The Future is Biomorphic

...inds me of the wisdom of what Nassim Taleb calls, “non-predictive decision making.” Why? Futurists and prognosticators are as accurate as a dead clock. Twice a day they get it right and the rest of the time they end up looking foolish. We can be especially thankful that the washing machine for people on page 179 of The Futurist never caught on. That said, the point is not always to predict the future. Architects, artists and designers push the env...

Read…

Tolkien and Trees

...abashed partisan of trees. A couple of quotes from him regarding trees are making the rounds on the internet, but I’ve learned to distrust popular quotations. They are often misattributed or downright made up. So I searched his edited letters for references to trees. There are many–he always mentions trees when he describes places, has funny things to say about artists who can’t draw trees, and has many trees of significance in his books, which he...

Read…

A Last Minute Gift Suggestion . . .

...hat Amazon is suggesting that I buy our own books, The Urban Homestead and Making It, as Christmas gifts. It also recommended Rachel Kaplan and K. Ruby Blume’s excellent book Urban Homesteading. It’s a reminder that this blog is partially supported by your book purchases at both independent booksellers and through the Amazon links on our Publications page. Many thanks to all of you who have bought our books in the past and continued to support us....

Read…

How to Search for Science-Based Gardening Advice

Agricola’s search page. In the course of writing our books and this blog we’ve had to deal with a lot of thorny gardening questions such as the effectiveness of double digging, the toxicity of persimmons, compost tea, lasagna gardening and how to mulch to name just a few. While the internet is an amazing tool, the number of conflicting commercial interests, biases and crazy talk in the eGardening world can make it difficult to, as Mark Twain put...

Read…

Saturday Tweets: Too Many Tweets!

...e written an open letter.#climatestrike #FridaysForFurture #schoolstrike4climate https://t.co/sf3uOLWQvR — Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) March 2, 2019 If this is wrong, I don't want to be right pic.twitter.com/eTA6u41uc8 — 70s Dinner Party (@70s_party) March 3, 2019 pic.twitter.com/6UKOTXeSwb — Cats (@SpaceCatPics) March 2, 2019 Caption this…🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/NVvkhpuvkj — Kevin W (@kwilli1046) March 7, 2019 pic.twitter.com/Ga2S4uwT76 — 70s...

Read…