(Nothing But) Flowers

Ok, I just found this GREAT teaching resource that I LOVE.

The site http://www.worldmapper.org/

On this site you can find scaled to size representations of world resource use, world population, fuel use, poverty indexes, imports/exports, etc with each country shown scaled to where it stands in regards to these stats. Great visual representations for students that speak louder than words. . . gotta love those cool social geographers that came up with this site.

I’ve intended to write about a project I have been involved in since last fall for some time now. One of the faculty in my department (with the help of several grad students) organized a research collaboration called CIRA (the Center for Integrating Research and Action). In particular, I’ve been attending meetings on a project in NC on addressing issues of poverty reduction in 12 of the counties identified as having the most “persistent poverty” in NC.

Last weekend I went up to Boone (in the Appalachian mountains) and stayed at the farm of another grad student, Maverick Farms. She is a PhD student while at the same time running an organic farm in the mountains with her partner & sister! Pretty amazing!

The CIRA project met all day in Cove Creek (a neighboring community to Boone) and we disussed the creation of local food systems as a way to keep money within communities. The project is planning on doing Community Food Asssessments in all of the communties in order to address how much money is spent on food in these communties and to find ways to tap into this spending and keep the money local.

It was a very exciting day! With visits to the Appalachian State Sustainable Ag program and to Maverick Farms and lively discussions about racism, class and food. Some of the partner groups in the project are:

- The Concerned Citizens of Tillery (CCT): located in an African-American New Deal Settlement community this group has been working for years on issues of environmental racism (the latest of whichis horrendous hog farms & their waste lagoons) and land loss of black farmers in the community. The numbers of African American farmers in the US and in NC have been declining over the years– surprise, surprise.

-Center for Community Action in Lumberton, NC A grassroots group dealing with community organizing and poverty issues in Southeastern, NC. (Hog farms are also an issue here. . .)

-Appalachian State Sustainable Ag Program & Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture. Will write more later on this!

Very exciting stuff! Will write more in this post when I get the chance! (I’m supposed to be dissertation writing right now!) Needless to say, I’m excited about the project, especially because we are finally starting to see it really take off.