School of Sustainability

Sixty-three acres of hazel and poultry among the corn

Drive through southern Minnesota in high summer and the pattern holds for miles: corn, then soybeans, then corn again, field after field with nothing taller than a fence post. Then, near Northfield, the line breaks. Maple trees rise over native hazelnut bushes, and beneath them a small farm works to a different logic. Salvatierra Farms covers 63 acres - modest next to its neighbours - and not long ago it was a conventional row crop operation indistinguishable from the sprawl around it.

The change is the work of Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, an agronomist who grew up in the rainforest of northern Guatemala. He farms poultry among the perennials, keeps the ground covered with a diversity of crops, and uses no herbicides, no pesticides and no chemical fertiliser anywhere in the operation. His method draws on two educations at once: a formal training in agronomy and the knowledge passed down by Indigenous elders at home. He is explicit that the farm is meant to be looked at and copied, not admired as an exception.

Around the farm an unlikely company has gathered - Lakota tribal members, farmers who once ran large conventional acreages, and Catholic sisters - people whose reasons for tending land carefully are matters of conviction as much as agronomy. That is as much as the published opening of this report tells us; the fuller account sits with the Associated Press. What is already clear is the shape of the experiment: a small, wooded, chemical-free holding, deliberately placed in the middle of industrial grain country, holding itself up as a pattern rather than a refuge.

Regeneration International · Associated Press · Read the source

After twenty years, Julie's Bicycle hands over the handlebars

Alison Tickell founded Julie's Bicycle to work at the junction of culture and climate action, and she has led it ever since - first in Britain, then internationally. The charity exists to help the creative sector act on climate, giving artists and organisations the tools to do it. On 14 September the organisation announced that, after two decades in the role, its founder is stepping down as chief executive.

The work under her leadership was practical rather than rhetorical. The charity built what it describes as the most comprehensive, freely available collection of climate resources for the creative sector anywhere, worked alongside hundreds of companies and networks, and pressed cultural policy at an international level. The running premise was that systemic change needs everyone involved, and that an organisation leads by doing the thing itself before asking others to. The tools were given away, not sold.

The handover has been built as a bridge rather than a cliff edge. Tickell stays on part-time until the end of 2026, focused on international policy and advocacy, while managing director Laura Pando steps up as interim chief executive. The board, now chaired by Abbi Knell, has opened a full international recruitment and expects a permanent appointment by early 2027. Long-serving chair Tony Wadsworth is leaving too, after thirteen years.

The organisation turns twenty next year and plans a celebration in early 2027 to honour both departures and whatever comes next. The recruitment itself is being run openly, through a listing with People Beyond Profit, rather than by quiet approach - a detail in keeping with how the place has worked all along. What carries forward is less a personality than an archive of working tools that anyone in the arts can pick up for nothing.

Julie's Bicycle · Read the source

Carl Anthony, who joined race and environment into one argument

Carl Anthony, born in 1939, died this year, and the obituaries record a life spent making a single point with unusual patience: that what is done to poor communities and communities of colour and what is done to the land are the same act, and no environmental plan that treats them separately deserves the name. When he arrived at architecture school at Columbia, he was the only African-American student in the place.

He went west, to a professorship at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, and co-founded an Oakland architecture firm, Anthony, Fleming & Assoc. David Brower appointed him to the board of Earth Island Institute. With Karl Linn he started the Urban Habitat Program, which set out to bring up leaders of many backgrounds inside the environmental justice movement. With Luke Cole he produced Race, Poverty and the Environment, a quarterly journal that gave that argument somewhere to live between conferences.

In the early 2000s he ran the Ford Foundation's Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative in New York, steering serious money towards equitable urban programmes, then came home to California and co-founded Breakthrough Communities in Oakland to carry the same work on locally. His list of seats is long - the Berkeley Planning Commission, the EPA's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, the President's Council on Sustainable Development. His 2017 book, The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race, sets out both the analysis and the life behind it.

Bioneers' remembrance places him among four lost figures. Gloria Steinem, who spoke at their 2011 conference, is remembered less for the biography than for how she worked: listening to critics until some became allies, refusing to abandon the long game after defeats. Peter Buckley, lawyer turned entrepreneur turned philanthropist, poured his energy and money into the David Brower Center, pushed past the highest green-building standards, and stayed its president until he died. Wendell Berry never spoke at Bioneers, but his way of seeing runs under everything they publish.

Bioneers · Read the source