American Avocet

Drip irrigation

I saw this in the neighbor's yard—a very cheap drip irrigation system. This way the water has time to soak deep into the soil and you don't have to stand there watering for an hour a drip at a time or have all the topsoil get hard or run off. All you do is drill out a hole in a plastic bucket, put a stick through the hole and then fill the bucket with water so that moisture seeps out slowly through the cracks and fibers.

Greening the Desert

My father is a man of the earth; that is, he knows how to analyze soil by sight and what to add to make it soft and rich and fertile. When I was young he would brag that he could turn the Sahara into arable soil if he were given a chance (his plan involved some B-52 bombers that would spread compost and rock powder over vast tracts of land). Obviously it was a little impractical but I always liked to imagine it anyway, since desertification is such a seemingly unsolvable problem. This video, however, makes me think that perhaps my father wasn't so far from having a solution as I thought he was. Hearing about a land that was salty and dry that is now producing dates and figs is a good antidote to all the other stories I've been hearing lately about dying honeybees and global warming.

Flight Patterns

Absolutely beautiful New York Times article about birdwatching by Jonathan Rosen. Richard Barnes’s photographs will be shown at Hosfelt Gallery in New York this fall and were taken over two years in EUR, a suburb of Rome that Mussolini planned as a showcase for fascist architecture. In a single article we learn about starlings as pests, as poets, as augers and as a metaphor for ourselves as Americans. I love the last paragraph (the last three, really) but it won't do to just repost it here, because without the beginning the end would mean nothing at all.

The Green Revolution

Interesting thought in a New York Times article. "A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism."