January 8th, 2009 By Angie Tagtow
As Tom Vilsack and Tom Daschle assume their cabinet positions in the Obama administration as Secretaries of Agriculture and Health and Human Services, respectively, they inherit mammoth challenges. Working together will be key to their success, because their work has a common denominator – food. Read More
January 6th, 2009 By Paula Crossfield
Yesterday, two of the sustainable food movements great leaders, Wes Jackson, plant geneticist and president of the Land Institute, and farmer/writer Wendell Berry opined on their growing concern for the havoc we are wreaking on our soil. Read More
August 19th, 2008 By Jeremy Oldfield
This is a story that begins down the road from the Nearing’s Good Life Center in Harborside, Maine, and ends in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1954, Scott and Helen Nearing published Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, which delves into the politics, economy, and pragmatic lessons of their 20th Century homesteading. It became a veritable bible for America’s “Back to the Land” movement in the late 1960s. Today, the Good Life Center (the Nearings’ final homestead) stands as a living museum of this lifestyle. In 2007, my girlfriend and I found ourselves apprenticing at a lovely farm a quarter mile from the Center. Read More
August 7th, 2008 By Elisabeth Ptak
If we can make the right choices about where our food comes from, we can change the world. Protecting farmland is the first vital step.
—Alice Waters
When Ellen Straus, a dairywoman from Marshall, California, gazed out from her family’s farm in the early 1970s, she saw practically the same sight as those who raised livestock there 150 years before would had seen. And it was just about the same view a coastal traveler on this section of Highway One, located about 50 miles north of San Francisco, would see today: rolling hills, ranches, and the sparkling estuarine waters of Tomales Bay. Read More