First, let's admire this fist:

The Economist put this on its cover earlier this year to celebrate the Arab Spring.

Let's use it, today, for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

People raising their fists, peacefully, against "greed is good," against wildly inequitable distribution of wealth, against fortunes made on derivatives and bail outs and what Warren Buffett called "financial weapons of mass destruction." Fists raised against not just fast money, you know, the stuff of 1,000 pt. drops in the Dow in 20 minutes and the stuff of Goldman Sachs 2010 bonuses "trimmed to $16 billion."

Pilfered Peppers in City Gardens; Tomatoes, Too

Josh Haner/The New York Times
Jackie Bukowski, the president of the West Side Community Garden. She lamented the loss of figs last summer.

By ROBIN FINN
Published: August 5, 2011

AT the 700 community gardens sprinkled through the city like little Edens, the first commandment should be obvious: Thou shalt not covet, much less steal, thy neighbor’s tomatoes, cucumbers or peppers. But people do.

“This was an inside job,” Holland Haiis-Aguirre, a key-holder at the West Side Community Garden, said after she arrived at her plot on July 24 to pick a “big, beautiful, full-sized cucumber” that she and her husband had tended from infancy. Instead, she found a denuded vine; her prize cuke apparently was in someone else’s salad. “So frustrating,” she wailed.

By midsummer, the urban irritant of garden pilferage was in full bloom, right in sync with the crops, the heat and the mosquitoes.

On a recent evening, Jackie Bukowski, president of the West Side garden, was batting away biting insects while talking about the thefts from the garden, which has 87 vegetable plots under cultivation. She recalled her disbelief last summer when hundreds of ripe figs were looted overnight. “Every single one of them, gone,” she said, noting that the two plum trees at the garden, on 89th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues, yield fruit “for the taking” by neighborhood children, “not to encourage stealing, but to help city kids learn where their food comes from.”

See  more at NYTimes

Obstacles to Small-Scale Agriculture in the US

Who Will Feed the People?

By KOLLIBRI terre SONNENBLUME

"In the future, more people will have to grow their own food" has become a truism among pundits and observers who are paying attention to the changing state of western industrial civilization, and of the U.S. in particular. Declining energy resources, ecological degradation, and global financial disolution are a few of the trends that are and will be impacting agriculture-as-we-know-it, and forcing agriculture-as-it-will-be.

That chemical-based farming is a failing experiment has been well-documented elsewhere; numerous books and articles have explored declining soil fertility, chemically-resistant weeds and pests, the tainting and depletion of irrigation water, the shrinking diversity of seeds, the dangers of genetically modified crops, and the plummeting nutritional value of fruit, vegetables, and grains. I will not reiterate these issues here, except through examples that address my points, which concern the future of agriculture.