Category: General
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First Thoughts on The Dawn Of Everything by Wengrow & Graeber
This is a huge book- both in its ground-breaking content and its physical size! Here the authors challenge the entrenched narratives that the pre-agricultural world was either a primitive Eden of small egalitarian hunter-gatherers (Rosseau) or nasty, brutush and short, requiring heirachy and governance to quell our worst natures (Hobbes). For someone like me researching…
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Grasping The Sparrow’s Tail: Thoughts on Inviting Movement Back into our Lives.
I let my intuition explore connections between shifts in seasonal farming patterns, Graber and Wengrow’s ‘The Dawn of Everything’, Tai Chi and Panarchy, and the importance of metaphors, stories and narratives in understanding and action.
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Creating Rural ‘Complete Communities’
Last Wednesday I attended a Greenbelt Foundation Workshop on Creating Complete Communities in Rural Municipalities at Gellert Community Centre in Halton Hills. As an independent researcher, I’m collaborating with Waterloo and Queens Universities, Save The Oak Ridges Moraine (STORM) Coalition and Mount Wolfe Farm in the development of the Oak Ridges Institute of Applied Sustainabiity…
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Hedgelaying North American Style with Dr Johann Schoepf (1783)
” Hedgelayers do it in style!” may sound like an amusing bumper-sticker but it refers to one of the most fascinating features of this rural skill: that local differences exist in hedgerow management, called by the National Hedgelaying Society Regional Styles. There are more than 30 styles recorded in the UK, with more in Europe,…
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A Plum Eater and the first jar of Mount Wolfe Spoon Butter
I’ve just finished this plum eating spoon which I’m please with. I’m getting to grips with the synergies between understanding the wood, form (what shapes and lines come together to make a spoon), working with tools (sharpness and hold) and the unknowable element I am happy to call ‘magic’! As is often the case, the…
James T Jones 