Busy dissertating and trying to get out of town for a week: 4 days with family in Catskills in NY, 4 days in Birmingham with Southeastern Environmental Leadership folks, a meeting with Jean Mills in Birmingham about SSAWG conference in Kty in Jan, and a very promising blind date in Birmingham. I’ll let you know . . .

Here’s the post I wanted to write anyway from eat local.

And here are picutures from CIRA conference and working meeting a couple weeks ago:

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excerpt from a campus admiinistrator write up:

The CIRA Collaboration on Re-Localizing Food provides an example of the engagement the Center fosters. An interdisciplinary team of UNC-CH faculty and graduate students work with three different regions in North Carolina. Two of the regions (the NE and the SE) are lead by grassroots organizations with over 25 years of experience each. The third region (the NW) is headed by the founder of the Sustainable Development Program at ASU working closely with the Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture and other Appalachian groups. At UNC-CH, the CIRA Collaboration team is composed of 9 faculty and 7 graduate students from the Anthropology, City and Regional Planning, Communications Studies, the Ecology Curriculum, Epidemiology and Nutrition. The discussion at our July 2007 conference and planning meeting on re-localizing food was aided by representatives from the Heifer Project, Rural Advancement Foundation International, Center for Environmental Farming Systems (at NCSU) and many other non-profit organizations and institutions working on local food systems in the state. Our main goals for this year are to undertake participatory food systems assessments across the regions in order to identify interests, desires, opportunities and potential for strengtthening localized food and to organize a statewide youth summit on sustainable food systems.