Of Museums and Mayhem

I loved going to museums, but over the last couple of  years the simple joy of it got entangled with doubt, guilt, and sadness. With every visit now it gets worse (and more interesting). In the “mummy room” at the MFA I felt a misgiving akin to my horror of zoos. I practically fled from …

On Hope and Opportunity: Carbon Sequestration

I just received Eric Toensmeier’s Carbon Farming Solution, A Global Toolkit of Perennial Crops and Regenerative Agriculture Practices for Climate Change Mitigation and Food Security (Chelsea Green, 2016). Reading this, along with Peter McCoy’s mind-blowing Radical Mycology, as well as the third US Department of Energy Billion Ton Report (just released today), and also listening …

Sun Motions

This is a cool tool. Put yourself on the north pole, or at, say, 74.8 degrees N latitude. Is this nature study? I’ve rediscovered Tim Morton’s books on ecology, among them Ecology without Nature and The Ecological Thought, where he introduces the concept of dark ecology as a means of expressing the “irony, ugliness, and …

Maintaining Systems until They’re Needed

In Transition and Permaculture circles we’re constantly talking about putting systems in place for when, that is, before, they’re needed. When I headed up the Solarize program in Wayland in 2012, this was my main motivation: lots of individual solar arrays on roofs so we have at least a basis for clean and decentralized electricity …

Some Ideas for Further Development

I remember singing along with Band Aid, “Do they know its Christmas time .” I must have sung this line, but I can’t remember realizing what it says, or anyone making a comment on it, either fellow-singers or popular media – being only thirteen in in 1984, I wasn’t clued into any other culture. The line: …

What I’ve Been Up To in February (So Far)

It’s Winter on the homestead and aside from plodding through two feet of snow to feed the chickens there’s not much to do on that level. There are many other levels to work on, however. I’ve written about  some personal inner work in the previous blog posts. Our tribe of friends meets often for cooking and …

There is No Alternative, or Paul Shepard for the Twenty-First Century

If you would like some music with this post,  I recommend Isakov’s 3 a.m., from which comes the following lyrics: give me darkness when i’m dreaming, give me moonlight when i’m leaving give me mustang horse and muscle, cuz i wont be goin gentle give me slant-eye looks when i’m lying, give me fingers when …

Throwing Spears with Weller, Shepard, Jenkinson, and a Dream

{The following is an offshoot and distraction from another, much more difficult post, which can be read here.} Via my studies of Stephen Jenkinson I found this talk on grief by Francis Weller,  In it, Weller likens the history of mankind to a 100 foot long rope. The first 99 feet represents humans in nature, hunting, foraging, defending …