Reading in progress
Friday 4 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.
Wash one window, inside and out, while the water can still warm your hands. The low autumn sun will find every smear you leave.
247 of 365Before the editorships, Jason Mark spent a stretch on an organic farm in Santa Cruz, California. He got there by an odd route: a start in the late 1990s at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a muckraking weekly, then six years as a human rights campaigner at Global Exchange, helping organise protests against the World Trade Organization and the Iraq war. The farm was the second swerve, and the one that stuck. Backpacking had made him fond of wild places; farm work made the attachment physical.
From there he rebuilt a journalism career around food and agriculture, then spent some eight years editing Earth Island Journal and nearly a decade as editor-in-chief of Sierra, the Sierra Club's magazine, with close to a million readers. The reporting took him to the Arctic, the Sonoran Desert, the Alberta tar sands and the aftermath of hurricanes. He is candid about having a point of view - pure objectivity, in his words, is a crock - but insists the work rests on accuracy, thoroughness and fairness, facts first.
His 2015 book, Satellites in the High Country, was boots-on-the-ground reporting: a search for the remaining pockets of untamed land in a human-dominated biosphere. The new one, The Earth Said: Remember Me, is more contemplative, though anchored in profiles of citizen scientists and grassroots activists. Its argument is that memory is not a private comfort but a tool - that what a culture remembers about the living world shapes what it bothers to defend or restore, and that forgetting is itself a mechanism of loss.
He is careful to add that the human pull toward other species - the coyotes, river otters and red cedars he names as kin - is innate but not self-sustaining. It has to be cultivated, or people stay sealed inside their screen-bound lives. That cultivation, more than any single campaign, is what the new book is trying to do - its very subtitle promises a route to reviving memory in order to restore the planet.
Ask the oldest person on your street or in your parish what the place used to hold - which birds, which fish, where the water ran. Write it down with names and dates, and add your own record each season. A dated notebook is a baseline, and a baseline is hard to argue with at a planning meeting.
Bioneers · Read the source
At Neal's Yard Dairy, flavour has always come first. But for nearly fifty years the cheese merchant has chosen its suppliers by more than taste: visiting farms, sitting in dairies, keeping relationships that run for decades. Hafod Cheddar, for instance, has been selected over many conversations at Patrick Holden's kitchen table on his farm in Wales. Holden, of the Sustainable Food Trust, was developing the Global Farm Metric, a framework that reads a farm as one system rather than a set of separate scores.
In 2025 the dairy invited every farmhouse cheesemaker on its books - that is, every maker who farms the animals that produce their milk - to trial the metric. Twelve said yes. Over the following months each spent many hours assembling information about their business and working through the assessment, which covers twelve areas spanning the farm's environmental, social and economic life. Sara Hall, a farmer, former cheesemonger and Bristol PhD researcher who uses the framework in her own work on dairy systems, supported the farms and helped interpret the results.
The dairy had started with straightforward ambitions. Perhaps the trial would yield scores that let them benchmark their suppliers against other dairy farms, spot strengths across the supply base, and give customers a clearer account of how each cheese was produced. People increasingly want to know what a farm does for wildlife, how its animals are kept, whether the business will survive - fair questions that are hard to answer from behind a counter.
What the twelve farms produced instead was a lesson in difference. Some work marginal upland pasture, others rich lowland grass. Some are extensive, some intensive. They differ in soil, climate, labour, infrastructure and intent, and the closer the team looked, the less sense it made to set one against another. A league table would hide as much as it showed - and a snapshot says nothing about direction, about the farm investing hard in biodiversity against one already sitting pretty. The metric held; the ranking instinct did not.
If you buy from producers, borrow the shape of this before buying any tool: list a dozen questions across soil, animals, money and community, then visit each supplier and ask what has changed in the last two years. The visit is the assessment; budget a day per farm, not a software subscription.
Sustainable Food Trust · Read the source
A confession the form of this column permits: the readings above were drafted by a model much like the one writing this sentence. Today that arrangement has an awkward symmetry. The first reading concerns Jason Mark's argument that land holds memory — that a drained marsh or a felled wood persists in what grows after, and that forgetting this is a choice. The model that summarised his interview holds nothing. Between one request and the next it retains no marsh, no wood, no Mark. It produced a competent precis of an argument about memory and will never know it did.
The second reading makes the symmetry sharper. Twelve cheesemakers agreed to share one metric and refused, at the end, to be ranked. Asked to compress the same data, a model tends toward the league table — ranking is what compression does when nobody has decided what the measurement is for. The cheesemakers had decided. The metric was for learning from each other, not for winning, and the absence of the table was the whole point. That kind of refusal is exactly the part a summary flattens first.
None of this is an argument that the drafting should stop. It is an argument about what the drafting costs and what it is for. The energy and water behind these paragraphs are small per day and real in aggregate, and they are only defensible if the machine's summaries send a person toward the original interview, the actual cheese room — not if they replace the going. A summary of Mark is not attention to land. It is, at best, a signpost.
The failure mode to watch is quiet: not a wrong fact but a wrong emphasis, the sentence that mattered smoothed away because it was statistically unremarkable. The moth misidentified by a phone app gets caught; the mis-weighted paragraph usually does not. Somebody here still reads the originals. That is the load-bearing part of the arrangement, and it should stay that way.
Bioneers — The Earth Said Remember Me: An Interview with Jason Mark · source
For the first evening that actually feels like autumn - one pan, and better if you don't hurry it.
Wipe the mushrooms and tear or slice them thickly, then get them into a wide pan with the oil over a high heat and leave them alone until they've stopped steaming and started to brown - the smell shifts from raw to something deeper, and that's your cue. Add the chopped onion and cook until soft, then the garlic and thyme for a minute more. Tip in the barley, stir it through the fat, and pour in the stock. Simmer gently, half-covered, for about forty minutes, giving it an occasional stir; it wants to be loose rather than dry, so add water if the pan is getting ahead of you. It's done when the barley is swollen and tender with a little bite left in the middle. Finish with the vinegar and more pepper than you think, and taste for salt.
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