Reading in progress
Friday 25 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.
At the shop or the market stall, ask which apple was grown nearest to here, and buy that one.
268 of 365Sweden banned the weedkiller paraquat in 1983, more than forty years ago, when the evidence of harm was still young. One by one, other countries followed as the research hardened. Even China, whose government owns Syngenta, the company that has made paraquat for decades, ran its own safety studies roughly ten years ago, found the results troubling, and stopped spraying the chemical on its own soil. At the centre of all this is an association between paraquat exposure and Parkinson's disease, an incurable brain condition, documented across years of scientific study.
In the United States the picture is patchier. Vermont has banned paraquat outright, its lawmakers citing the same Parkinson's research. California's regulators announced that manufacturers had voluntarily agreed to stop selling it there after the state raised health concerns drawn from new research. And in Washington, several members of Congress have pushed for a nationwide prohibition, arguing that the federal government is lagging well behind the rest of the world on this one.
The federal regulator, the Environmental Protection Agency, continues to authorise paraquat across millions of acres of American farmland and has played down the significance of the science linking it to Parkinson's. In June the agency said it would convene a roundtable over the summer to re-examine the safety questions around the chemical. Summer came and went. No roundtable was held, and none has been scheduled.
In the US paraquat is a restricted-use chemical, so only certified applicators may handle it - but anyone who farms or manages grounds can ask whoever sprays a simple question: what is in the tank, and is there a burndown option without paraquat? Tillage, a smothering cover crop or a different chemistry usually answers it. The conversation costs five minutes.
The New Lede · Regeneration International · Read the source
The reading above was drafted by a model, as most of this page is. It was given a stack of harvested articles — Syngenta's undisclosed paraquat research, Vermont's ban, California's voluntary withdrawal — and it produced a hundred-odd words comparing Sweden in 1983 with America now. A person checked the dates and the claims against the sources, trimmed a sentence that overstated what the Parkinson's studies actually show, and published it. The whole exchange took perhaps four minutes of human attention.
It is worth being plain about what those four minutes bought and what they cost. They bought a summary that was adequate but not sharp: the model flattened the most interesting detail, which is that the evidence Syngenta withheld was internal, not external — the company knew things its own scientists had measured. That distinction matters to anyone deciding whether to trust a regulator's file, and the machine glossed it because glossing is what summarisation does. It costs something too: a data centre drew power and water to produce three paragraphs a working journalist could have written in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea, had the journalist existed and been paid.
The honest accounting is that the tool is useful here precisely because the alternative is silence, not a newsroom. Nobody was going to write about paraquat drift for a small publication this week; the machine means the story reaches the hedge-laying readership that sprays neither paraquat nor anything else, but that votes and buys food. That is a real gain. It is also a small one, and it should stay small: the model's summary is a signpost, not the work. The work is the investigative reporting the signpost points at, done by people, slowly, at outlets with lawyers.
If you read one thing today, make it the Syngenta piece underneath ours. The machine's version is a handle. The original is the weight.
The New Lede / Regeneration International — Syngenta's Secrets · The Restart Project — A new chapter for Fixing Factories · source
A pan of dark greens and beans for when the evenings start drawing in, with yesterday's bread doing the work on top.
Strip the kale leaves from the stalks and chop the stalks small - they go in first and nobody will know. Warm half the oil in a wide pan, add the stalks with a pinch of salt, and give them five minutes before the garlic, sliced thin, and the chilli join them; keep the heat low enough that the garlic softens without catching. Roughly tear the leaves in, splash in a little water, and cover for a few minutes until they've collapsed, then tip in the beans with all their liquid and simmer uncovered until it thickens to something that coats rather than sloshes. While that goes, blitz or grate the bread to crumbs and fry them in the rest of the oil in a small pan, stirring, until they're the colour of a conker and sound dry against the metal. Squeeze the lemon into the beans, taste for salt, and serve in bowls with the crumbs over the top at the last moment so they stay crisp.
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