Week-ish notes 02/12/24

An open lined notebook with three pens placed diagonally across the pages. The pens are light blue, dark blue, and black, arranged from top to bottom on a white surface.

On the 23 September I went along to LandAlive, a regenerative farming and food conference for the South West. The second day was themed around food. Caroline Grindrod opened the plenary with a beautiful talk about our ‘story of separation’ – how our fear, driven by from separation from land and nature, drove us to …

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Permaculture and spiders

A cellar spider eating a house fly. A tangle of legs and wings.

We have an entente with the cellar spiders in our house. We leave them to their own devices in the crevices and ceiling areas we don’t need, and they return the favour by policing all the other invertebrates. Pholcids eat flies and other spiders. They’ll eat each other if pushed. We’ve tried over time to …

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A (very brief) history of agriculture

This was a piece of course work from my Skills Bootcamp in Regenerative Land-Based Studies at the Apricot Centre earlier this year. It’s an attempt to map out a history of agriculture. It will have missed a very great deal, but I focussed on pivotal events and technological developments that drove population change. Comments welcome. …

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Week-ish notes 24/10/24

An open lined notebook with three pens placed diagonally across the pages. The pens are light blue, dark blue, and black, arranged from top to bottom on a white surface.

I’ve been thinking about study, particularly as I approach the halfway-through-term reading week next week. Where my global systems thinking module on Mondays takes the form of a lecture with occasional group discussions, my Friday food systems module is a seminar. The approach is different for the two. At the Monday lecture, I take a …

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Tipping points

A cloudy landscape viewed from above. The scene includes a low-lying layer of dark clouds or fog, with sunlight filtering through, creating a golden reflection on the surface below. The overall atmosphere is soft and ethereal, with diffused light and contrasting shadows across the horizon.

This week we covered tipping points, critical thresholds in the Earth’s climate system. Crossing a tipping point can trigger self-reinforcing, cascading shifts in the behaviour of Earth’s systems that can be irreversible. Learning more about tipping points at the University of Exeter with Tim Lenton feels like going to the source. The University of Exeter …

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Gaia

A globe resembling the planet Earth seen suspended in the air inside a cathedral.

This week was lectured by Prof. Tim Lenton, and this module keeps setting off lightbulb moments for me. How did life on earth get to be self-regulating? What is life, and what is its effect on the planet? James Lovelock had started looking at the composition of atmospheres of different planets while working at NASA. …

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