Reel-ing in the lawn
What I learned when I resolved to mow our entire lawn with a human-powered reel lawn mower.
Claire Schosser
Energy, Diminishing Returns and the Future of Food
This game of investing energy towards the procurement of food is one that Homo sapiens – and all living organisms – have played for millennia.
Place-based Everywhere: Lessons from Flood Wall Street
If it wasn’t obvious before, it is now: capitalism has become the most divisive issue of our time.
Irony alert: Yergin gets award named after peak oil realist Schlesinger
Where is George Orwell when you need him? It is a supreme irony that cornucopian oil industry mouthpiece and consultant Daniel Yergin should receive America’s first medal for energy security named after James Schlesinger, the first U.S. energy secretary.
Mycophile Summer
One of my goals and accomplishments for this summer, to learn the stories and tales of as many mushrooms as I could.
Permaculture and the Myth of Scarcity
"[While] the transitional period may involve temporary food shortages and real hardship, permaculture methods can easily feed the peak world population of perhaps 10 or 11 billion we’ll see by mid-century."
The Buffalo Wind
I’ve talked more than once in these essays about the challenge of discussing the fall of civilizations when the current example is picking up speed right outside the window.
Recommended Reading for the UN International Year of Soils 2015
If you never thought ‘dirt’ could be interesting or ultra important, UNU’s Robert Blasiak recommends a fascinating book demonstrating how soil management has impacted the rise and fall of civilizations.
Plowing Bedrock: How bad is soil erosion in US cropland?
A statement in JM Greer’s blog last month challenged everything I thought I knew about soil management in American cropland.
Dark Age America: The Senility of the Elites
The illusion of invincibility is far and away the most important asset a mature ruling elite has, because it discourages deliberate attempts at regime change from within.
The Oiliness of Everything: Invisible Oil and Energy Payback Time.
You can’t understand the predicament we’re in until you can see the oil that saturates every single aspect of our life. What follows is a life cycle of a simple object, the pencil.
A Land Under Waves
Why does a man who knows about global warming and rising sea levels live by a saltwater canal where his back yard ends twenty inches above the water? Because the location is too beautiful to give up. And because I don’t know if the canal will rise to the doorstep during my lifetime…
