Category: General
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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…
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The Certainty Merchants
In the past year or so I have been undergoing a transition in my thinking and practice away from conservation ecology into a more socio-ecological position. there are no wildlife problems after all,only human ones right? Ive always been interested in systems thinking and complexity ever since reading Fritjof Kapra’s Web of Life, but I’m…
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Savage Gods: Paul Kingsnorth may at last have found the real enemy of the environment, and they are words themselves.
Cooling off for six hours in a police cell in Esher, Surrey, in 1997, with King Arthur Pendragon taking up residence in the cell next door, I had a moment to reflect on the power of words, language and stories. We had both been arrested at…
James T Jones 