When I rise up
let me rise up joyful
like a bird.When I fall
let me fall without regret
like a leaf.
(Wendell Berry, c. 1969)
On one level, clearly, a drought is just bad luck, the savage will of the gods. If it doesn’t rain for long enough, then every farming system grinds to a halt. But the severity of how drought affects a place is shaped by how it has been managed before. And the fact is that a lot of British farmland is now being farmed so efficiently — in monocultures, and fed with synthetic nutrients — that often it has quite low levels of soil organic matter. Now, this can work fine in years where there is plenty of moisture. But over time, we also know that degraded soils dry out quicker in droughts.
The Rothamstead Institute estimates that every 1% increase in soil organic carbon raises the soil’s water holding capacity by about 354,000 liters per hectare: enough to fill five swimming pools. It isn’t how much rain falls from the sky, in other words, but how much we can hold in our soils that really matters.
Systems, in short, can be too efficient; fields need some buffer, some untapped potential, that they can call on in periods of stress and exhaustion. But our farming systems are being asked to run flat-out all the time. There is no slack, and very little resilience. The basic problem is that the economics of agriculture don’t pay for soil organic matter, or for farmers to rotate crops, or to let land have periods of recovery. In practice, that means that most of our arable landscapes are now poorly adapted for extreme weather events.
Repainted what is essentially my studio bathroom, formerly my daughter’s bathroom, which I had permitted her to paint bright salmon pink. Color yes, pink no. It was the most annoying room I have ever painted—all obstacles, no room to maneuver—but it’s done, and now I get to build a wall cabinet.
View from my driveway after the wettest July since the 1930s
Speaking of buying things: The very last straw for me with SquareSpace was discovering that without my choice or even knowledge it was now possible to buy, via my website, a $30 spreader in four easy payments of $7.50. Make a new plan, Stan. We’re finished.
Why is it that there are more items for sale on the internet than protons in the sun but I cannot find the thing I actually want
Challenge: Create a two hour setlist of cover songs appropriate for a farmers market busker that does not contain any songs you have ever heard sung or played at a farmers market.
This one is titled “To Me the Converging Objects of the Universe Perpetually Flow,” which is what happens when you fill the time between customers at the craft market reading your pocket edition of Walt Whitman and doodling.
This is, I don’t know what. Reptilian love child of Pennsylvania Dutch and Zuni?
Recently there have been several major mathematical breakthroughs enabled entirely by AI: both proofs and counterexamples to long-held conjectures. Ordinarily I read about this sort of ting with interest. Now I find I simply don’t care. Mathematics may have its uses but it is not interesting because it is useful; it is interesting because it is beautiful. The pursuit of mathematics is valuable not because it is important to be right but because the pursuit of it is beautiful. It is not like having a cure for cancer and not minding where it came from. It is the difference between watching a dancer and watching a computer simulation of a dance. If it isn’t human, to hell with it.