Society

Extensive farming or extensive agriculture is an agricultural production system that uses small inputs of labour, fertilizers, and capital, relative to the land area being farmed.

Subsistence agriculture occurs when farmers grow crops on smallholdings to meet the needs of themselves and their families. Subsistence agriculturalists target farm output for survival and for mostly local requirements. Planting decisions occur principally with an eye toward what the family will need during the coming year, and only secondarily toward market prices. Tony Waters, a professor of sociology, defines "subsistence peasants" as "people who grow what they eat, build their own houses, and live without regularly making purchases in the marketplace".

Establishing Salish Sea Summits under the Oceans Protection Plan

The Pacific Northwest (PNW; French: Nord-Ouest Pacifique), sometimes referred to as Cascadia, is a geographic region in Western North America bounded by its coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean to the west and, loosely, by the Rocky Mountains to the east. Though no official boundary exists, the most common conception includes the U.S. states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and the Canadian province of British Columbia. Some broader conceptions reach north into Alaska and Yukon, south into northern California, and east into western Montana. Other conceptions may be limited to the coastal areas west of the Cascade and Coast mountains.

The Salish Sea is a marginal sea of the Pacific Ocean located in the Canadian province of British Columbia and the U.S. state of Washington. It includes the Strait of Georgia, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound, and an intricate network of connecting channels and adjoining waterways.

The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values employed for a governance mechanism. Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.

Community-supported agriculture or cropsharing is a system that connects producers and consumers within the food system closer by allowing the consumer to subscribe to the harvest of a certain farm or group of farms. It is an alternative socioeconomic model of agriculture and food distribution that allows the producer and consumer to share the risks of farming. The model is a subcategory of civic agriculture that has an overarching goal of strengthening a sense of community through local markets.

No.332 — AI’s “human in the loop” isn’t ⊗ I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is ⊗ Jules Verne’s technocratic worldmaking

Scott Belsky, Adobe’s chief product officer, said something in a 2020 conversation that has stuck with me since. “Twitter is one of those products where I can see overuse making people have a…

Even if you think you are crushing it, you should read this.

I’m surprised more people aren’t saying this.

Interesting. American Voting has been subject to repeated hacks since at least #BushVGore where hanging chads were just a distraction, the hack was in Valusia County. I was a le

Donald Trump and Republicans won in a rout

In an era of disasters and despotism, one way to get people connected and ready to respond is to host an open assembly. Here's how.

With Donald Trump in the White House and Republicans controlling the Senate, an increase in book bans is a serious threat.

Progress hasn’t stopped, but it’s never easy, and never without backlash.

In the last week, I have been referred to as "Daddy" more times than ever before in my life. And apparently I'm a "boomer" now. I've also been told that my blog is a psyop to protect the dollar. Since the twit-shitshow (twitshow) began, it looks like I got 1.7M "impressions", around 30K likes, 7K RTs, 700 replies, and my number of followers went from 15K to 24K. (But then I immediately ...

Election day, 2024.

The writer expresses dismay over the re-election of Donald Trump, likening it to a “zombie Palpatine” scenario. They reflect on the implications of GOP control, the potential rollback o…

The USA just had a historic and potentially defining election. This has left a lot of people wondering how we got here and what happened.

…what do you get? Answer: “Special Little Freedom Zones.” That’s what Reason’s Liz Wolfe calls the Honduran “charter cities,” officially known as ZEDEs  (Zones for Economic Development and Employment), which were declared illegal in September by the Honduran Supreme Court (“No More Special Little Freedom Zones,” September 25). The ruling prohibits the creation of new...

At Robert Eagle Staff Middle School, administrators are seeing a “huge improvement” after limiting students’ cellphone use during class time.

No one has ever gone broke betting on whiteness and patriarchy in America.

As a new collection of his writing is published, Rebecca Solnit remembers her friend, the late activist and anarchist who believed ordinary people had the power to change the world

If someone suggests a Women’s March, so help me… (Twitter comment) I remember sitting in the teachers’ lunchroom at my middle school, January 2001, and having a woman I like and consider a good tea…

Betting on voter gratitude is a common mistake.

Local news outlets cannot change grocery prices. But they can help their readers deal with them.

Washington state’s Climate Commitment Act survived. It’s a promising sign for the future of climate action.

When Donald Trump won in 2016, we weren't sure if good journalism mattered anymore. Now, we're more sure than ever it does.