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Category Archives: Ways of Seeing
Integrated Agro-ecological Systems Land Use vs the ‘dis-integrated’ industrial machine
There is a difference in kind between complex, integrated, low input, free range systems of land, soil, organic matter, fungi & macroinvertebrates, plants & animals, and …. ….. industrial high energy input feedlot systems which abuse each of those – … Continue reading
Posted in agricultural strategy, Environmental Philosophy, Industrial Mindset, Land Use, Land use policy, Thought Pieces, Ways of Seeing
Tagged agricultural strategy, Commoditisation, Complex Adaptive Systems, Culture-Nature, Economics of Natural Systems, Land use policy, Land use strategy, Managing Complexity, Mechanistic Worldview, Resilience theory, Socio-Ecological Systems, Strategy Vs Technocrats, Sustainable Land Management, Technology Treadmill
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Getting Politics (and Life!) off the Titanic
William Ophuls has written some very thoughtful books about our political age. Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology is one of them. He challenges our world, not just at the level of tinkering with deck chairs (e.g. biofuels … Continue reading
Posted in Reimagining, Thought Pieces, Virtues, Ways of Seeing
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Review – The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young
Rosamund Young’s The Secret Life of Cows gives far more than a simple description of animal personality, behaviour and communication. It speaks also to and of humanity. What animals eat impacts on their health and the quality and taste of their … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Reimagining, Thought Pieces, Ways of Seeing
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The Commodisation of Water and Life Itself
The commoditisation of life – humans as ‘work units’, as mere ‘things’, land as capital, produce as lifeless ‘pork units’ etc. All the meaning reduced to the most basic measure; weight or volume or cost, at its worst undifferentiated by … Continue reading
Posted in Thought Pieces, Ways of Seeing
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Reimagining Landscapes I: Rejecting the Machine
How do you separate the personal from the professional? We are taught to deal in the ‘objective’, in measured things. But the whole idea of reimagining how we look at landscapes – our so-called ‘working lands’ of farms and forests … Continue reading
Bizarre Economic Beliefs – Finding the Black Cat that Isn’t There
More evidence has come out that tax cuts don’t lead to economic growth, and let’s not go into how people ought to measure progress or growth. But isn’t small government, and commensurately low tax rates, what the Neoliberal economists have … Continue reading
Posted in Thought Pieces, Ways of Seeing
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The Systems View – But what else have you done?
Why don’t we teach our kids to think like this – in feedbacks and multiple effects, not simple lines of one thing’s effect on only one other thing? It’s idiotic. You never do one thing. Especially not those things … Continue reading
Posted in Thought Pieces, Ways of Seeing
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The Wisdom of Intimacy
Edward Abbey – he of Desert Solitaire, one of the classics questioning the values of our modern world – wrote a short and scathing essay of a laboratory scientist intent on studying dog behaviour because “no one had done it … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces, Ways of Seeing
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Twining the Spirals: Is Real Beauty Reciprocal?
I keep notes, in a black Moleskine notebook with its history and paper, Bruce Chatwin and all that. They come in various sizes and lie in a drawer. Some on a shelf. I’ve been writing less in them since I … Continue reading
Posted in Thought Pieces, Ways of Seeing
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Teaching Wisdom – To Know the World, you Have to Live in the World
“To know the world, you have to live in the world.” Carol Black has written a beautiful and insightful essay on connection between children and the outdoors, knowing, and what education ought to be. It resonates with me. I think … Continue reading
Posted in Land Use, Thought Pieces, Virtues, Ways of Seeing
9 Comments
Ways of Seeing III: Looking for the Many Moving Things
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.“ F. Scott Fitzgerald I read that Fitzgerald quote in a book by Roger … Continue reading
Ways of Seeing II: The Mechanical View and the Treadmill of Techno-Fixes
This is the second in a series. I wanted to write about where we have come from in land use and conservation, what we are doing, and where we could be going: from Pre-modern (Pre-Industrial), To Modern (Industrial, or Productivist), to … Continue reading
Ways of Seeing I: Paradigms of Progress – the Rise of the Machine
Preamble. This is the beginning of a series. I wanted to write about where we have come from in land use and conservation, what we are doing, and where we could be going: from Pre-modern (Pre-Industrial), To Modern (Industrial, or … Continue reading
