Let's Make Money

Through the documentary "We Feed The World" I stumbled across Austrian filmmaker Erwin Wagenhofer. His second documentary is called "Let's Make Money". It was released in 2008 and is 110 minutes long. It is on its way to be as successful as his first documentary. It already won the German Documentary Prize in 2009.

The official web site and the partner site are currently available only in German. The trailer is here. The German version of the full film is currently on YouTube.

In it he interviews investors, financial managers, politicians, workers and homeless people. It is about globalization and privatization. It is sizzling. I love the line "Privatization originates from the Latin word 'privare' which means 'to deprive'." A viewer posted a comment in IMDB with the title "Anyone with a bank account should see this film". Do you have a bank account? If yes, go see it!

We Feed the World

"We Feed The World" is a 96-minute documentary by Austrian filmmaker Erwin Wagenhofer released in 2005. In it he traces the origins of the food we eat. Where does it come from? Which use or misuse do we perform with it? How has farming industrialized? How has it affected farming and farmers? It includes an interview with Jean Ziegler, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

The official web site lists that it has been the most successful documentary ever in some European countries. The highlights are shown in this 8-min summary. The full film is currently on YouTube. Food for thought.

The Future of Food

This 90-minute documentary film entitled "The Future of Food" was produced in 2004, but today in 2010 it is as relevant if not even more relevant as in 2004. Food is the most vital and critical element to our life and we have been passing control over to a handful of corporations. We need to reclaim control and return to basics.

The documentary was shot by Deborah Koons Garcia, wife of late rock music legend Jerry Garcia. The official website operates under the same name: www.TheFutureOfFood.com. Different trailers are here and here. The full length film can be found here (US only) and here. On interview with Koons Garcia is also on YouTube.

I found the documentary powerful and highly interesting, enough to make me look forward to Deborah Koons Garcia's upcoming project "In Good Heart: Soil and the Mystery of Fertility". No surprise that GM and Monsanto pop up throughout the film.

Supermarket Secrets

UK's Channel 4 has produced a very insightful 100-minute documentary on the topic of supermarkets and how they control how and what we eat. As we all shop in supermarkets it is an absolute must see. The documentary skilfully highlights things behind the scenes we cannot image such as animal cruelty, how the supermarkets select individual food varieties for their merit of transportability and eliminate all other varieties from the market, how they force organic and non-organic farmers to create up to 30% of waste of the harvested food, etc. The documentary is entitled "Supermarket Secrets". The bottom line is something that should not be news to us: Just like the farmers' job is not to produce food but to produce profit, so are the supermarket chains. Their primary interest is not in providing us with a variety of food, or healthy food, or safe food; their only interest is to maximize profits - and that they do very well. The final comment of the documentary is: It is time again that we learn to shop. Well said.

Spin

"Spin" is the title of a 1-hour documentary by Brian Springer, released in 1995. It can be found on the Internet here and here. It provides a behind the scenes look at the 1992 US presidential elections. This documentary is outstanding in showing how elections are fought and won. It shows the work of spin doctors and speech writers. The documentary has a lot of material of what politicians say when they believe to be off the air. This gives a good contrast to the actual thinking versus to what they say in front of the running camera. Please keep all of this in mind when you go voting the next time. The message is very clear: do not trust a politician, certainly not one in our modern political machinery.

9/11 versus Oklahoma Bombing

Since 9/11 seems suspicious, it is time to go back and also reevaluate similar incidences of the past. One of them is the Oklahoma Murrah Building bombing in 1995. Have a look at these videos entitled "Oklahoma City Reality Check" and "Turning Buildings to Dust" and interpreted by Brasscheck TV. It brings up more doubts of the same style (why and how) as associated with 9/11.

Price of Nature

The Economist published an article on why it is important to put a price on nature. This article and the story it presents is a step into the right direction. There is a lot of danger though. First -- ideally -- we should not be a profit-driven society. It is not a sign of healthy living and a mature society that everything has to have a price tag. Some things are simply priceless. Today a value of zero is attached to nature for most purposes. All such cost is "externalized". As the article correctly says "the profit is for the private pockets, the indirect costs (to nature, our health) are to be paid by the tax payer or the general public". Coming from such a misled system, putting a price onto nature is a step forward. Not ideal, but better than putting a tag of $0 on it.

Other dangers of such a system are: How do we agree to the price tag? How much is a species worth? As the article says "pandas are cute, bugs aren't". Should we put a higher price tag on pandas than on cock roaches? Further down the road we are running into a situation as we doing now with CO2. We will start trading with nature, I will kill some natural habitat here, but offset it by buying some "habitat" or "species credit" there. Everything will be bought and sold and traded. The only guaranteed winners are then traders and banks. Just like CO2 or emissions trading does not reduce or eliminate emissions, habitat and species trading will not reduce or eliminate habitat and species destruction.

It is good that people and companies start recognizing that nature has value and that it provides innumerous services to us "freely". It is good to include these values in our decisions. But we need to remind us, as an example, that when we use such tools to decide where we build our next factory, we only try to find the least detrimental solution. "Least detrimental" still is bad for us. We should first ask us if we can avoid building the factory all together through other means such as consuming less.

Thumbs Up for GM Crop

In the high tech section of the news today were three headlines:
Genetically Modified Crops Get Vote of Approval (Wall Street Journal), Gene Engineered Crops Profit Farmers (ABC News), and Biotech Crops Found to Offer Substantial Benefits for Farmers (Science Magazine). Three articles on the published 253-page report, and all three are positive. All three articles report that more than 80 percent of all soybeans, corn and cotton grown in the U.S. are now produced from genetically modified plants. None of the three finds this worrisome. Critical thinking is clearly not on the forefront of the media.

The benefits are at best short-term and shallow ignoring all the risks, while the true costs are huge, partially hidden and paid by all. Public reports do not see it that way.

Worst of all was a user comment left at the WSJ article. It basically stated his opinion that there is no difference between organic and GM food because many existing crops are cross-breeds, which is just a low-tech version of genetic modification. How did we come this far? And to such an extreme? Was it greed on the part of the politicians steering us into this direction? Blind faith in technology? Profit thinking by corporations, i.e. Monsanto? The preconceived notion that anything new must be better?

The World's Smallest Political Quiz

Are you left, right, central, a statist, or a libertarian? This tiny quiz gives you an answer. It is not too serious, but even a game can sometimes give insights. It is good to see into a mirror to see where one stands. Left and right refers to the US interpretation of these political sides, not the European one.

The Paradox of Our Age

For today a little poem:

"We have bigger houses but smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time.
We have more degrees, but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgement;
more medicines, but less healthiness.
We've been all the way to the Moon and back,
but we have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbors.
We have built more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever,
but we have less communication.
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.
These are the times of fast foods but slow digestion;
tall man but short character;
steep profits but shallow relationships.
It is a time when there is much in the window,
but nothing in the room."

Source: His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

About Great Ideas

Berthold Brecht wrote "Alle großen Ideen scheitern an den Menschen" which freely translates to "All big ideas fail because of the people." It is a quote worth pondering. At first it seems to be contradictory: inherently, big ideas are supposed to be for the benefit of the people, yet he says they fail due to the people. Why does society suffocate brilliant ideas? What can a big idea do by itself? What about a "right" idea? It can be big, it can be good, it can be beneficial to a vast multitude, but that by itself will not be convincing enough, that by itself will not guarantee that the idea will be implemented or will be a success. Often, even an idea necessary for survival will not be accepted. For our context we can let the word "idea" be a place holder for terms like "permaculture", "sustainable life style" or similar. It becomes clear that the idea is just a small piece. By itself it will be heard only by a few and even less will adapt it. The idea will need to be communicated, shared, discussed and publicized. Books, blogs, videos play a key role here. Further on and in parallel, a lot of work will need to go into hands-on convincing people. In this phase, workshops, coops and demo sites come to mind. Any idea, no matter how good, rational, well-intentioned and self evident, is just a starting point. It is the spark. It will need a lot of fuel (work and effort) to start a big fire. Let us not be the people that make big ideas fail in today's society.

Basque Country Coops

There is only limited material available regarding permaculture and related strategies in the Basque Country. Here are articles that discuss the employment form of professional cooperatives that are popular in the Basque Country. These articles look at Mondragon, one of the largest coops in the world. Mondragon is currently used as a case study to create a coop in Australia in the area of permaculture to assist in the hand-over and running of permaculture farms where the owners are close to retirement and seek a successor.

Permaculture Projects

OpenPlans is a nascent platform for social activism surrounding permaculture and climate change. It is an open hub that allows people to create, build, manage and promote projects related to these topics. If you are not inclined to create a project, you might find and join a local project suiting your interests. The platform is still small and currently home to some 26 projects. OpenCore is the underlying technical infrastructure.

Permaculture Coop is one of the projects created on OpenPlans. Permaculture Coop is an affiliated site of Permaculture TV. As the name implies if focuses on cooperative efforts in the area of permaculture at a world-wide level. In a gist this site is working on ideas of how to scale up permaculture from a single person veggie garden to villages, towns and cities. This team studies and develops concepts for a permaculture (worker) cooperative movement. They have analyzed a handful of case studies around the world and work towards creating new cooperative businesses.

Permaculture TV

Here is a new site worth having a look at: www.permaculture.tv. It tries to be a central place or an online hub for videos related to topics like permaculture, transition movement, climate change and cooperation. The site calls itself a free video coop. If you like you you can keep up to date through their permaculture TV feed.

Dollar vs Euro

George Soros is creating a stir. Despite all the money printing in the US, with the current crisis in Greece and the dooming bankruptcy of countries like Greece, Spain, and Portugal, suddenly the bottom is dropping out of the Euro. Soros is predicting a Dollar Euro parity. Who would have forecast that. Sure, the European problems are large, but the money printing in the US seems far larger to justify a parity. The only thing that seems clear and certain, both currencies are and will be strongly devalued.

Buy, buy an American Pie

Quite funny this video: Buy buy American Pie is a charming satire at the current way of life.

Eat The Weeds

The site Eat the Weeds does not have the most appealing visual presentation, but is has a wealth of outstanding high-quality information on foraging and edible plants. Highly recommended if you like greens. It gives ideas of what you might plant in a wild garden. Also, if you know everything on this site you will never go hungry as a survivalist. More than 111 videos on the topic of foraging are available on Green Deane's YouTube channel: Eat the Weeds. A treasure chest!

Fukuoka in Greece

Masanobu Fukuoka is a legend in the area of permaculture. Amongst other things he re-introduced the seed ball planting method. This visianary Japanese was ahead of his time.

This quote is just marvelous and so to the point: "If modern agriculture continues to follow the path it's on now, it's finished. The food-growing situation may seem to be in good shape today, but that's just an illusion based on the current availability of petroleum fuels. All the wheat, corn, and other crops that are produced on big farms may be alive and growing, but they're not products of real nature or real agriculture. They're manufactured rather than grown. The Earth isn't producing those things... petroleum is!" (source: Masanobu Fukuoka, Mother Earth News interview, 1982)

The Permascience channel on YouTube just published these videos: Fukuoka in Greece (1/3), Fukuoka in Greece (2/3), Fukuoka in Greece (3/3).

For a how-to on making seed balls view The Seed Ball Story.

Global Warming

Talking about global warming is in style. We have climate conferences, politicians release new laws (e.g. making CO2 legally a poison), and researchers have funding to study these issues. That is good. A healthy and fair discussion is always beneficial.

Before one makes up one's mind it is also good to hear both sides of the argument. Here is a very eloquent presentation arguing that man-made actions are not the core cause for catastrophic climate change. Warren Meyer who runs the www.climate-skeptic.com blog has put together this 90-minute video presentation entitled "Catastrophe Denied: The Science of the Skeptics Position". It has been updated in 2010. He presents his case well. Viewing this presentation is highly recommended for anyone wanting to form an opinion on climate change. A more casual discussion is here.

Many people will find it easy to agree with him on some or even many points. There are many factors regarding climate change that we are unaware of, and we should be humble enough to admit that our research and understanding are just scratching the surface and are based on many - possibly arguable - assumptions. That does not mean we should not pro-actively work and act for better environmental protection. I very much agree with the author that the approach currently pushed by US politicians is terrible: a CO2 trading system will favor special interest groups and not lead to true environmental benefits. Such a system will be twisted to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Direct carbon taxation or equivalent pollution cleanup fees are more productive, easier to implement and more fair. I furthermore agree that money can be spent on lower-hanging fruit in the environmental protection area with more environmental bang for a buck than betting whole economies on a single CO2 card game.

Wolfberry or Goji Berry

Today I got an email pointing out the benefits of wolfberries or goji berries. They are high in vitamin C and very high in antioxidants. There are disputed claims of health benefits such as vision-related improvements, anti-cancer properties and stronger immune system. These berries also provide a long list of micronutrients and phytochemicals (a full list is given here). One has to take the claimed benefits used in marketing with a salt of grain, but nonetheless this plant seems to be promising and worth while a closer look. Next time I am in a health food store I will try to buy some of them, if possible grown locally rather than in China, to try them. Apparently they can be eaten straight, or with yogurt, or with the breakfast muesli.

The plant seems to have many different names in many languages: wolfsberry, goji berry in English, Gemeiner Bocksdorn, Teufelszwirn, Hexenzwirn in German, and Bayas de Goji, cambronera or licio in Spanish. The scientific botanic name is Lycium barbarum or Lycium chinense.