Ours is a world at once profoundly overpopulated and woefully underpeopled.

All making begins as an act of unmaking.

I was just reading about the 78 thousand people that want to go mars.



It's a one way trip and the comments from the applicants talk about boundaries of human knowledge, the greater good of humanity, an ancient human tradition to explore and to expand our species etc.



On the thread following the article one doubting Thomas expressed the following:…

My brother and sister and I were born into an existence of comfort. Food and Water were a plentiful affordable human right. Shelter was cheap then, disposable income was high. Refuelling the car a nuisance instead of a luxury. Pleasure was a frequent excess. Life was a non-stop banquet.

Those things are long gone now. We now find ourselves way beyond the tipping point. The window of opportunity to reverse our consumption now closed.

Then with gathering pace the cult of plenty…

Here is the first nuc I installed!

Good news!  Two Friday nights ago the universe answered my plea for help in locating a new source of honey bees.  After having quite a bit of trouble with a beekeeper that I had made arrangements with back in January (things like phone calls and emails not being returned, and a general lack of professionalism), I located,…

Ultimately, there may only be one victim of climate change: expectation.

Rosy denial is way more depressing than painful truth.

Workin in the garden …

I have ruminated enough times on this blog about climate change that it would no longer pop up its ugly head, and yet it never ceases to amaze me as to how well it lends itself to a quick article.  As homesteaders, so many of our daily activities lead to the out-of-doors, and therefore keeps us connected to nature and all her changing…

project "livin' wild, livin' free" is on!  an excerpt from the latest blog post...

"...In my civilized life I have been a disrespectful wimp, seated mornings by an electric heater sipping the fruits of some distant land, nicking the planet with one more blade of selfishness, oblivious to the destruction wrought by my Madison Avenue-conditioned lust for comfort and sensual delight.  But out here there is no switch to throw, no means of playing god to transform night into day,…

What are you giving up in order to keep what you're not willing to give up?

There's a petroglyph in my front yard.  It is etched upon a large piece of local volcanic stone.  There is depicted on one side a man figure with a bow firing an arrow at another figure, on the other a spiral and a sun sign.  The peoples who inhabited these mountains were the Miwok of the Shoshone group.  In his book, 'The Handbook of California Indians completed in 1911, Alfred Krober the pioneering anthropologist stated that wherever he found petroglyphs the local people had no knowledge…

Silence and patience often sound the same.

...and some days, I have trouble reasoning with my inner cynic.

I was wondering,

is there a chance,

a small possibility,

a tiny crack for me to fit through.



Before this world comes tumbling,

will it recognise 'me' and ‘my’ talent?

Is there still time for ‘me’

to have a piece of the pie?



The critics will rave and they will say,

GENIUS!

and compare me to the gluttonous creatives from back in the day

who…

Things always seem worse than they are until they're worse than they seem.

hello fellow Dark Mountaineers!  i figured after a few years of membership here, it might be about time to actually post something... and i hope it's not inappropriate to be using this space to promote my own blog, but i thought this might be of interest to folks in this group...

first a little about myself and how i got here... i grew up spending a lot of time in the woods as a kid and by fourth grade or so, i decided that the minute i turned into a legal adult, i'd head out into the…

"eutopia ... from the Greek…

New book of essays, projects and art inspired by ecosopher Joanna Macy,center around local actions,  creativity and sustainability. Book was launched  in Bristol on 17 April, 2013.

Alastair McIntosh has written in his review 'these essays show how people are digging where they stand, deepening inwardly where there might be little latitude…

Identities

I

Owl…

Dead Bees!

Death.  More death here at the Dead End Alley Farm.  This time it was our bees.  The bees that up until a few weeks ago I thought were going to come through the winter successfully.  But as life has shown us recently, nothing is for certain when walking down the path of homesteading.

Last fall I brought our bees…

For a while, I've been grappling with our current constructions of psychology. Fundamentally the assumptions we make about the human mind and spirit, underpin the cultural mess we are in - or vice versa. We could argue that it is out of the blindness of western civilisation that the narrowness of defining psychological functioning and where our dysfunction, distress and disconnection have emerged from.

Eco-psychology has started to address this, but it is a wide and varied field and…