Agriculture, Northland Sheep Dairy

Farm restoration – a Downeast Maine story

Tuesday, February 9th, 2021

More a set of recalled vignettes than a systemic history, this essay will at least capture some of my photo archive in an explanatory framework.
Property purchase and rebuilding

As we drove up to the top of Ridge Rd. in Robbinston to the last visit on our hunt for a retirement farm in Maine, the vista that [...]

The quality of peasant life: a scenario for survival

Tuesday, November 17th, 2020

Histories of peasant life that characterize it as nasty, brutish and short ignore the vast variety around the world of peasant quality of life and attendant differences in environment, social organization and culture. Differences of degree of overlordship alone range from several layers of overlords to complete autonomy. It is just this great variety, the [...]

Human designs for ecosystem management and survival after the oil era

Saturday, January 18th, 2020

All societies in history have relied on the land and its plant and animal resources. The superstructure of high technologies and complex forms of social organization like cities that fossil energy has made possible only conceal our essential reliance on the land. As access to the dense, high quality forms of energy in fossil fuels [...]

What is Sustainable?

Monday, January 8th, 2018

Answers to this question that are rooted in the relevant scientific disciplines – primarily systems ecology, the physics and economics of natural resource science and the world-system method of the history of civilizations – are so unsettling to most people in their implications for the future of modern civilization that they are met with denial. [...]

Biochar – a Critical View Through the Ecosystemic Lens

Monday, October 30th, 2017

I have been following the biochar story since it began to gain visibility over a decade ago. I view it from the perspective of forty years of farming informed by study of systems ecology. My understanding of both of these pursuits has evolved over that time in ways that will inform this critique. I began [...]

Food Production Systems in the Decline of the Industrial Age: A Call for a Socio-ecological Synthesis

Sunday, June 9th, 2013

The sustainability of industrial food production has long been under attack for its destruction of the soil, water, air and other products and services essential to life on earth. Now the massive consumption of energy and other resources needed to build and maintain industrial society has led to the depletion of these [...]

Cities and Suburbs in the Energy Descent: Thinking in Scenarios

Monday, October 8th, 2012

This article was originally reviewed, edited and published by Tompkins County Relocalization, a group in upstate New York that is researching various aspects of energy descent.
“A city could be defined, almost, as a human ecosystem that grossly exceeds the carrying capacity of its local environment.” – William Catton

The vulnerability of cities and suburbs in [...]

Reductionist Science and the Rise of Capitalism: Implications for a New Educational Program of Agricultural Science

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

The thesis of this essay is that there is a way of doing science that is characteristic of scientific inquiry under capitalism because its methods provide the kind of “irresponsible knowledge” that a profit-at-whatever-cost social system like capitalism requires. As my title implies, I will argue that as capitalism evolved to become an ever more [...]

Implications for Agriculture of Peak Cheap Energy

Sunday, November 27th, 2011

By way of introduction to what I have to say, let me explain the evolution of my thinking. As a farmer for 30 years, I have been an active participant in the movement to develop alternatives to Industrial Agriculture. As you may know, much of the motivation for that movement was a growing awareness of [...]

On Invasives

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

What I will say here about the issue of invasives may seem picky, but it is not, because it points up a fundamental flaw in how we think about any intervention into the complex, systemic world in which we live.
The flaw running through the whole discourse about invasives is the tendency to see them too [...]

« Previous Entries