Reading in progress
Thursday 20 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.
Ask the oldest person on your street what this corner was before it was houses.
232 of 365On a spring day in Glenmoriston, a group of teenagers stood round a fire they had lit themselves, learning to bake bannock bread. Earlier they had dipped nets into a pond and been walked through a recovering stretch of Caledonian forest, naming trees as they went. The children, aged eleven to fourteen, came from Farr and Kinlochleven High Schools, and they were at Trees for Life's Dundreggan estate near Loch Ness not as visitors but as researchers.
They were taking part in Healthy Young Minds, an early-intervention programme run by the University of South Wales with the University of the Highlands and Islands and Dundee University, and funded by the Medical Research Council. The premise is that mental health difficulties often arrive in early adolescence, and that young people in remote Highland communities face extra barriers - isolation, thin infrastructure, and the distance to any help that does exist.
Rather than handing the pupils a programme designed in a university, the researchers asked them to build one. In workshops facilitated by Ewen's Room, a Highland mental health charity, the children generated ideas for outdoor activities that might support wellbeing: camping, wild swimming, hill walking, outdoor cafés, beach combing, fires, natural crafts. Each idea was tested against feedback from other young people and from green health experts, refined, and then voted on.
The setting did some of the work. Dundreggan has been rewilding since Trees for Life bought the estate almost twenty years ago, and now holds more than 4,000 recorded species of plants and animals, many rare. Its Rewilding Centre has trails, a café, a storytelling bothy and purpose-built accommodation with twenty bedrooms and up to forty beds - enough for a school group to stay overnight in the glen itself.
When the researchers asked afterwards what had shifted, the pupils described spending more of their time outdoors than before the project. The woods and hills had come to feel bound up with how well they were coping, and several said they now paid more attention to the people around them. Along the way they were taught the five ways to wellbeing: connecting with others, learning new skills, giving, being active, and taking notice of small things. The research team is preparing two academic papers, seeking further funding, and plans to help the schools put the pupils' own designs into practice.
Borrow the method, not the programme: take a group of eleven-to-fourteen-year-olds outside for a day - a walk, pond dipping, a fire, bread over the flames - then hand them pens and ask what outdoor activities would actually help them. Let them critique and vote on each other's ideas. The voting is the intervention, and it costs a packet of sticky dots.
Trees for Life · Read the source
There is no machine-learning story in today's harvest worth your time, so this column does the other thing it is supposed to do: it accounts for the machine that drafted the reading above it. The piece about Highland pupils designing nature remedies was assembled by a model before a person looked at it. That has been true every day this publication has run, and it seems only fair to say it plainly at least once a week.
Here is roughly what that costs. Generating a few hundred words of draft text uses a fraction of a kilowatt-hour — closer to running a kettle for a minute than to a car journey, though the honest number is hard to get because the companies running these systems publish averages and marketing, not meter readings. The bigger costs sit upstream: the data centres, the water for cooling them, and the badly paid annotators whose work made the training data usable. None of that disappears because the output is a nice article about a rewilding estate.
What the machine is good for here is narrow. It reads a dozen feeds nobody on a volunteer budget had time to read, flags what touches soil and seed and repair, and produces a draft a person then checks, cuts, and sometimes bins. It is a sorting tool, like the seed sieve hanging in the potting shed — it does not grow anything, it just separates one thing from another faster than fingers do. When it gets things wrong, and it does, a person catches it or the error goes out under this masthead and the fault is ours, not the model's.
The question we keep asking is whether the hours saved are worth the resources spent, and whether a publication about careful hand work should be using the tool at all. Today the answer was yes, narrowly. Some days it isn't, and on those days this column should say that instead.
For when the bunched carrots at the market still have their fronds on - the tops are the sauce.
Scrub the carrots but don't peel them, halve any thick ones lengthways, and put them in a wide pan with enough water to come halfway up, a good slug of oil and salt; lid on, cook over a medium heat until the water has nearly gone and the carrots are tender and starting to catch, about twenty minutes. Meanwhile put 750ml of salted water on to boil, rain in the polenta and stir until it thickens and comes away from the sides, then turn it low and give it as long as the packet says. Pick the feathery carrot tops from their thicker stems, wash them well and blitz or chop very fine with the garlic, sunflower seeds, the lemon juice and enough oil to make a loose, spoonable sauce - it should taste green and slightly bitter, like parsley with opinions. Spoon the polenta into bowls, lay the carrots and their pan juices over it, and finish with the green sauce.
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