Breaking Ground; The Chain Saws of Salvation
ON a bright, chilly morning last month, I joined a small group of my neighbors who had gathered just south of Kent, Conn., chain saws and loppers in hand, to face down a threat to one of the prettiest...
View ArticleGardening
Reading along in THE INVITING GARDEN: Gardening for the Senses, Mind, and Spirit (Holt, $40), I suddenly came upon this provocative sentence: “Gardening is not a hobby, and only nongardeners would...
View ArticleBreaking Ground; Seed. Reseed. Secede.
WHERE do you go to shoot a movie about a perfectly ordinary American whose whole life, unbeknownst to him, is a scripted show for television? Ideally, you’d find a place that looked so stereotypically...
View ArticleBreaking Ground: The Call of the Wild Apple
ALL the way in the back of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station’s orchard here stand several jumbled rows of the oddest apple trees you’ve ever seen. No two are alike, not in form or leaf...
View ArticleThe Triumph of Burbopolis
I grew up in a pretty nice subdivision on Long Island, but try as I might to kindle some spark of nostalgia for “the Gates of Woodbury,” the gravitational pull of the place is almost nil. It has been...
View ArticleThe Lives They Lived
History is written by the victors, it’s often said, but what about natural history? This invariably gets written by one human being or another, no matter what species’ triumph it trumpets, for the...
View ArticleThe Way We Live Now: Pollinator
For a while there, it looked as if this might be the year it never happened, but the gardening season has arrived at last. Last week the peas went in, finally, and today I’ll plant potatoes. Nights are...
View ArticleNaturally
1. Supermarket Pastoral Almost overnight, the amount and variety of organic food on offer in my local supermarket has mushroomed. Fresh produce, milk, eggs, cereal, frozen food, even junk food—all of...
View ArticlePoison
An Environmental Memoir. By Susanne Antonetta. 242 pp. Washington: Counterpoint. $26. “This is the story of a body,” Susanne Antonetta tells us near the end of her arresting memoir of a New Jersey...
View ArticleIs This Country Living? Ask the Cows
MY town’s annual agricultural fair fell on the Saturday after the attacks on New York and Washington, and I think everyone was relieved when the selectmen decided to go ahead with the event. The...
View ArticleThe Year In Ideas: A to Z; Genetic Pollution
The way we think about and deal with pollution has always been governed by the straightforward rules of chemistry. You clean the stuff up or let it fade with time. But what do you do about a form of...
View ArticleSustaining Vision
On the second day of spring, Joel Salatin is down on his belly getting the ant’s-eye view of his farm. He invites me to join him, to have a look at the auspicious piles of worm castings, the clover...
View ArticleThe Modern Hunter-Gatherer
I. A WALK IN THE WOODS Walking with a loaded rifle in an unfamiliar forest bristling with the signs of your prey is thrilling. It embarrasses me to write that, but it is true. I am not by nature much...
View ArticleLove and Lies
We animals don’t give plants nearly enough credit. When we want to dismiss a fellow human as ineffectual or superfluous, we call him a “potted plant.” A “vegetable” is how we refer to a person reduced...
View ArticleWendell Berry’s Wisdom
A few days after Michelle Obama broke ground on an organic vegetable garden on the South Lawn of the White House in March, the business section of the Sunday New York Times published a cover story...
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