Reading in progress
Sunday 13 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.
Fill a shallow dish with water and set it on the step or sill where the birds land. They are moulting now, scruffy and thirsty, and the puddles are gone.
256 of 365A research team that included the University of Göttingen spent two years walking nine landscapes around the town, counting what lived in the winter wheat fields and totting up what the fields earned. They were testing a question EU farm policy quietly asks every grower: if you want to do right by a wheat field, is it better to sow strips of wildflowers along the edges, or to farm the whole thing organically?
They compared three kinds of field. Conventionally grown wheat with a wildflower strip sown along it, organically grown wheat, and conventional wheat with nothing done to it at all, as a control. On the ecological side the two interventions came out roughly level: both the flower strips and the organic fields held 20 to 30 per cent more biodiversity than the untreated conventional crop. A strip of wildflowers at the field's edge does real work, and so, it turns out, does farming the whole field organically.
The economics pulled the two apart. The organic fields yielded only half as much wheat per hectare as the conventional ones, yet their profits ran one and a half times higher, making them the most profitable of the three — and both the organic fields and the wildflower strips draw EU support as environmentally friendly farming practices. The findings appear in the Journal of Applied Ecology.
It is worth being clear about what this study is and is not. It is two years and nine landscapes around one German university town, in one crop. It says nothing about how the numbers hold in a dry year, or in a country with different support payments. But it does put a number on something farmers across Europe are currently being asked to decide.
Before converting a whole farm, convert one field to organic and run it alongside your conventional crop for two seasons, keeping the full accounts separate: yield, support payment, input costs, sale price. The decision is made in the profit column, not the yield column.
Regeneration International · Read the source
It took thirty hours for helicopters to reach the fire that burnt through Glenmore and RSPB Abernethy in the Cairngorms this summer, because the aircraft based in Scotland were away fighting blazes in England and Wales. On the ground, more than a hundred volunteers worked beside the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, while bulldozers cut firebreaks and, eventually, water fell from the air. By the time it was out, an area the size of Dundee had burnt.
The year before was worse. A fire at Dava and Carrbridge in 2025 ran across 45 square miles of moorland - roughly the footprint of Manchester - on ground managed for sheep and shooting, not rewilding. Yet while the Cairngorms fire was still burning, attempts were made in the press and on social media to pin it on rewilders. Drained, repeatedly burnt grouse moor dries into a single flammable crop; if the peat beneath ignites, it can smoulder for weeks.
The counter-proposal is blunt: water stops fire. Rewetted peatland, beaver wetlands, native broadleaf woodland and floodplains reconnected to their rivers all hold moisture where it would otherwise drain away; where rewetting is not possible, cattle grazing thins the fuel. Rewetted and naturally grazed ground appears to have escaped the worst of the recent burn - though newly restored land can still catch, which is a case for firebreaks and stewardship, not against the work.
The practical lessons are already visible. The Cairngorms National Park's Climate Adaptation Fund granted £300,000 to fourteen business and community groups this year; twelve of the grants bought firefighting machinery, much of it deployed against the fire within months. A summer byelaw now bans campfires across the park, with signs on every road in. There is talk, too, of a mountain rescue model for wildfire: local people who know the terrain, gamekeepers among them, equipped as the first line.
If your community borders moorland or forest, ask your park authority or council about an equipment grant and form a volunteer fire group on the mountain rescue model - the Cairngorms fund averaged roughly £21,000 per group and the kit was in use the same year. On ground you manage, block drainage ditches with peat dams to hold water through summer; wet ground will not carry flame the way drained heather does.
Trees for Life · Read the source
When Carl Anthony entered architecture school at Columbia, he was the only African-American student in the room. He died this year, after a working life that ran from that classroom through Berkeley, Oakland, New York and back again. From every position he held he kept noticing the same thing: the land that got poisoned and the people who got poor were usually the same people. Bioneers, where he spoke at least once, remembered him this autumn alongside Gloria Steinem, Peter Buckley and Wendell Berry.
The career, laid out, is a list of things built rather than posts held. He taught architecture at Berkeley's College of Environmental Design and co-founded a firm in Oakland. David Brower put him on the board of Earth Island Institute, and there, with Karl Linn, he started the Urban Habitat Program, which set out to cultivate multicultural leadership inside environmental justice work. With Luke Cole he produced Race, Poverty and the Environment, a quarterly journal that gave the young movement somewhere to think in print.
In the early 2000s he went east to run the Ford Foundation's Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative, which put him in charge of real money and let him fund the kinds of programmes he had been arguing for. Then he came home to California and co-founded Breakthrough Communities in Oakland, which extended that work. Along the way he sat on the bodies where land decisions actually get made: the Berkeley Planning Commission, the Presidio Council, the EPA's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, the President's Council on Sustainable Development.
Late in life he wrote down the whole argument in a book, The Earth, The City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race, part memoir and part case that the story of American cities and the story of American land cannot be told honestly without race in it. He was, by the account of those who worked alongside him, a mentor as much as an organiser, and a scholar as much as either.
A quarterly journal is how a scattered movement learns to think together, and it costs less than a single staff post. Print or digital, four issues a year, one editor, contributors paid something even if token. That is the whole machine.
Bioneers · Read the source
For when the bunch comes with its leaves still on - the tops cook like chard and cost nothing extra.
Twist the tops off the beetroot and set them aside, then scrub the roots and simmer them whole in well-salted water for thirty to forty minutes, until a knife slides to the centre without argument - keep a cupful of the cooking water, which goes pink and is worth having. Drain, and when they are cool enough to handle the skins will slip off under your thumbs; cut the roots into fat wedges. Wash the tops well, chop them stems and all, and wilt them in the butter with a splash of the beet water and a pinch of salt, which takes about three minutes. Stir the horseradish into the soured cream with the vinegar and enough salt that it tastes faintly sharp. Lay the greens on the plates, the warm beetroot over them, the cream over that, dill if you have it, and the rye bread alongside for the pink puddle at the end.
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