Eight uses for fall leaves from the Old Farmer’s Almanac. We’re raking ours up, mowing them to shred them, and placing them in areas where we plan to do new planting next spring, in order to both kill the grass in those areas and improve the soil.
Another beautiful Fall day.
Regenerative agriculture (like what you see in “Biggest Little Farm”) is animism in action.
We finished the grape arbor. Now it just needs some paint and we’ll be ready to plant grapes next spring. We’ve raked the leaves up there to kill the grass over the winter so we can do more planting in that area.
Ok so I watched Biggest Little Farm and that was one of the most emotionally intense, beautiful, inspiring documentaries I’ve ever seen. You should watch it—with a boxful of tissues.
It’s going to be a beautiful weekend here so one more big push to finish a few projects: finish the grape arbor, fill the final raised bed, put out some Halloween decorations. But first, coffee and The Biggest Little Farm (thanks for the recommendation, Tim).
What hath Jon Stewart wrought?
In a recent post, Robert Rackley riffs on an article by Jon Askonas at the New Atlantis arguing that Jon Stewart paved the way—however unintentionally—for Tucker Carlson. I haven’t yet read the piece (I will over the weekend) but I have to say that I agree with the premise. The Iraq War, the War on Terror, the Bush presidency generally were formative times for me. Voting for Bush in 2000 was the last time I voted for a Republican for president.
Luxury surveillance
Chris Gilliard: These “smart” devices all fall under the umbrella of what the digital-studies scholar David Golumbia and I call “luxury surveillance”—that is, surveillance that people pay for and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits. These gadgets are analogous to the surveillance technologies deployed in Detroit and many other cities across the country in that they are best understood as mechanisms of control: They gather data, which are then used to affect behavior.
Animism
Graham Harvey: Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others. Dana Driscoll: Animism is a belief in the spirit of all things. Animistic views recognize that rivers, stones, trees, animals, human-created objects, and people all have spirits and that those spirits can be worked with, learned from, and honored in various ways.