Tag Archives: Africa

The Economic and Ecological Collapse We Helped to Create on Valentine’s Day.

14 Feb

Bealtaine Cottage permaculture porchAny financial system that is based on debt is doomed to failure.

A good analogy is to look at one’s own household.

Do you consume more than you produce?

Bealtaine Cottage permaculture gardensKeep borrowing and eventually the crunch will come…payback time, with nothing in reserve to pay what’s owed.

Many people refer to this as, living beyond one’s means.

If this is what you are doing, then it’s time to take control of your own micro economy.

Bealtaine Cottage... Flo, aka Mrs MouseLeave your government to continue paying bankers grossly inflated sums of money and try to re-calibrate your own finances.

I was enjoying a long conversation with my mother on Monday.

mum, aged 80, at Bealtaine CottageGrowing up through WW2 was the greatest lesson in personal finance for her. (This is her, aged 80, at Bealtaine Cottage).

If one did not have money, one could not buy goods or services.

That proved to be enormously enabling for that generation…one of the healthiest and most empowered ever known in the modern world.

Mum, aged 80, at Bealtaine CottageMum still has all her own teeth…sugar was rationed!

She has never been over-weight, birthed 11 children and did not own a washing machine until I bought her one. (My elder brothers never quite got their heads around why she would need one!)

Mum has always lived within her means and helped all of her children as well.

If Mum ran the economy, the bankers would be paid according to their productivity…and politicians also!

Bealtaine Cottage polytunnelToday is Valentine’s Day.

Many people of limited means have bought flowers for their loved one…flowers grown in Kenya in Africa by using water from Lake Naivasha.

Bealtaine Cottage water barrelThe water levels have dropped.

This has had a devastating effect on plant, marine and animal life.

Hippo numbers have fallen by more than 25%.

The lake is now quite polluted with pesticide drain off.

University of Leicester environmentalist David Harper told the March 28, 2006, British Times: “Almost everybody in Europe who has eaten Kenyan beans or Kenyan strawberries, and gazed at Kenyan roses, has bought Naivasha water.

“It will become a turgid, smelly pond with impoverished communities eking out a living along bare shores … As the lake becomes smaller and shallower it will become warmer, fueling the growth of microscopic algae.

“It is only a matter of time before the lake becomes toxic.”

The Food and Water Watch report said: “The pesticides applied on the farms and in the greenhouses eventually end up in Lake Naivasha and in the groundwater, endangering the area’s people and wildlife … http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/49188

Che Mousy Bear at Bealtaine Cottage Feb 12 001Kenya is the largest supplier of cut flowers to Europe, providing more than a quarter of imports.

These are mostly roses, and a third of annual production is for Valentine’s Day.

For less than the cost of a cheap bunch of flowers, you can buy a fruit tree and plant it for the one you love.

Plum tree at bealtaine cottage permacultureEach tree planted will provide oxygen for two people for the rest of their lives.

Apple tree at Bealtaine Cottage Permaculture Cottage 023Isn’t it time we invested in Love?

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Monsanto, Bono, Africa and Suicide

17 Jul

He was once a hero of mine.

A singer who sang about the issues I cared about.

But, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” has become “Endgame, Bloody Endgame,” as the one time singer who articulated the ideals of a generation, turns advocate and spokesperson for the awful, dreadful, death impregnated, GM seed and food corporations of the globe.

The G8 Summit, where the great and the greedy met to plan their attack on an unsuspecting continent, will go down in history as the final chapter in a globalized attack on the poor and downtrodden of our world.

For we all know about India and the almost quarter of a million dirt poor farmers who have taken their lives in all manner of disturbing ways.

That was about seed.

GM seed.

Seed with great advertising and promises behind it, pushing it upon the most vulnerable upon our sacred Earth.

And, if I know…I, a woman living in the remote west of Ireland without television or daily paper, then I am certain that Bono knows all this and more!

After all, did he not spend time with President Obama at the G8 Summit?

So, why, Bono…why?

Today’s video…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqkpQyo5CjM

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