My last day in England is blustery and autumnal. I hike up the lane behind my sister’s house and follow a Public Footpath sign across stubbly fields. The wind roars in a big ash tree and a flock of about a hundred rooks rise flapping and cawing into the air. I find a fragment of [...]
In another post I wrote about honesty and common respect for other people’s property. I had the impression that I remembered a time when there was a lot more of that, so I did some homework and discovered a STAGGERING FACT: When I was born, in 1962, there were roughly half as many people on [...]
One of the things that permaculture has taught me is to view life as a work in progress.
Wandering around on a permacuture farm is a lesson in the health of scruffiness. Messy mulch and apparently out of control weeds are actually restoring the soil. Smelly, shitty chickens are actually eating pests and fertilizing the land. [...]
I read recently about a good way to clinically stress rats. When you want stressed rats, say for an experiment on heart disease, you put them in confined spaces for short periods of time. A few hours will be enough to elevate their cortisol and make them unhappy.
This made me wonder about the effect of [...]
I have begun to notice a new conversation being had. It’s so new that I have been skirting around it for quite a while, without having the vocabulary for it. But then someone, after listening to me flounder for a while with much splashing and gasping, gave me the phrase I needed: “personal sustainability”. A [...]
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R A Vaughan