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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July Linkages

...’s “Canning & Preserving”, published by Lark Books, will be available April 2010. The third and fourth books in the series, “Home Dairy” and “Beekeeping”, will be available in April 2011. Hopefully we’ll be having English on our new Homegrown Evolution Podcast that will debut when we can get our computer, seen above, to record audio. A few blog posts ago we answered a question about soil testing. Visiting journalist Michael Tortorello tipped us of...

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Dystopia Report: The I-710 Corridor Aesthetic Master Plan

...reeway builder’s utopian promise of speed and liberty delivers, instead, exurban sprawl, congestion and waves of urban decay and gentrification. That utopian vision of Freeway building is personified in mid-century figures like Robert Moses and the city fathers of early 20th century Los Angeles. But Jameson goes on to question, “does anyone believe in progress any longer? . . . are the architects and urbanists still passionately at work on Utopian...

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Saturday Linkages: Grains, Collapse and Mangoes

...-to-fcc-grow-light-ballast-causes-hf-interference-violates-rules … Granjas urbanas ganan terreno en Los Ángeles http://tinyurl.com/ozxeley How sustainable is digital fabrication? http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/03/how-sustainable-is-digital-fabrication.html … Winners and losers at the garden show | Garden Rant http://gardenrant.com/2014/03/seen-at-the-garden-show.html … How to Grow Sweet Potatoes and Mangoes in an Urban Jungle http://tinyurl.c...

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Two apps for choosing bike routes: one good, one bad

...nk you’re in Amsterdam. Well, almost. Before going somewhere unfamiliar, I used to pour over bike maps to figure out where the bike lanes and paths were. Now, there are apps for that. The Good: Google Maps In 2010, a bike option was added to Google Maps. While not perfect, it works surprisingly well. Combined with a little familiarity with what streets are good and bad to ride on, I now find that I rarely look at the city’s bike maps anymore. Here...

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