Reading in progress
Friday 18 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.
Stop for a minute at the first mushrooms pushing up through the park grass or the verge, and leave them standing. They will not be there next week.
261 of 365Alec Bălășescu manages a place that most maps forgot. Ultima Frontiera sits beside the Chilia branch of the Danube, close to the Black Sea, and its name - last frontier - is literal. Eight hundred hectares of reedbeds, lakes, grassland and dunes, inside the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve, where white-tailed eagles and Dalmatian pelicans still turn up and horses wander loose. It looks wild. It isn't.
In the 1950s the wetland was drained and penned into a fish farm, its water moved by dykes, sluices and pumps. Some of those embankments were built by political prisoners. The nearby Periprava labour colony was among the harshest camps in Romania's communist system, and between 1958 and 1963, under a commander named Ion Ficior, more than a hundred men died there reclaiming land and cutting reeds. The fish farm itself gave up about twenty years ago, the pumps rusted, and the water began quietly finding its own way back.
In 2025, with backing from the Rewilding Land Facility, Rewilding Europe took on long-term management of the site. Work is already under way - buildings renovated, waste cleared, infrastructure repaired - while a hydrological study by Dutch consultancy Bureau Stroming, completed in 2026, proposes reconnecting the former fish ponds, removing barriers and improving connectivity with the Danube. The aim is a semi-natural system with dynamic water levels, better for fish, Dalmatian pelicans and terns. Locally owned cattle already graze alongside the horses.
The derelict prison buildings are not being demolished. Vegetation is closing over them, and owls and bats have moved into the ruins. Rewilding Romania is working with the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile to keep the history legible - remembrance and reedbed in the same place, on the argument that a healed landscape that forgets what happened on it has only half healed.
Before touching a drained wetland, pay for a hydrological study and wait for it - one wet season and one dry, to see where the water wants to go. And walk the site with the oldest residents you can find before clearing a single building; the history goes with the rubble.
Rewilding Europe · Read the source
At the end of a hot August, around two hundred people spent three days at Kerminy, an artistic and agricultural farm in South Finistère. They came for a local Soil Assembly organised around the questions already present in this Breton watershed. The gathering belonged to a Soil Assembly network begun in 2022, which links one international event each year with shorter assemblies held close to the places concerned.
Kerminy had been forming that place since 2020. Artist-farmers live there all year with donkeys, cattle and sheep; students, teachers, researchers, artists and activists pass through. The cultivated ground sits among hedges, trees and springs, and the equipment ranges from a cider press and sickles to seed mixers and low-carbon seeders and mowers. The estate lies roughly twenty kilometres from the sea in the Aven watershed, whose streams reach the Aven and Bélon estuaries.
Nearly eighty people joined the morning plenary, facilitated by Patrick Degeorges. Leila Chakroun led a session titled “Half-Farmer / Half-X”, while the wider programme moved between practical workshops, screenings and performances. Kerminy resident Malo Legrand presented a ceramics work using wild clay gathered inland at Argoat and shaped on the farm. It was to have been fired in a kiln made on the foreshore from local material, with the incoming tide interrupting the burn. Fire restrictions stopped that part, and the firing was postponed.
The marine edge framed the whole weekend. On Friday, Ewen Chardronnet and Maya Minder’s Umi no Oya traced nori cultivation in Japan’s Ariake Sea and the post-war use of oyster shells in improving production. On Sunday, the assembly moved to the Château de Bélon Oyster Farm for another film by the pair, made with researcher Christine Ewers, about the native European flat oyster. Once recorded at 1,196 reef sites across Europe, it now supplies only about 2 per cent of the continent’s oysters. The assembly closed with a tasting at Bélon.
For a local soil assembly, choose one working landscape and trace it to the water it feeds. Bring together a facilitator, a farmer or gardener, and someone making with local materials for one weekend: one plenary, one hands-on session, one visit downstream. Twenty people with responsibilities in the place are more useful than a large audience.
Makery · Read the source
This column's neighbour pieces today — the delta dykes, the gathering at Kerminy — were drafted by a model, and this one is being drafted by it too, so honesty about the tool belongs here more than anywhere. What the machine actually did this morning was narrow: it read a handful of feeds, pulled out what touched land, soil and commons, and produced summaries a person then had to check. It did not go to Kerminy. It has not stood in a hayloft in Iowa, which is where one of today's better leads sits — a seed-saving barn opening to visitors, the kind of thing that requires a body, a nose, and a Saturday.
The failure modes are worth naming plainly. Given the harvest above, the model could not find a single story about machine learning doing real work in the field — because there wasn't one — and a weaker editorial process would have let it invent one, or dress up a press release as news. That is the everyday risk with these tools: not that they produce nothing, but that they produce something plausible when nothing honest was available. The correction is boring and human. An empty day gets written as an empty day.
There is a cost ledger too, and it should not be waved past. Drafting a few hundred words by model spends a fraction of the energy of the journalism it summarises, but the computation still runs in datacentres drawing power and water, trained on text scraped largely without asking. Against that, the saving is real but modest: an hour of reading time, not a reporter. Any honest accounting of this publication's own use lands there — a small tool, doing a small job, under supervision, with its limits stated on the page rather than buried in a footer.
Seed Savers Exchange · source
For the first small celeriac and the apples that will not keep.
Slice the onion and soften it slowly in the oil in a wide pan while you scrub the celeriac, cut away only the knotted root end, and dice the rest small; chop any leaves and keep them back. Add the celeriac and the apples, cored and chopped with their skins, turn once or twice in the oil, then pour in the water or stock and simmer until a knife slides through the largest piece with no argument, about twenty minutes. Mash in the pan or blend half of it and return it, leaving enough texture to sit on the spoon. Stir in the mustard, the chopped leaves, salt and plenty of pepper, and cook for two more minutes until the leaves lose their raw edge. Eat with rye bread toasted hard enough to hold up.
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