• Storytelling the Adjacent Possible (part 1)

    Storytelling the Adjacent Possible (part 1)

    In which I carve spoons , listen to podcasts and take a brief, meandering walk through post-pandemic society via ‘”doomer optimisim”, situated cognition, Cynefin, beauty and the on-going wonderful experiment at Mount Wolfe Farm. I spent a lovely few hours yesterday making carving billets from a bit of sugar maple and roughing out an eating…

  • Place, Land and Work: how do we start to belong?

    Place, Land and Work: how do we start to belong?

    “….Hope Then to belong to your place by your own knowledge Of what it is that no other place is, and by Your caring for it as you care for no other place, this Place that you belong to though it is not yours, For it was from the beginning and will be to the…

  • Edges, Boundaries, InBetweens: Continuing Explorations in Liminal Space

    Edges, Boundaries, InBetweens: Continuing Explorations in Liminal Space

    ‘The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.’” Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed 1974 In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the…

  • Hedgerows at the first ever International Association for Landscape Ecology-North America Conference

    Hedgerows at the first ever International Association for Landscape Ecology-North America Conference

    This week the International Association for Landscape Ecology-North America (IALE_NA) is holding its first ever Annual Conference. I was originally a member of the UK branch of IALE and joined the North American chapter when it was formed last year from what was IALE-US. The conference was to be held in Toronto, and I was…

  • Creating Rural ‘Complete Communities’

    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…