“What if we only bought handmade things?” That was a question that my friend asked me back in 2002 and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

The colonial mindset quickly reduces everything to a set of commodities. Commodification replaces the handmade with the machine made — soul for cheapness.

When I experience Nature, sometimes in my backyard, sometimes in a park, sometimes in the middle of the city, I am experiencing the holy — something just beyond comprehension.

As humans we tend to worship that which is incomprehensible, that which provides us with life. There is nothing more sacred…

“You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round.”

Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Lakota

It is easy to murder a fly.

But that is not really murder. The term “murder” only applies to a human being. Sometimes the term is used for shock effect by vegans to describe what happens to livestock or wild animals. …

If you think about it, all of our food comes from an absolutely massive amount of sex.

Animal sex gives us bacon and eggs. Plant sex gives us toast, juice, and jam. Or rather, we, as very advanced apes, have become amazingly brilliant at utilizing animal sex to cook a delicious breakfast.

In the spring we’re surrounded by a buzzing cacophony of sex: sperm clouds wafting through the fields, suggestive flowers unfolding in the dewy grass, birds peeping incessant love power ballads from the high branches.

Pollen, in particular, is an extremely important foodstuff for animals, as the last icicles…

Disclaimer — I am not a scientist or a medical professional. Any content in this article is for informational purposes only. Consult your healthcare provider if you have any medical concerns or questions.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

-John Muir

The last inch of frozen slush on the edges of my gravel driveway has finally melted, and spring is beginning to unfurl like the proud wings of a peacock.

There is no more smoke coming from the chimneys of sugar shacks, and the green grass peeks…

Attribution: http://www.forestwander.com/

A black shadow, a winter-coated fisher, dashes across the crumbly blacktop a hundred yards in front of me, through a decrepit barbed wire fence into a grove of young maple trees, loping up a hill that plunges down the south side of my property perpendicular to the road falling to the east. Through the older maples and oaks he runs, wild, free, and majestic in his single-minded mastery of his environment.

The fisher, a catlike member of the weasel family, is an indomitable hunter. Similar in many ways to his relative, the much smaller marten, the fisher measures…

To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.

-Wendell Berry

Survival is a relationship.

It is an intimate connection that all living things have with their environments.

Indigenous cultures thrived for millennia on this planet because of the ecosystem-based relationships that they cultivated with their surrounding landscape.

Men and women were part of the flora, fauna, mountains, and rivers all around them.

The dawning of the agricultural age about 10,000 years ago changed many of those integral relationships. …

These days it seems like everyone is either a prepper or a denier. Either someone has a stockpile of refried beans and ammo or they are on spring break in Florida as the Coronavirus sweeps across the land.

As a certified permaculture designer, I’ve been studying and working in the field of Permaculture for the past 20 years and I can tell you there is a middle way that can lead us toward a sustainable and much more secure future than we have right now.

It is a middle way because it recognizes that community plays an expansive and important…

A whale will never understand the concept of being Vegan, but she will most definitely understand that she is dying because her stomach is full of 88 pounds of plastic waste, including 16 empty sacks of rice.

She is full, but she is starving. Her stomach acid cannot break down the plastic, so it has begun to break down the lining of her stomach.

Soon she will die in misery.

Is this what compassion toward animals looks like now?

If we decide to become a raw food vegan, we may end up increasing organized crime in south American countries because…