Reading in progress
Tuesday 22 September 2026
What is working, where, and who made it work. Read the whole turn of the earth in two minutes, then go as deep as you like.
Open the umbrella in the hall and check it for holes and bent ribs, while mending it is still a choice. The rain will test it soon enough.
265 of 365Rebecca Howard spent two years driving the length of Britain with her paints. She visited nine rewilding sites from the Rewilding Network - the RSPB saltmarsh on Lancashire's Ribble Estuary, an ancient temperate rainforest in Cornwall, an urban rewilding park in Derby - and made a painting of each. The result, an exhibition called A Year in the Wild, opened this September at Knepp in Sussex, with prints and cards sold to raise money for Rewilding Britain.
She came to it through frustration. A landscape painter for years, she kept noticing that everything she painted - seascapes, hillsides - had been groomed, trimmed or ploughed, and she wanted to see what the country looked like without that management. What held her on the sites was less the scenery than the people: small-scale rewilders putting land back together out of affection rather than profit, most of them unrecognised and unpaid.
The work itself is done on site, alongside the rewilders. At Moor Barton in Devon she joined Robin and Annie ringbarking larch that were crowding out the native woodland. The painting that came out of that visit shows a larch stump covered in porcelain fungi - the dead tree feeding the fungi, the fungi returning the nutrients to a wood that now has room to grow. A viewer can take it as a pretty study of mushrooms, or read the whole ecological transaction in it. Howard is happy either way.
The visit that shifted her thinking was to Derek Gow's farm at Coombeshead in Devon. His counter-intervention there is almost nothing: great piles of logs and sticks left as cover for reptiles and ground-nesting birds, dead branches left to rot where they fall. "Every creature needs a place to live," he told her. After this summer's drought she saw it herself: plants standing in dead leaves came through; plants on bare, tidy soil did not.
A log pile is the cheapest habitat going: stack fallen branches and sticks in an untroubled corner, an afternoon's work, and leave it for reptiles and ground-nesting birds. Then stop raking - leaves left on beds through summer kept plants alive in the drought where bare soil did not.
Rewilding Britain · Read the source
Today's first reading is about a painter who spent two years visiting nine rewilding sites, returning through seasons, watching scrub become thicket and thicket become something with no name yet. This column exists to say the uncomfortable part plainly: that reading, like the others above it, was drafted by a machine. The painter took two years. The machine took less time than the kettle. Both produced something you can read, and it is worth being honest about what separates them.
The painter's slowness was not inefficiency. It was the work. A model trained on landscape images can produce a plausible rewilding scene in seconds, and it will be wrong in ways that matter: the wrong species of willow for that valley, light from no season the site has ever had, deer where the fencing says deer cannot be. The painter's two years are a form of verification. She knows which fence the deer actually jump. A model does not know anything; it produces outputs, and a person has to stand between the output and the page. That person, today, is the editor, and the verification is thin.
None of this is an argument that the machine has no place here. Reading parish rainfall records, sorting a season of camera-trap images, transcribing a landowner's recorded memories — these are jobs where the tool earns its electricity. But a painting of nine sites is not a record-processing job. It is a relationship rendered visible. The machine drafting these words used energy, water and mined minerals to summarise a woman's two years of attention, and the summary is not the attention.
So the honest accounting for today is this: the publication used a cheap, fast tool to describe an expensive, slow one. The painter's version will still be true in ten years, hung on a wall. This paragraph will be compost by Friday. Both have their uses, but only one of them was ever in the rain.
Nine rewilding sites, two years, one painter (today's readings)
A one-pan supper for when the evening turns cool and the first field mushrooms appear.
Soften the chopped onion in the oil in a wide pan for a good ten minutes, then add the mushrooms and keep the heat up so they brown rather than stew - the smell changes from damp to something closer to toast when they are ready. Add the garlic and thyme for a minute, then tip in the barley and stir it through the fat. Pour in the stock, season, and simmer gently for about half an hour, uncovered, until the barley is swollen and tender but still has a bite and the liquid has thickened around it. You want it wetter than a risotto but not a soup; add a splash more water if it tightens too soon. Finish with the vinegar and plenty of black pepper, taste for salt, and leave it five minutes off the heat before serving.
Nothing drops off. Today's readings move here tomorrow morning and stay, filed under the entrypoint they came in on. Below is the back-spool already gathered from the network.
The institutions whose public output feeds this reading. Each is watched every morning for what it publishes openly. Individuals are not listed here.
Permaculture Association · Permaculture Magazine · Regeneration International · Seed Savers Exchange · Garden Organic · Navdanya · Biodynamic Association UK · Biodynamic Demeter Alliance · Rodale Institute · Kiss the Ground · Savory Institute · Landworkers Alliance · Sustainable Food Trust · Real Farming Trust · Agroforestry Research Trust · Soil Association · A Growing Culture · Pasture for Life · Farmerama Radio
Ecosystem Restoration Communities · Rewilding Britain · Rewilding Europe · Trees for Life · Knepp Estate · Beaver Trust
The Restart Project · Low-tech Magazine · Makery · Repair Cafe International · Precious Plastic · Library of Things · Wuyong (Ma Ke)
Centre for Alternative Technology · AECB · Passivhaus Trust · Community Energy England
Julie's Bicycle · Dark Mountain Project · Emergence Magazine · Orion Magazine · Resurgence & Ecologist
Shareable · Transition Network · Global Ecovillage Network · Capital Institute
Bioneers · Gaia Education · Schumacher College · Center for Humans and Nature · Findhorn Foundation