Gene Logsdon, 1932 – 2016
But along with these, 2016 also saw us lose an agrarian outside the world of Permaculture, that somebody being the aptly named Contrary Farmer, Gene Logsdon.
Allan Stromfeldt Christensen
The Twelve Days (and Months) of Climate Justice Day Six: Why Can’t a Poem Stop Climate Change?
One of the most powerful antidotes we have to despair – whether in the face of the climate catastrophe that looms menacingly on the horizon, or of the dawn of the Trump era in the United States – is our ability to resist and create, often simultaneously, through our cultural creation – our art, cultures, literature, movies, and music.
Fracking Follies
The US Energy Information Administration, or EIA, regularly updates its estimates for how much oil and gas might be recovered in the future, and at what rate. With the application of new technology from year to year, those estimates generally keep going up. But it’s important to remember that they are just estimates — and the devil is always in the details.
Nibbling at the Margin: Thoughts Toward a New Year’s Resolution
I’ve never been enthusiastic about reducing my carbon footprint or energy consumption. It would have real effects, I know, and you can make extreme reductions, as the Riot 4 Austerity folks and others have demonstrated. But I can’t help saying to myself, “Unless everybody does it, the effects are marginal.”
The Futile War between Conservationists and Farmers
Fungi and other soil microbes are critical to the health of soil and our food systems yet ‘conservation biodiversity’ often overlooks them for more charismatic wildlife.
Tales of Agri-Resistance
There is nothing quite like the smell of the brewing of Arabic coffee prepared on burning olive branches, just pruned during the olive harvest. The smell of heil (cardamom) cooked in coffee, and the aroma of the burning wood, are almost as delicious as the day’s first cup sipped atop the dry limestone walls that separate the terraces of the wadi (valley).
2016: A Sheep’s Vigil
Humans are symbolic creatures. We look for the signs in passing details that make sense of larger patterns – news stories, politics, natural events stitched into the narrative of our lives by small, local things. And always, perhaps, a reading of the portents for a prickling sense of threat, dulled but not dismissed by the comfort of the modern.
Carbon Markets at the End of 2016 – What can We Expect in the Future?
I attended the UN Climate Summit (COP22) in Marrakech last November…As someone studying the ethical issues surrounding carbon trading schemes, it was particularly noticeable that ‘ethics’ of any description are simply not on the agenda of these talks.
Positive Thinking in a Dark Age
I recall a Buddhist parable involving a stick that appears from a distance to be a snake, causing fear to rise in the perceiver. As the perception shifts upon closer examination, the fear subsides and the relieved hiker continues down the path. Understanding and awareness have a lot to do with how we feel and how we act. As hosts to the dominant cultural mindset (our collective understanding of who we are in the universe), our minds play a critical part in both perpetuating our dominant way of life and also in shifting away from it.
Robert Macfarlane: How Language Reconnects Us with Place
I have come to realize that language is an indispensable portal into the deeper mysteries of the commons. The words we use – to name aspects of nature, to evoke feelings associated with each other and shared wealth, to express ourselves in sly, subtle or playful ways – our words themselves are bridges to the natural world. They mysteriously makes it more real or at least more socially legible.
This Small Town Refused to Settle for Wal-Mart When Its Last Local Grocery Store Closed
For two months in 2012, longtime Iola, Kansas, resident Mary Ross trudged through the sweltering heat, waving gnats from her view as she walked door to door with a petition. It was the hottest summer since moving there with her family about 30 years ago, but Ross was determined to gather signatures requesting a grocery store be established in the small rural town of fewer than 6,000 people.
State of The Transition: Fossil Fuel Diehards Take Over The White House
As captains of the fossil fuel industries and their lobbyists prepare to take over the White House – appointed by a President elected by a minority, claiming to represent the people on an anti-elite ticket yet possessing by far the highest cumulative wealth of any cabinet ever – they will face evidence breaking out all around them of a fast-moving global energy transition threatening to strand the fossil fuels they seek to boost.
