Food & Water

From 1999-2024, Dark Mountain’s Mark Watson taught and demonstrated the art of holding a dialogue with (mostly) wild plants. Part-manual, part-memoir, this small book is a distillation of his hands-on practice, ‘hanging out’ with twelve flowers and a tree over a year: from a conversation with burdock in a community garden, to lying alongside sea kale on the Suffolk shore, to foraging for mallow leaf fritters and flower teas.

Anyway, as I’ve often said here, I don’t think renewal is going to come from the centre. So while I genuinely mourn the misery to come for people who, unlike me, are going to be in the frontline, I guess I’m finding it hard to get invested in the politics of the centre.

Ocean enthusiasts and random passersby alike came together in Seattle this past August to explore and celebrate their connection to the deep sea.

This year, the especially dry conditions also mean that the Hudson Valley faces a heightened risk of wildfires — something typically unheard of in the area. Parts of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut have all seen wildfires in early November, with a massive fire on the New Jersey-New York state border still raging as of Monday.

The Flores González brothers’ revolutionary innovation has been to turn a heretofore indigestible, but massive and accessible, source of fiber, biomass, water, and protein—the agave leaves or pencas—into a valuable animal feed, utilizing the natural process of anaerobic fermentation to transform the plant leaves’ relatively indigestible saponin compounds into digestible carbohydrates and sugar.

The failure of the Danish climate tax on agriculture is a result of a siloed science and policy with no consideration of the realities of agro-ecosystems. Landscape management need to be multi-faceted and not directed towards just one objective, be it climate regulation, maximum harvest, profit, bio-diversity or tourism.