Since suburbanisation in the 1930s, motorways, fertiliser agriculture and plastics have welded American life to oil — a dependence that feeds, and is fed by, successive military operations. After the bicycle, is there another road?
The sixth round of the Lianhe Programme received 58 applications. After initial screening, online interviews and expert review, 12 localised solutions focusing on ecological restoration, community composting, smallholder disaster risk reduction, women’s empowerment and other topics were selected.
A Chiang Mai chef running a Shanghai pop-up dinner, driven to tears in the kitchen by Dianping’s ratings and the pressure to waive bills to keep the peace; Maizi, rated a mere 3.8 yet running his bar eight years without any platform, reveals another face of the system.
Liulan Reservoir breached; Typhoon Maysak’s floods swallowed jasmine fields, fish ponds and rice paddies in Hengzhou. Flower farmers who expanded planting amid the “new-style tea beverages” boom met downpours beyond the flood defence standard—insurance came up empty, and they can only start from scratch.
A month of hoeing, carrying water, huddling by the fire through downpours to mountain folk songs at Baicao Garden — Sister Yan Ping’s ecological farm, Guigang, Guangxi — metres from a chemical-fertiliser orchard. The body into the land’s rhythm, until April’s heat sent a nature-hungry graduate back to the city.
After her immune system collapsed at fifty, Kouzi came to Villains’ Valley and, over five years, built a self-sufficient solo farm entirely by hand – with health indicators now better than they were twenty years ago.
Autumn 2025: a village in Hunan’s Dongting Lake area enforced the strictest burn ban in history. Village cadres patrolled day and night for three months and spent 400,000 yuan — yet villagers still burned away nearly a thousand mu of straw in the blind spots of tower cameras.
After eleven US years, Chen Xi quit Beijing and leapt into a Dong village in Qiandongnan — cabin, rice. Three years: barely a few dozen jin. Seven years on, Zhaoxi She stably grows nine heritage rice varieties. ‘The land taught me to give myself time — seven years, just entering our own summer.’
Dutchman Metske began with a vegetarian restaurant in the squatting movement. He farms roughly 6.5 acres of heavy clay in Kent, using wildflower strips to support ecological balance and grow seasonal vegetables – selling at north London’s organic farmers’ market every Saturday.
Smallholder farmers account for roughly 97% of agricultural production entities: one field officer often has to cover 40,000–50,000 mu and tens of thousands of households, making household-by-household loss assessment virtually impossible. “Wrong or missed claims” follow, while climate change steadily pushes up payout pressure on policy-based agricultural insurance.