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Ecology
Uncommon Weather
Herb had finally hit the jackpot in the herring-roe fishery and decided that, with the girls gone, I might enjoy some creature comforts to take the edge off being alone in the cabin so much. Unfortunately I had already come to the same conclusion, and one of the comforts I’d treated myself to was named Jimmy.
October 2009
excerpted from
Small Is Beautiful
Economics As If People Mattered
Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on worldwide systems of trade.
October 2009The Sincerest Form Of Flattery
Janine Benyus On The Virtues Of Imitating Nature
Our mission, in both our business and our nonprofit, is to increase respect for the natural world. Creating more-sustainable products and processes is just an extension of that. To learn from nature, you have to become involved with what Wes Jackson calls the “deep conversation.” To learn how to take carbohydrates and water and turn them into a fiber as strong as steel, as a spider does, you go to a spider and respectfully ask, “How are you doing that?” Then you go and try to do it yourself. And when you fail — it’s very hard to do! — you go back to the organism and ask again.
September 2009
The Meadow Across The Creek
The difficulty is that with the rise of the modern sciences we began to think of the universe as a collection of objects rather than a communion of subjects.
September 2009December 2008
When a friend called with the news, I assumed he was putting me on. A deer, he said, had crashed through the plate-glass window of a pottery store in downtown Chapel Hill. It was exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, and I wasn’t in the mood for a joke.
December 2008Digging In
Wendell Berry On Small Farms, Local Wisdom, And The Folly Of Greed
The human definition of the natural world is always going to be too small, because the world’s more diverse and complex than we can ever know. We’re not going to comprehend it; it comprehends us. The question is whether we can use it with respect. Some people in the past who knew very little biology were able to use the land without destroying it. We, who know a great deal of biology, are destroying our land in order to use it.
July 2008
Going Underground
Paul Stamets On The Vast, Intelligent Network Beneath Our Feet
A mycelial “mat,” which scientists think of as one entity, can be thousands of acres in size. The largest organism in the world is a mycelial mat in eastern Oregon that covers 2,200 acres and is more than two thousand years old. Its survival strategy is somewhat mysterious. We have five or six layers of skin to protect us from infection; the mycelium has one cell wall. How is it that this vast mycelial network, which is surrounded by hundreds of millions of microbes all trying to eat it, is protected by one cell wall? I believe it’s because the mycelium is in constant biochemical communication with its ecosystem.
February 2008
Sunbeams
August 2007Cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed . . . by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
