How Smart Are Plants?

"When most of us think of plants, to the extent that we think about plants at all, we think of them as old—holdovers from a simpler, prehuman evolutionary past. But for Mancuso plants hold the key to a future that will be organized around systems and technologies that are networked, decentralized, modular, reiterated, redundant—and green, able to nourish themselves on light. “Plants are the great symbol of modernity.” Or should be: their brainlessness turns out to be their strength, and perhaps the most valuable inspiration we can take from them." Michael Pollan: How Smart Are Plants? : The New Yorker
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The Farm's Ecovillage

Life on The Farm, kinda laid back & kinda shrinking. But they run something called the Ecovillage Training Center. Good field-trip prospect!

 • Ecovillage Training Center (www.thefarm.org/etc): A “total immersion school for sustainability,” the training center offers hands-on learning in permaculture design, natural homebuilding and energy conservation. Founded in 1994, it is set among The Farm’s 5,000 acres of protected woods and serves as a living laboratory. The eco-hostel is undergoing a two-story expansion to accommodate more visitors. The village is open to the public.

The Farm, home to free spirits for 42 years, is at a crossroads | The Tennessean | tennessean.com

Too soon to despair

Not long ago, I ran into a guy who’d been involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, that great upwelling in southern Manhattan in the fall of 2011 that catalyzed a global conversation and a series of actions and occupations nationwide and globally. He offered a tailspin of a description of how Occupy was over and had failed. 

But I wonder: How could he possibly know? It really is too soon to tell. First of all, maybe the kid who will lead the movement that will save the world was catalyzed by what she lived through or stumbled upon in Occupy Fresno or Occupy Memphis, and we won’t reap what she sows until 2023 or 2043...

Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, What Comes After Hope | TomDispatch

Creating Passionate Environmentalists

At about 300 colleges across the country, young activists worried about climate change are borrowing a strategy that students successfully used in decades past. In the 1980s, students enraged about South Africa's racist Apartheid regime got their schools to drop stocks in companies that did business with that government. In the 1990s students pressured their schools to divest in Big Tobacco. 

This time, the student activists are targeting a mainstay of the economy: large oil and coal companies....

College Divestment Campaigns Creating Passionate Environmentalists : NPR

Fear itself

the climate that worries me most is the climate of fear, the belief that our current trajectory leads inevitably to total disaster. This belief discourages constructive action, and can result in irrational acts by people in despair, individually, or as nations, willing to do anything to derail the juggernaut we are told is carrying us, inevitably, to destruction. Unlike environmental problems, it is less clear to me how we change this. But at least, those of us in science, social science and the media can seek to craft solutions and enlist engagement, rather than feeding fear. With hope comes action. 

-Peter Kelemen

An Earth Scientist Explores the Biggest Climate Threat: Fear - NYTimes.com

Places humanized, not conquered

My hope, for all future generations, is that they will have (in addition to sunshine, fresh air, clean water, and fertile soil) a somewhat slower pace of life, with plenty of time to pause, in quiet places . . . haunted places—everyday, accessible places, open to the public—places that are not too radically transformed over time... 

Aaron Sachs, Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition

Delight Springs