September 2009
4 posts
Found It
Awhile back, I promised to look into the history of community sponsored agriculture, the model that my farm uses to sell most of its produce. Apparently the standard narrative is that CSAs started in Japan in the 1970s when a group of women concerned about pesticides formed subscription-partnerships with local farms, and that this model spread to Europe and the US. While the first part of that is...
Where to Ash
Here’s another major problem with the TVA spill and cleanup: once TVA gets the coal ash out of the river, there’s really no good way to dispose of it. TVA’s solution has been to pay a poor town in Alabama to let them dump the ash in an abandoned mine. In the short-term, this does help the town financially, and most people agree that this type of “dry storage” is...
Exeunt
There have been a lot of changes on the farm in the past couple of weeks. All of them stem from the fact that the farmer and his wife have decided that this will be their last season here. They’re in the process of selling the farm, not simply as land and a house, but hopefully also as a business. I’ve known this since the first week I got here, but it didn’t seem like much of...
The Spectrum
I’ve been talking to people from what seem to be the two most important—for lack of a better term—citizen watchdog groups in the TVA region. One is the afore-mentioned United Mountain Defense (they of the TVA smokestack puppets), and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. But although they share some very broad environmental concerns, they take very different views of TVA.
The Southern...