Vital Systems

Vital Systems sponsors Sustainable Ventures' citizen advocacy and the Our Daily Bread Prize Program Initiative. Our primary focus is on expanding rigorous and comprehensive pricing and accounting in our business practices,  to support the evolution of a world based on sustainability principles. The Our Daily Bread Prize Program Initiative gathers collective knowledge in food and farming and enables access to these practices so that they are shared in common by all of us. This enables each of us to act effectively in implementing sustainability in our own lives.

Our aspiration, through our upcoming series of Reports and the Our Daily Bread Prize Program, is to grow a body of collective food and farming knowledge that:

1. Integrates findings that have been promoted by practitioners in the language and forms that most effectively communicate those findings to their peers;
2. Begins to consider how to frame these findings in ways that clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of individual and collective actions to a wider audience, and
3. Offers readers the opportunity to frame, review, and comment on an evolving set of questions and actions necessary for this "Great Turning."

By featuring the work of candidates for the 2010 Our Daily Bread Prize, Vital Systems will be promoting collective knowledge building, with the goal of enrolling a wide and diverse audience, as participants that actively engage and communicate ideas that can really work. Prize candidates are those among us willing to step forward to analyze and communicate proven and proposed food and farming best practices that support living systems based on sustainability principles.

In this time of increasing uncertainty, each of us must support food security for our own and other communities. We must select the most effective ways to secure our food sources, change our eating habits (for both personal and planetary health), halt the extinction of many of the world's species, and grow economic justice through the visions, strategies, life goals, tools, and rewards we craft to be compatible with our new world story.

In parallel with the Our Daily Bread Prize Program, Vital Systems will be examining our eating (and food production) habits in a series of Reports. First up will be Growing Climate Stability - Food and Farming Actions that Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions drawn from Nine Sectors. The initial Feature of the report, What About Meat?, is now up on Collective Knowledge, and we invite all who are interested in sustainable food to read and comment on it.

Many critical underlying questions are raised by considering the broader impacts of how we feed ourselves, such as ths point, drawn from Charles C. Mann's The Good Earth:  "By 2030, 8.3 billion people will walk the Earth, and farmers will have to grow 30 percent more grain." How will we accomplish this when desertification is occurring rapidly around the world? According to Mann, "We have degraded an area the size of the United States and Canada combined." Keep reading, consider the strategies that are most effective for you to take, take them, and engage others as effectively as you can. All our lives, for all time, depend on it.