Featured

We Used to Just Call These “Houses”

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We have a way in the modern world of rediscovering things that humans have always done but branding them as something trendy and a little alien. So it goes with the explosion of interest in “tiny houses” as an answer to what ails cities struggling to house and attract people.

The ironic thing about tiny houses is that they’re nothing new; it’s just that, in surprisingly recent memory, our culture had a different name for them. We called them “houses.”

Scheer Folly: Promised Coast-to-Coast Energy Corridor Makes No Sense

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Real conservatives know that energy corridors don’t make jobs or support freedom.

When China built a pipeline to access natural gas in western Burma, there were reports of forced labour, relocated villages and corruption.

Those kinds of things are inherent in energy corridors, which enrich the powerful at the expense of the weak.

Surveying Archaeologists Across the Globe Reveals Deeper and More Widespread Roots of the Human Age, the Anthropocene

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Not everyone is sure that today’s industrialized, globalized societies will be around long enough to define a new geological epoch. Perhaps we are just a flash in the pan – an event – rather than a long, enduring epoch.

Others debate the utility of picking a single thin line in Earth’s geological record to mark the start of human impacts in the geological record. Maybe the Anthropocene began at different times in different parts of the world.

California Cotton Fields: Scaling Carbon Farming Practices with Bowles Farming Company

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Farmers are interested in how they can be a part of this carbon economy, Michael says. “But it’s a risky thing to experiment with given all the other pressures they have to deal with. So we need to flesh out in greater detail how carbon sequestration would work, and what would be the incentives to do so. We’re getting closer.”

Is a Techno-linguistic Transition Inevitable?

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So get outside every day. Somewhere. Walk barefoot through a park, collect some wild edibles, do some yoga in your yard, some breathing exercises in the forest, or simply sit under a tree somewhere, whatever you can. This will help heal you, and keep you happy in the unplugged world and tethered to the real world.

Basic Income, Not Tied Benefits, for Australia’s First Nations

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A lot of Australia’s welfare programmes primarily target First Nations people. Australia is a settler colonial society. Sovereignty was never ceded and has never been given back. This is an ongoing struggle, and welfare is now being used as a weapon in neo-assimilationist attempts by the settler state.

Iowa’s Farmers – and American Eaters – Need a National Discussion on Transforming US Agriculture

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As a scientist at Iowa’s land-grant university, I believe our state is at the forefront of redefining what agriculture could be in the U.S., and addressing environmental and economic challenges associated with the extensive monocultures that dominate our current system. I think these conversations should be at the forefront nationally. After all, everyone needs to eat, so all Americans have a stake in the future of farming.

Rare Wildflower Threatened by Lithium Mine

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In a remote corner of Nevada is a wildflower that grows nowhere else on earth. Named “Tiehm’s Buckwheat” (Eriogonum tiehmii), it has been found on only ten acres of public land in the Silver Peak Range of Esmerelda County, and is virtually unknown except to a handful of botanists. Tragically, it is at risk of extinction due to mining activities that have just started in its habitat.