020 Emily Green on the Mow and Blow Landscape Paradigm

...dependent. She blogs at Chance of Rain. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in 2011 Emily says, What would you do if a neighbor came to you and asked, “For 20 minutes every week, may I turn on your vacuum cleaner, smoke detector and garbage disposal and run them all at once?” Holding that thought, consider if the neighbor added, “Ah, may I also blow noxious dust your way for those same 20 minutes?” Imagine that not just one neighbor on the street ask...

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We Went to Japan

...e eye of a Daruma doll to bring good fortune. Daruma dolls for sale at the festival. Our time in Japan was just before Sakura (cherry blossom season). A few trees were blooming early and the stores were full of Sakura themed goods and foods. There’s even a Sakura themed Domino’s pizza meal. Tokyo was immensely fun to wander at night and I kept thinking of the class I took on Frederic Jameson’s book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Cap...

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What we think about when we try not to think about global warming

...s at the bottom of our pile of day to day concerns, and our policies and lifestyles reflect that unconcern. In fact, over the last two decades, concern about climate change among laypeople and politicians has actually declined, especially in the U.S, England and Australia. The question is, why do we respond the peculiar way we do to this information? Stoknes walks us through the psychology of denial, and of the assimilation of climate change infor...

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“Urban Homesteading” belongs to us all

...teading” freely from now on out. Longtime readers may remember that back in 2011, the Dervaes Institute sent notices to a dozen or so organizations, informing them that they could no longer use the terms “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading” unless speaking about the work of the Dervaes Institute, as they had registered trademark on both terms. Beyond that, some people found their web pages or social media sites removed when their hosting ser...

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What’s Your Everyday Carry?

...ebsite. Consider this blog post as an update of the pocket dump I posted in 2011. Since that time my EDC has changed, mostly via subtractions. Here’s my current EDC: 1. Leatherman Rebar This is the central and, unquestionably, most useful cornerstone of my EDC. Not a day goes by when I don’t pull out the Rebar to fix something or slice off a piece of cheese with the dull (my fault) pocket knife. The Leatherman folks have tried to anticipate every...

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