School of Sustainability

Reading in progress
Tuesday 18 August 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.

One little thing

Eat something outside tonight, even if it is only a sandwich on the step. The evenings are already shortening.

230 of 365
  1. AttentionEastern United States, 39° N

    Three thousand years of chestnut trees, and what went untaught

    Each dot a thousand years: continuous management of eastern US chestnut groves

    Along the eastern side of what is now the United States, people tended chestnut groves for three thousand years. Not wilderness, not untouched forest - a worked landscape, kept in production across more generations than most institutions on that continent have survived decades. On the coast, others built clam gardens on the ocean floor, engineering the shallows to grow shellfish. Inland, fire was set deliberately and often, keeping whole prairie ecosystems in the state they needed to be in.

    Dr Lyla June Johnston spent years of doctoral research on land management systems like these, assembled from Indigenous Nations around the world, and she is direct about why they are absent from most people's schooling. On 13 August 2026 she talked through the work in a live conversation hosted by Gaia Education, an education organisation that runs online courses, ahead of Indigenous Sciences, her second course with them - six weeks online, beginning 7 September 2026, with Pat McCabe (Weyakpa Najin Win, Woman Stands Shining) as guest speaker.

    Her framing is worth sitting with: human hands and human judgement are not intrusions on nature but tools that landscapes were shaped by, for millennia. These were not conservation but agriculture and aquaculture of a high order, run continuously. The published account is brief - a summary, not a transcript - so the research itself is only sketched here.

    Practice

    Take one piece of ground you know - an allotment, a wood edge, a field - and find out who managed it before the present regime and how. The county record office, tithe maps and the local history society will get you back two centuries in a weekend; old orchards, coppice stools and ridge-and-furrow will take you further.

    Gaia Education · Read the source

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Machine

The machine that read the feeds this morning

Above this column sits a piece about three thousand years of chestnut knowledge and what failed to get passed on. It was drafted by a machine, and so was everything else you read here today, and on a day when the harvest offered nothing honest about AI doing real work in the field, that is the subject worth taking up.

Here is what the tool actually did. It read short summaries from a few dozen feeds — seed exchanges, repair projects, rewilding estates — picked what looked relevant, and produced prose in a consistent voice. It did this in seconds, for pennies, in a data centre that drew power and water it did not pay for by the litre. What it did not do is know anything about chestnuts. It arranged plausible sentences about knowledge transmission without having transmitted or received any knowledge itself. The difference matters more than the fluency suggests.

The chestnut piece is, in a way, about exactly this failure mode. The skills that went untaught — when to coppice, how to read a stool's age, which rotation suits which slope — were never written down because the people who held them assumed there would always be someone standing next to them, watching. A language model is trained on what got written down. The untaught majority of human skill is not in its data and never will be. It can describe the gap. It cannot fill it.

So the arrangement here is the same one this column keeps recommending for everyone else: the machine does the typing, a person does the knowing, and the limit is stated on the label. The day that stops being stated, you should stop reading.

Leeks braised down over green lentils with mustard

vegan

For the first leeks of the year, when the big ones haven't started yet and you can use them small.

  • four or five small leeks, or three big ones
  • 200g (7oz) dried green or Puy lentils
  • three cloves of garlic
  • a bay leaf
  • two tablespoons of cider or wine vinegar
  • a heaped teaspoon of wholegrain mustard
  • three tablespoons of olive oil
  • salt and black pepper

Rinse the lentils, cover with water by a few centimetres, add the bay and simmer until just tender - about twenty-five minutes - keeping every drop of their cooking water. Meanwhile trim the leeks, split them lengthways and wash between the layers, then lay them cut side down in a wide pan with the garlic, a splash of water and half the oil; it wants to be wider than you think, so the leeks braise rather than pile up. Cook them gently, turning once, until a knife slides through the thick end with no argument, around fifteen minutes, and let them take a little colour. Whisk the remaining oil with the vinegar, mustard and salt and stir it through the drained lentils while they're still warm. Spoon the lentils onto plates, lay the leeks over the top and pour on any juices left in the pan. It's ready when the dressing has soaked in and the whole thing smells of mustard and slow onion rather than vinegar.

Serves 2 · about £2.10

Tomorrow: Any lentils left make a soup tomorrow: cover with their kept cooking water, add more water to fill, and simmer with whatever half an onion is going. The leeks, reheated, are good on toast.

Archive

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.

Source register

The institutions whose public output feeds this reading. Each is watched every morning for what it publishes openly. Individuals are not listed here.

Soil & Seed

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

Land & Water

Ecosystem Restoration Communities · Rewilding Britain · Rewilding Europe · Trees for Life · Knepp Estate · Beaver Trust

Making & Mending

The Restart Project · Low-tech Magazine · Makery · Repair Cafe International · Precious Plastic · Library of Things · Wuyong (Ma Ke)

Shelter & Warmth

Centre for Alternative Technology · AECB · Passivhaus Trust · Community Energy England

Art & Story

Julie's Bicycle · Dark Mountain Project · Emergence Magazine · Orion Magazine · Resurgence & Ecologist

Community & Commons

Shareable · Transition Network · Global Ecovillage Network · Capital Institute

Attention

Bioneers · Gaia Education · Schumacher College · Center for Humans and Nature · Findhorn Foundation