Reading in progress
Wednesday 28 October 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.
When you carve the pumpkin for Saturday, scoop what comes out into a pan instead of the bin. That is most of the pumpkin.
301 of 365On the Giovenco River in Italy's Central Apennines, the day the barriers came down was the end of a long queue. The Rewilding Apennines team removed five of them in 2024 and reconnected 11 kilometres of river, but around three years passed between the first application and the demolition. Local anglers support reconnecting the river, and the team is working to strengthen native Mediterranean trout populations. The team then turned to the Liri, the river the Giovenco feeds, and in September 2025 took out a dam 30 metres long.
On the Giovenco, a national park had to agree to the work, and so did the offices responsible for archaeological, artistic and landscape heritage. Those came on top of the tiers that Mario Cipollone, who leads the team, says a removal can pass through: the municipality, the region, and national bodies whenever a river runs across a regional line. Rewilding Europe's account of the wider process puts studies of ownership, flow, sediment, flood risk and wildlife ahead of the permits, and monitoring on either side of the demolition.
One lesson the team is carrying forward concerns sequence. For a sixth weir on the Giovenco, it is drawing up the feasibility study and the detailed executive plan side by side, not one after the other. Rewilding Europe reckons that could save months and stop a gap in funding from opening between the two. The approvals still have to be won; what changes is that the two documents no longer wait on each other.
The removals being prepared in the Central Apennines, and in four other Rewilding Europe landscapes, have backing from the Open Rivers Programme, which pays for taking out small obsolete barriers. In 2025 more than 600 barriers came out across 21 European countries, and many thousands of obsolete ones still stand. On the Polish side of the Oder Delta, the team has counted at least twenty on a single river, the Wołczenica, and is starting with two of the more straightforward ones.
Before commissioning any survey of an old weir, list every body that must sign off: the municipality, the region, national bodies if the river crosses a regional boundary, and any park or heritage authority. Commission the feasibility study and the executive design together so the funding does not stall between them. The Giovenco's first removals took about three years from application to demolition.
Rewilding Europe · Read the source
On 16 June 2026 France's Court of Cassation chose not to rule alone on Trần Tố Nga's case. It cited the questions the case raises for international law and asked for it to be decided by its Plenary Assembly. That stage is expected early in 2027. Trần is 84, a journalist and war veteran who holds French and Vietnamese citizenship. She was sprayed directly during the war, and her first child died at 17 months. Since 2014 she has been taking the manufacturers of Agent Orange to court in Paris.
Her case is one strand of the research Kim Đoan Quốc is setting out in a three-part series for Makery. Kim is a visual artist who works across installation, video and performance. In 2025 they spent six months in Việt Nam preparing Foliating Memories, a project about Agent Orange pollution. Kim was the 2025 recipient of the Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation grant for the project. The grant aims to make artists' movement sustainable and inclusive, and it weighs each recipient's own situation.
Kim's account rests on one technical point. Dioxin, they explain, is a by-product that forms when 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T are mixed at the wrong temperature. Stripping the forest did not require it. By Kim's account, the 14 companies supplying the US army left the temperature uncontrolled and knew what that produced. Employees fell seriously ill and some died. A warning went up through the administration to the US government, and production carried on unchanged. Some 80 million litres were sprayed over the forests of the south.
Two photographs mark the trip. In one, from July 2025, Phùng Tửu Bôi is presenting his archives. In the other, the anthropologist and geographer Marvin Freyne stands in Mã Đà forest in November 2025. Kim writes that they met Freyne against this background.
Makery · Read the source
Two of today's readings were drafted by a machine. One concerns five river barriers on the Giovenco, removed after three years of permits and paperwork. The other concerns Trần Tố Nga, now in her eighties, whose case against the companies that made Agent Orange has been sent to the plenary assembly of France's highest court. She first filed it in 2014. The model produced a draft of each in less time than it takes to boil a kettle. That gap matters, and it is easy to read it the wrong way.
The speed did not come from doing the work faster. The work was the three years: the surveys, the objections, the signatures, the lawyers' briefs, the testimony given and given again. The model rearranged text that people had already written about that work. Everything it could say rested on reporting someone else did slowly. A summary is downstream of labour, and it adds no labour of its own.
The places where these drafts go wrong are predictable, so a person checks them. Vietnamese names lose their tone marks, which turns them into different words. Legal procedure gets flattened: 'sent to the plenary assembly' is not a ruling, and a draft can make it sound like one. Hydrology gets vague, with 'barriers' standing in for weirs, culverts and sills that behave quite differently in a flood. Each draft is read against its sources before it runs. When the sources are thin, the draft is too, and that is the moment to say less.
There is also a cost this column cannot yet give you, and the honest thing is to admit it. We do not have a reliable figure for the electricity or water behind a single day's drafting. The providers publish aggregates and averages, not the meter reading for one paragraph. Until we can measure it, we should not imply it is negligible.
Today's reading: Five Giovenco barriers came out after three years of paperwork (Land & Water) · Today's reading: Trần Tố Nga's Agent Orange case sent to plenary assembly (Making & Mending)
For when the beetroot still comes with its tops on, which in late October it mostly still does.
Cut the leaves from the beetroot, slice the stalks thinly like celery and roughly shred the leaves, then scrub the roots without peeling them and grate them coarsely, accepting that your hands will be pink until tomorrow. Warm the oil in the widest pan you have, wider than seems necessary, because the beetroot needs to fry rather than steam, and soften the sliced onion and stalks with the caraway and a good pinch of salt for about eight minutes. Add the grated beetroot, spread it out and leave it alone for a few minutes at a time between stirs, so it catches slightly at the edges; after fifteen minutes or so the raw, earthy smell gives way to something sweeter and the colour darkens from magenta to garnet. Tip in the chickpeas with three or four tablespoons of their liquid, which turns everything glossy, then pile the leaves on top, cover for two minutes until they collapse, and stir them through with the vinegar and plenty of pepper. Taste for salt and vinegar, which it usually wants more of than you expect, and eat it on thick toast.
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