Whiskerfish’s Recent Comments

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  Tom, I think it's important to realise that there are already grassroots groups working on local agriculture in poor urban 'township' communities all over South Africa, using sustainable organic/permaculture techniques. Some groups I know of have been operational for almost 30 years, and have devised an array of methods to build soil cheaply, organically and easily in a huge variety of conditions. I hope that Allen's crowd realises this and acts with the appropriate respect -- because the story of international do-gooders who come in with the best of intentions on paper, and then try to dominate funding streams while simultaneously failing to co-operate with locals who have been in the trench-gardens for a very long time is by now a depressingly familiar one. The reason that some community gardens have failed is because South Africa's commercial, chem-intensive agricultural system produces veg rather cheaply, and there is really no open land to farm in many intensively-settled urban shackland areas, where the tin-and-plastic houses are put up right against each other. People in poor areas often aspire to being lawyers and doctors -- urban people, not farmers with their hands in the dirt. Urban farming is all to close to the rural subsistence life that many have fled. It's fashionable to rail against Big Ag, and any fool can see the problems with the big chem-oil system, but the meltdown in Zimbabwe shows one what happens when productive, modern monocultural farms disappear from the scene overnight. Their output has not been easily replaced by small-scale organic farming. South African grassroots farmers know how to build soil. What they need is help to make local and national policiticians accountable, and a restructuring of markets to make their efforts viable. It remains to be seen how Allen's efforts can help with this. Best Adam Welz (South African, currently in New York)On Under the Clinton Global Initiative, Growing Power takes its grassroots-agriculture model to Africa posted 1 month, 1 week ago 7 Responses

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  Right, my last comment did not get published (gremlins in the system, or me saying the redesign sucked?) so, one more time...

  As a long-time fan of grist (daily visitor to the site) and big-time Net surfer I am hugely disappointed in the redesign. It's insanely cluttered, takes ages to load, and the less said about the colour scheme the better (washed-put, unfriendly version of the apartheid-era South African flag). It's simultaneously overbusy and dead-spacey, which is a pretty amazing feat to achieve. It's lost character; there's nothing (nothing) about the look of the site that says anything environmental or cheerful or edgy or...

  There's no arguing that things may have needed freshening up, but seriously guys, you've chucked two-and-a-half of the triplets out with the bathwater.

  My main ciritcism is the fragmentation of the site into artificially-defined topic areas. The great thing about the old grist was being exposed to a whole range of topics from energy to biodiversity to green politics -- quickly and clearly -- via a single channel e.g. gristmill. It's what made the place interesting. Now I have to futz about with different sections and it's not clear if news and opinions re those sections will be found there or if news and opinions are their own sections and it all involves too much clicking and waitng for downloads and more futzing and guessing what I'm missing out on and so on and so on.

  I know you tried but please, fire your design team, who are clearly more enamoured with widgets and features than efficiency and user-friendliness, and start again.

  I'm reading a full 80% less of the site than I did before, and no longer feel happy about making a daily turn here. The only reason I still pass by is because of the persistent quality of some of the content. Reading grist has become more of an obligation and less of a pleasure.

  Cheers

  Whiskerfish

  On Welcome to the new Grist! posted 7 months, 1 week ago 106 Responses

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  great post, Tom

  but the question that's still sitting in my mind is WHY these debts became 'toxic' and HOW.

  I mean, if we're talking about toxic mortgages, have they become toxic because the houses 'behind' them are worth a tiny fraction of what they were a year ago?

  Or because the owners of those houses used them as surety for loans that were, a year ago, worth in excess of those houses?

  If debt was piled upon debt, i.e. assets were used to leverage loans of many times those assets' value, then whoever granted those loans should be prepared to lose the excess value. That in itself, although massively disruptive, might not mean the end of the US economy.

  However, if many houses are now pretty much permanently worth a fraction of what they were worth a year ago, because people realise that they are too big to heat cost-effectively or too far from jobs to commute reliably to and from in a world of insanely volatile oil prices (the Kunstler scenario) then the US really is in deep, deep doodoo. That would mean that the US really has misinvested an enormous pile of capital, and the whole country will have to suffer for that.

  If this second scenario is true, no amount of bank bailout is going to help -- you'll just be throwing promises of value into a void that'll be unable to turn them into anything useful -- the only thing that will build real value in the US economy is a fundamental restructuring of living arrangements to make life far more energy and time-efficient than it is now for most suburban/exurban communities in the US.

  Am I making sense? It all revolves around how you view what money represents, in the end, and what the material value sitting behind money might mean for money's value.

  Cheers

  WhiskerfishOn While Geithner's bailout flounders, it's time to explore other financial models posted 8 months, 4 weeks ago 8 Responses

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  holy crud

  this is one of the most terrible vid clips I have ever seen. Gore is his 'old' wooden self and Jenny Clad is fire-ably awful. She is the most ridiculous caricature of a hung-up charity NGO do-gooder imaginable -- the kind of admin droid that should be safely locked up in a back room doing the accounts. Get her off the program! Send her to work for the RNC!

  This is depressingly bad and should immediately be yanked from the airwaves.

  WhiskerfishOn Former veep to rally climate change activists posted 9 months ago 8 Responses

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  weatherization cut from stimulus

  I just read on nyt.com that "$8 billion to refurbish federal buildings and make them more energy efficient" has been cut from the stimulus.

  I can't believe the stupidity of this. I'm struggling even more with the fact that NO ONE in a high-profile place seems to have made a simple, articulate case for keeping that money in there.

  The Republicans have been damning the stimulus because it's going to tax dollars and because a lot of the planned spending is not, apparently, directly going to rev up the economy.

  So they go and cut spending that will directly employ Americans -- and thus stimulate the economy -- and save tax dollars that otherwise would have been spent on energy bills.

  WTFFFFFFF???

  I mean, you can completely trash these two-bit palookas in one soundbite. Why is no-one doing it?

  I'm just an ignorant African, so it's possible I'm missing something. Please tell me I'm missing something!

  Whiskerfish On Obama talks tough on the need for investment posted 9 months ago 6 Responses