryl Collins and co-author Jonathan Morduch uncover the surprisingly complex financial lives of the most destitute people.
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Featured Blogs


LesQuestes's picture

12:16 and 27

I have been twenty-seven for sixteen minutes. The square root of which is four. There's something somewhat spine-tingling about the reality that I am about to enter the end-phase of an entire era in my life and to embark on a new kind of journey, one that will move away from a self-centric world perspective and, perhaps, one into service, into listening, into giving of myself more readily to others. I find myself bringing the first minutes of this new year of my life with aches in my body and a sadness, tinged with hope, in my heart. My last day at the age of twenty-six was, remarkably, filled with meetings, with eyes to futures, concerns for wellbeing, and the themes of empathy, trust, community strongly running through the currents of conversation. I was in eight separate meetings today, stemming from advising, giving feedback, brainstorming, and sharing. Throughout many of those moments, I became aware of my own vulnerability, my own youthfulness, and yet felt the shifting of the cusp from something to another, a slight, almost invisible, supersensible experience that spoke to me and said, "And now...."
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anniepalestina's picture

Waldorf Team in Haiti friends of waldorf education sends to work with traumatized children-support anthro emergency intervention

Soon our next intervention will start- this time in Haiti.
Some in our Team worked already together in Gaza and in Indonesia. 
the “Friends of Waldorf Education” are a non-governmental organization which built up a “emergency pedagogy”section to help traumatized children in crisis regions. We started in 2006 were we worked with children in Lebanon after the war. In 2008 we worked in China after the earthquake in 2009 we went to Gaza two times and also last year we worked in West-Sumatra, Indonesia to support children who did suffer (and still do) from the aftermath of the earthquake. 
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LesQuestes's picture

White Hairs and Wonder Years

Yesterday, I stood in front of the mirror, my hair all mussed, my shirt hanging off the kilt of my shoulder and I noticed one lone hair, shining brighter than the rest, attempting to craggily stand itself up into the air. I smiled, pulled it away from the rest of its brunette companions and marveled: this white hair was proof that I was again! It was not silvery gray, like many others that tuck themselves here and there; no, this one was white! A shimmering beacon of the next frontier for my life. Unlike perhaps many I know, I didn't freak out, I didn't immediately think, "Now I need to start dyeing my hair." No, I just thought, "I guess I am living." And so I tucked the lone hair back with the rest and went on my way.
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Seth Jordan's picture

Documentary Project

Hello everyone,

The news has just come in...the election commission has responded to the outpouring of international pressure and is allowing Nicanor Perlas to run for President of the Philippines!   

But the Idea of New Politics that Nicky represents is not confined to the Philippines. His vision of a healthy, integrated, sustainable society is an ideal that we all carry in our own corners of the world. This vision is what's so powerful. It's embodied in an amazing way in his political platform, where a truly remarkable picture begins to emerge of how a whole nation can come together and move towards it's highest future potential.
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learningtofly's picture

Stress & Surrender: What does it take to do my best?

"Don't call 911" was among the first things I said when I realized I was on the bathroom floor yesterday morning.  Paramedics were already on their way.   There was grime in my mouth from the cobbled floor under my face.
The question I keep asking myself is when do I get to be strong again?  When do I get to be a fulltime student, activist, lover, celebrater and nurturer again?  What more do I need to learn about "taking it easy," about caring for myself first?
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Vitalis's picture

Australian Green Senator supports Nicanor Perlas Presidential Bid

Citizens from around the world, especially concerned with environmental and social justice see in Nicanor Perlas the profound insight and practical capacities to make a meaningful, positive and far reaching impact both in the Philippines and, (as his track record shows over the past 40 years), also the globe, were he to be elected as President in 2010.
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Featured Articles


What Can Biodynamics Contribute to the Future of Agriculture? The Biodynamic Food Chain

“As a culture we seem to have arrived at a place where whatever native wisdom we may have possessed about eating has been replaced by confusion and anxiety.  How did we ever get to the point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?”
    -    Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma

The modern agricultural landscape is indeed a confusing place. Seemingly contradictory statements, like “eating is an agricultural act” and “it’s just lunch,” muddle our perception of what, in fact, “agriculture” means. Even our once-firm ideological grip on the combined economic-agricultural agenda of the organic movement is being challenged by the appearance of organic foods in Wal-Mart and McDonald’s.
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Community, Compassion and Passion: Retreat for Farm-Based Educators, November 13, 2009

At the first annual Farm Based Educators Retreat in East Troy, Wisconsin, like-minded folks came together to be able to serve one another and thus, ultimately serve the anthroposophical community with deep support in the realm of child and adult farming and gardening education.

After a rather tortuous drive to East Troy, having to navigate my way through Chicago's traffic jams, wrong turns provided by mapquest, and washed-out bridges, I at last arrived at my destination in the dark of a cold night. As soon as I walked through the door, a bearded man greeted me in a lighted portal and warmly said, "finally we meet, my friend." I had the sense that he wasn't just referring to this lifetime. Any anxieties I had about my time together with relative strangers melted away instantly. The rest was uphill from there.
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Reflections on Farm Week: Our Connection to Hawthorne Valley Farm

“If children are given a sense for the living earth and their connection with it when they are young, they will develop into adults who are, on the one hand, more securely rooted in themselves, and on the other are more capable of acting as caring custodians of the natural world.”
    -Rudolf Steiner, Lecture given in Torquay, August 14 1924

More than thirty-five years ago, a group of teachers from the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City saw the need for students to have knowledge of, and experience with, biodynamic farm work as part of their education.  They recognized that something vital was missing from the student’s education and that these city children needed to have a place where they could go to learn about life on a farm.  Through this initiative, what is now known as Hawthorne Valley Farm was transformed from a small, ailing farm into a working biodynamic farm with the intention of offering farm education.
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Integrity, Wholeness, and Healthy Farms

(Excerpts from an article originally published in Winter 2009 issue of Biodynamics. The original article was an edited version of a speech delivered at the Acres USA conference in December 2008).

Rudolf Steiner, the father of biodynamic agriculture, viewed the farm as a self-contained individuality.  His advice was to develop a personal relationship to everything in farming.   Steiner’s advice touches upon the core of what a biodynamic farm is about.  A biodynamic farmer relates to the farm just as we relate to our spouse, our children, our close friends.  By making a relationship personal, we make it real.  We learn to listen as we realize that there is a balance between what you have to give before you are able to receive.  Good and functional relationships have integrity—one of the key qualities that makes them work.
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Ingredients

As part of an effort to illustrate the dynamic, local and community-oriented food movement, a new feature-length documentary film, called Ingredients, puts the spotlight on biodynamic farming practices at Bergstrom Winery in Newberg, Oregon, and Roxbury Farm in Kinderhook, New York. Taking a seasonal look at how people across the country are working to revitalize the connection between food and land, Ingredients profiles farms, wineries, restaurants, chefs, and food activists such as Alice Waters and Gary Paul Nabhan.

The film fits well after a viewing of Food, Inc., the 2009 documentary that has so effectively startled audiences with its -intelligent discussion of our integrated set of problems facing food and agriculture systems. While Food, Inc. does end on a positive note with affirmations of the ways in which we can all go forth with our own individual efforts to develop a healthier, more just, and safer food system, one still leaves the theater with a feeling of shakiness.
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Biodynamics

In the early 1920's a group of practicing farmers, concerned with the decline of the soil, sought the advice of Dr. Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy, who had spent all his life researching and investigating the forces that regulate life and growth. From a series of lectures and conversations held at Koberwitz, Germany, in June 1924, there emerged the fundamental principles of biodynamic farming and gardening, a unified approach to agriculture that relates the ecology of the earth-organism to that of the entire cosmos. This approach has been under development in many parts of the world ever since.
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Featured Groups


A People for Perlas

Global citizens supporting Nicanor Perlas for President of the Philippines in 2010

Biodynamics Association

Nurturing the biodynamic movement in North America through education, research, and development

North American Youth Section

Where you can find out about the Youth Section, upcoming events, youth internship opportunities, and more.

Think OutWord

A peer-led training in Social Threefolding for young adults

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