The Future of Feeding Ourselves
The future of food will be different after COVID19. We should be planting our Victory Gardens NOW!
Category Earthcare
Extirpated, Eradicated, Extinct
We were walking down our pasture loop yesterday, and for some reason, I remembered when we first walked this path in 1999, we often saw flying squirrels that would drive the dog-of-the-day crazy. Not any more. It’s been years since…
Global Syn-WHAT?
The phrase “global syndemic” immediately drew my sustained attention when it first appeared as a result of an initiative and study produced by the science journal Lancet in January of this year. tldr: Scroll down to the 3 minute video…
Sustainable Prosperity
There are many who don’t hear the music; and many of the more powerful who hear it, and don’t want to get to the end of the dance. It is a new rhythm and meter called the Next Economy. And…
Bottled Water: The Biggest Con of All Time?
Last night at the Floyd Country Store (and more at a new venue perhaps next year) we viewed the 38th movie in six and a half years of this SustainFloyd program of information-sharing (not to mention Pot Luck Suppers). Some…
The Wraiths of Riches Who Rule the Earth
…Brazil has elected a new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who favors abolishing protected indigenous lands. He has promised to scale back enforcement of environmental laws, calling them an impediment to economic growth, and has made his intentions for the Amazon…
Hotter Than It Was: Not Your Imagination
…or a liberal hoax after all. Granted, human memory can be a leaky sieve and the tendency to make things markedly WORSE or BETTER “when I was a boy” is pretty common. But here is a way to put facts…
Alone in a World of Wounds
The more a person knows about the complexity and fragility and inter-dependent webs within the living world, the more outrage and sadness and sense of powerlessness they are likely to suffer. Aldo Leopold said it well: “One of the penalties…
The Smaller-Hammer Approach
Don’t get me wrong: the bigger-hammer folks still prevail in the arena of strip-mining the soil for maximizing profit from monoculture-derived soy, corn, cotton and the like. And granted, the insects and weeds still either have or are evolving the…
THE LAST STRAW of ONE Lifetime
I pledge: to never again use a new plastic straw. I made that commitment–regrettably and only after decades of knowing about the Great Garbage Patch in the Sargasso Sea, and since, about the other floating islands the size of Texas…
Take It to the Limit One More Time
Planet Earth has always operated within limits–almost like an organism. But too there have been “accidents” that overwhelmed natural processes and created eons of disorder. Runaway climate shifts of the past carried the land or sea beyond a state where…
On Walking the Talk in 2018
And so, like many of you, I struggle to find balance, courage, and focus for the coming year. And I see work (a few items listed below) that is worthy of my time–a commodity in somewhat short and uncertain supply…
On Not Killing Our Environmental Puppies
Yesterday, your neighbor’s yellow lab gave birth to a litter of puppies. Today, the owner has made up his mind to do one of the following: to turn them outdoors to fend for themselves in the heat and take their…
BlueWater Dream of the Great Below
I awoke with a start. I had fallen asleep slumped against my favorite leaning poplar a ten-minute walk from the house. I was most certainly not exactly there now. I had nodded off on a warm summer afternoon, but now…