Book Review: The Blood of the Earth: An Essay on Magic and Peak Oil

...P it is no steal, either. All forms of the book are available on this here page. The paperback version is (sorta)(sometimes) available at Amazon. A good, free way to get to know Geer’s thinking is to read the archive of his weekly blog, The Archdruid Report. Right now he’s doing something a little different, a series of fictional pieces to illustrate an idea, but you’ll find many of the concepts from The Blood of the Earth in his blog posts, espec...

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Bees will love your Coyote Brush Hedge

...y were good looking hedges. You wouldn’t guess it from this pic). One of a series of posts inspired by our recent tour of the new gardens at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. Baccharis pilularis, called coyote brush, or chaparral bloom, is an unassuming Western native plant with a secret super-power: native and non-native pollinators love, love, love! its tiny little flowers. If you want to lavish affection and care on the pollinators in you...

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An Arts and Crafts Masterpiece in San Francisco

...itects and designers that included Bernard Maybeck, A. C. Schweinfurth, A. Page Brown, William Keith, Bruce Porter, and the Rev. Joseph Worcester in 1895. On the walls are a series of stunning California landscape paintings depicting the four seasons by William Keith that echo the naturalistic theme of the building. The upright and stern chairs allegedly touched off the mission furniture craze. Should you find yourself in San Francisco this church...

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Nomadic Furniture

...shelves, lamps made from milk jugs, hexagonal dining sets as well as a two page hymn to the waterbed (ok, not sure about that thoughtstyling). The subtitle of the book sums it up, “how to build and where to buy lightweight furniture that folds, inflates, knocks down, stacks, or is disposable and can be recycled.” You can see more of their work thanks to a recent retrospective of their work in Vienna. My favorite project in the book is the series o...

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Post Petroleum Lecture

...rk on Saturday March 24th as part of the 2007 Sustainable Habitats Lecture Series. The series is put together by permaculture expert David Khan, and those of you who missed the last lecture, raw milk outlaw and dairyman Mark McAfee, missed an engaging, and provocative afternoon. So don’t miss this next one! From Khan’s announcement: Albert Bates is a permaculture and appropriate technology instructor at the Eco village Training Center at The Farm...

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