Multiple Mantis

While I've been super busy preparing beds and planting winter crops, I did discover I had some onlookers: multiple praying mantises. They are always fun to find even if they do eat both pest and beneficial insects. I can only hope they are taking care of some of the grasshoppers I discovered wiping out a fair amount of the baby carrots that were just coming in - drats! (Note: cover carrot beds next time with screen or row cover if grasshopper numbers seem high.)

A Future

An interesting read - Back to the Future - from the always interesting James Howard Kunstler. Mentions Detroit twice. Snippet:

I don’t think there’s any question that we have to return to traditional ways of occupying the landscape: walkable cities, towns, and villages, located on waterways and, if we are fortunate, connected by rail lines. These urban places will exist on a much smaller scale than what is familiar to us now, built on a much finer grain. They will have to be connected to farming and food-growing places. A return to human scale will surely lead to a restored regard for artistry in building, since the streetscape will be experienced at walking speed.

The requirements for this will be pretty straightforward. It doesn’t call for “critical theory,” as the grad schools refer to metaphysical thinking these days, but rather practical skill and common sense. The mandates of reality are telling us very clearly that the age of fossil fuel magic is drawing to a close, with huge implications for how we occupy the landscape. It also implies a timeout for the kind of rapid technological change that has come to seem normal for us. This necessary timeout is probably the only thing that will prevent us from destroying the planet we call home. We’re suffering profoundly from too much magic.

The infatuation with technomagic in our visions of the future city has paradoxically produced places with no magic, no power to enchant the human spirit. The city of slick glass skyscrapers may inspire a certain crude awe, as anything gigantic might. But go to the tower districts of Houston, Minneapolis, Dallas, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, and I guarantee you will not find anything like enchantment. What you’ll find is sterility, a vacuum, a fiasco of unintended consequences. It turns out that the human spirit needs texture, not sleekness in its dwelling place, and it needs things human-sized to feel truly human, and despite all the striving to escape that, it is exactly what we’re going to get.

Market Forces

The Union of Concerned Scientists has an interesting report out called Market Forces: Creating Jobs through Public Investment in Local and Regional Food Systems.