Chelsea Green Blog
Community Resilience
How to Get the Most Out of Your Wood-Fired Oven
What could be better than an oven you can build yourself, that allows you to cook an array of delicious foods outside, and can help restore the individual and communal resiliency we’ve lost in recent decades? Follow these tips to learn how to make and maintain your own wood-fired oven! The following is an excerpt…
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Okra With a Twist: Crispy, Dry-Fried Okra
Wood-fired oven are not just for baking bread and pizza! If you utilize the full heat-cycle, as Richard Miscovich details in From the Wood-Fired Oven, you can make a wide range of tasty eats during just one firing—from roasting meats and vegetables to drying herbs. With live-fire roasting, this recipe for Dry-Fried Okra comes out…
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Learning from Our Arboreal Allies
Akiva Silver owns and operates Twisted Tree Farm, a homestead, nut orchard, and nursery located in Spencer, New York, where he grows around 20,000 trees per year using practices that go beyond organic. His background is in foraging, wilderness survival, and primitive skills. He has been observing nature intensively for the last 20 years, cultivating…
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Biodynamic Beekeeping 101
Spring is here and I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get started on all of the projects I mapped out during the cold winter months – including trying my hand at incorporating bees into my homesteading adventure! As a new-bee (get it?!), I need help to get started so I did…
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Ten Facts About the Water We Use
Most people have a basic understanding of the importance of water conservation. We’re taught to turn the faucet off while brushing our teeth and not to try and take shorter showers. However, we might not be aware of just how important conserving water is, how it impacts our lives, and how much we need it…
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The Importance of Nutrient Cycling
Putting nutrients back into the land is almost – if not more – important than harvesting from it. When it comes to growing pretty much anything, it is all about balance, and nutrient cycling can help you maintain equilibrium within your land. There are many simple and affordable ways to practice nutrient cycling, from compost…
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A Different Way of Working
While it’s true that machines can make life easier, they don’t necessarily make it better. Robert Somerville, author of Barn Club, understood this fact. That’s why he decided to gather a team of volunteers to come together and build a barn the old fashioned way – with a little sweat, tears, and his hands. The…
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The Barn: Cathedrals to Nature
When renowned craftsman Robert Somerville moved to Hertfordshire, in southern England, he discovered an unexpected landscape rich with wildlife and elm trees. Nestled within London’s commuter belt, this wooded farmland inspired Somerville, a lifelong woodworker, to revive the ancient tradition of hand-raising barns. This is a tale of forgotten trees, a local landscape, and an…
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What If Schools Nurtured Imagination?
Imagination is central to empathy, to creating better lives, to envisioning and then enacting a positive future. Yet imagination is also demonstrably in decline at precisely the moment when we need it most. In his book, author Rob Hopkins asks why imagination is in decline, and what we must do to revive and reclaim it.…
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RECIPE: It’s The Perfect Time For Rosehip Jam
All good things must come to an end– and that includes warm summer nights. But with the close of summer comes overnight frosts, the ideal time to gather plump, ripe rosehips. A rosehip’s sweet, unique flavor is perfect on morning toast. There are endless variations on ingredients and many ways to make rosehip jam. Here are…
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The Motivation Behind Change
In #futuregen, Jane Davidson explains how, as Minister for Environment, Sustainability and Housing in Wales, she proposed the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015—the first piece of legislation on Earth to place regenerative and sustainable practice at the heart of government. Unparalleled in its scope and vision, the Act connects environmental and social health…
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6 Books That Bring Hope to Life
Books can bring comfort, happiness, and most important: hope. Let these books fill you with inspirational stories of perseverance, hope, and innovation. Following the collapse of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy, social activist Ruairí McKiernan questions whether he should join the mounting number of emigrants searching for greater opportunity elsewhere. McKiernan embarks on a hitchhiking odyssey…
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Change Ourselves, Change the World
Lisa Fithian has shut down the CIA. She has disrupted the World Trade Organization and camped in a ditch with Gold Star mom and protester of the Iraq War, Cindy Sheehan. She has stood her ground in Tahrir Square, occupied Wall Street, marched in the streets of Ferguson, and walked in solidarity with tribal leaders…
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The Spirit of Hitching
Gone are the days where you can stick out your thumb to catch a carefree ride. For a long time though, hitchhiking was considered normal and even reasonably safe. Even more, it gave people a chance to connect with strangers, share stories, and spend a bit of time in someone else’s shoes. While the days…
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Save Your Soil the Power of Pee
It’s time to roll up your sleeves and get down into the dirt – but you may want to grab a bucket, especially first thing in the morning. Nutrient loss in our soil is an ongoing issue for some gardeners, but you may find help in an unexpected—liquid—form. The following is an excerpt from The…
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Neighbor Loaves Program: Maintain Grain Value Chains and Feed the Community
By Amy Halloran, author of The New Bread Basket. It originally appeared on foodsystemsjournal.org. The Neighbor Loaves Program In the surreality of March 2020, as states closed the doors on business, my colleague Alyssa Hartman had a great idea. Watching businesses struggle, she wondered what she could do as a non-essential worker to help farmers…
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Ireland: A Journey into the Heart and Soul
The following is an interview with Ruairí McKiernan, author of Hitching for Hope, and originally appeared in the Chelsea Green 2020 Spring Journal. It has been adapted for the web. What does the future have in store if politicians aren’t beholden to the people, if the pace of development is compromising mental health, and if…
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Enter Biochar: Reduce Your Pet’s Carbon Pawprint
Many carbon-conscious pet owners are aware of the non-recyclable waste that comes with owning a pet. Between kitty litter, puppy pads, and all those plastic dog bags, the waste adds up. Enter biochar. Imagine a world where the puppy pad is so odorless that your dog wants to sleep on it and the kitty litter…
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The Man Who Planted Trees Before His Time
Though nature can be a mighty force, it takes great care and a gentle hand to support the growth of the environment–especially trees. Trees are essential for life; they create oxygen and are home to thousands of species, yet we’re experiencing rapid deforestation. It only takes one person to plant one tree in their community…
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Resiliency: Becoming an Adaptive Human
They say history is bound to repeat itself if we don’t take the time to learn from the past. Our decision-making skills and resiliency are essential for survival but, for some, it’s difficult to connect the dots between the cause and effect of said decisions. However, in this day and age, it’s important to recognize…
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Publishing in the Time of a Pandemic: On Birth and Survival
The following is by Charlotte Dennett, author of Follow the Pipelines, and originally appeared on Medium.com. It has been adapted for the web. April 2, 2020 was supposed to be a special day. Not the usual birth-day, mind you. And not the kind of day I anticipated a month ago, before a pandemic took over our lives. I…
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Survive the Future: Three Principles to Get Started
What guiding principles will you need to not just survive the future, but imagine a better one? By understanding each other, we can work together.
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Limits to Growth and the COVID-19 epidemic
It comes to no surprise to anyone that the human population continues to grow, rapidly. However, there is a limit to that growth that we don’t quite know yet. Dennis Meadows, an emeritus professor of systems policy and social science research at the University of New Hampshire, walks us through the connection between population grow/decline…
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A Dictionary for Our Times
How would you define the word “Empowered”? Before you run to the dictionary, we’re not talking about the straight definition; what we mean is, what does it mean to be empowered in today’s society. Read on for short extracts from Lean Logic that speak to these times of crisis. The following is an excerpt from…
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Planet Coronavirus: Survival, Resistance and Regeneration
“There are times in history when sudden events—natural disasters, economic collapses, pandemics like Coronavirus, wars, famines—change everything. They change politics, they change economics and they change public opinion in drastic ways. By Ronnie Cummins, author of Grassroots Rising: A Call to Action on Climate, Farming, Food, and a Green New Deal, and originally appeared on…
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