Awaz Apni

This is an interesting article, especially for me, with my interest in indigenous precolumbian agriculture in the Americas. Three thousand eight hundred years ago, long before U.S. plains rippled with vast rows of corn, Native Americans planted farms with hardy "pioneer" crops, according to new evidence of the first farming in eastern North America. Because the area appears to have been well stocked with wild food sources, the discovery may rewrite some beliefs about what led people to start farming on the continent, scientists say. Rather than turning to farming as a matter of survival, the so-called Riverton people may have been exercising "free will" and engaging in a bit of gastronomic innovation, archaeologists say. This does not surprise me in the least. We always assume 'prehistoric' peoples started farming because they had to, as a survival technique, but we don't ever stop to think that they might be just like us, inventing new things simply be...

Post-Civ! A brief philosophical and political introduction to the concept of post-civilization is an interesting read. Post-civilized thought is based on three simple premises: 1 – This civilization is, from its foundation, unsustainable. It probably cannot be salvaged, and, what’s more, it would be undesirable to do so. 2 – It is neither possible, nor desirable, to return to a pre-civilized state of being. 3 – It is therefore desirable to imagine and enact a post-civilized culture. I certainly don't agree with the whole thing but I do like its spirit: "We are for an ecologically-focused green anarchism and we are for mutual aid, free association, and self-determination." Download it here (small PDF file), or try Post-Civ!, a deeper exploration for more detail.

I like this magazine and it seems they are looking for submissions for their upcoming edition "How I learned to stop destroying the planet and love the global recession" What if the economic recession we're presently experiencing is not just a regrettable temporary setback in the never-ending march of growth-fuelled prosperity, but the beginning of a painful but ecologically necessary process of scaling back our footprint to a more sustainable level? How would we manage the decline so as to ensure the burdens are shared out equitably? How would we go about reorganizing our society and economy around conservation and community well-being rather than economic growth and short-term profit? The revolution envisioned above would require a fundamental transformation in every aspect of our lives -- our jobs, our homes, our food system, our arts and entertainment, etc. It's certainly beyond the scope of a single issue of Briarpatch to describe, but in our July/August 2009 ...