Grow Your Own Food!

Date: September 27, 2012
Reporting From: Santiago, Chile
Original Article Here

Last summer, two researchers from the New England Complex Systems Institute published a short paper examining the correlation between rising food prices and civil unrest. It was a timely analysis, to say the least. A number of food riots were occurring throughout the world, not to mention waves of revolution sparked by the high cost of food.

This is nothing new; throughout history whenever people have struggled to put food on the table for their families, social unrest has been a common consequence.

The French Revolution is a classic example

From City Slickers to Homesteading

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Source: Off-The-Grid News
Link to Original Article Here

Maybe you remember the 1991 film starring the late Jack Palance, Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, Bruno Kirby, Helen Slater, and Yeardley Smith (the voice of Lisa Simpson) that tells the story of three wealthy men in the throes of midlife crises who attempt to find themselves on a cattle ranch. Getting far more than they bargained for, each returns to their lives in New York City changed men, ready to face their former lives with a new outlook and a set of skills that most who are raised in a “concrete jungle” traditionally don’t learn.

Goodbye Civilization: So Simple A Greekman Can Do It

Around 1000 people per day are still losing their jobs in Greece with the percentage of the population not working now uncomfortably larger than those who are employed. This is creating drastic – or perhaps more aptly philosophical – reflections by its people. As the BBC reports, the feeling in Greece is that a “whole generation is on hold” and there is a growing trend towards the creation self-sustaining eco-communities – free of the ties of money and modern civilization. “What others saw as a global economic crisis, [Greeks] saw as a crisis of civilization” and so they are trying something different, growing their own food, bartering with one another, and exchanging surpluses with other villages.