Everything Written on A Real Green Life in 2020
Everything Written on ARealGreenLife in 2020
This post lists everything I wrote in 2020, organized by category. Thanks so much for reading along. I'll be back with more in 2021!
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Regenerative Farming and Gardening
Regenerative Farming and Gardening
(2 - 3 minute read)
Growing food regeneratively means growing food in ecosystems, not mono-cultures. And it means doing so with an intention not just to feed people, but to build soils, care for ecology, and leave the surrounding web of life stronger, richer, more complex and more resilient after our growing systems are in place, than it was before.
Building Ecosystems as a Side-Effect of Growing Food
Building Ecosystems as a Side Effect of Growing Food
About a 5 minute read
Strongly interrelated and networked elements in a vegetable garden, an orchard, a community, or any other living system, are healthier and happier than isolated fragments of life subsisting alone and unmoored.
Rungi – Rainforest Floor Vegetable
Rungi - Rainforest Floor Vegetable
About a 3 minute read
A vegetable from the tropical highlands of Papua New Guinea, rungi is an attractive, edible, nutritious year-round ground cover for the tropics and semi-tropics that tolerates a wide range of growing conditions.
Sweet Violet – Edible, Medicinal, Beautiful
Sweet Violet - Edible, Medicinal, Beautiful
A 3-4 minute read
There is a little plant I've been on the look-out for, and I'm delighted to have finally found her.
Please allow me to introduce you to Sweet Violet (Viola odorata), a delicate, beautiful little ground-covering plant with a super-long list of nutritive, medicinal, and sense-pleasing attributes.
When “Do Something” Fails, There is Another Way
When "Do Something" Fails, There Is Another Way
About a 3 minute read
The logical mind wants to muscle its way to the results we want; when muscle is inadequate to the task, we think we’ve failed and we’re out of options.
The heart, on the other hand, is not afraid to invoke the results we want by the quality of our attention and the power of our desire to give what we don’t physically have to give.
Expanding on the Grandmother Effect
Expanding on the Grandmother Effect
About an 18 minute read. Download the free PDF here.
The “Grandmother Hypothesis,” or Grandmother Effect, is the idea that the presence of grandmothers helping in the care of their grand-offspring has been an important factor in human survival and evolution.
I think that the powers of older women extend far beyond babysitting (valuable as that is), and I think we need their contributions more now than ever before. Here's why.
Through the Lenses of Separation vs Interbeing
Through the Lenses of Separation and Interbeing
About a 2 minute read
Logical, rational thinking understandably sees things as separate. 'I am me; that is something "other" than me.'
The “other” can be another person, another group separate from the group to which I belong, or a non-human entity like a river or a forest.
There is another way to see things. Through a lens of interbeing, I am still me, but now I recognize that I’m closely related to everything that the mindset of separation calls “other.”
The Dominant Healthcare Approach vs Marginalized Alternatives
The Dominant Healthcare Approach vs Marginalized Alternatives
This is less than a 2 minute read
In our culture, control and separation are given more importance than compassion and relationship.
To illustrate what I mean, here's a comparison between the dominant approach to healthcare and the marginalized, "alternative" approaches.
Supermarket Food is Like a Tiger in a Zoo
Supermarket Food is Like a Tiger in a Zoo
This post is about a 2 minute read
Real food is more expensive than supermarket food if you measure only in dollars. But here’s the thing: if you can measure its value in dollars, it’s not really real food.
The value of food was never meant to be measured. To measure something, you have to separate it out from the other things it’s connected to. As soon as you do that, it becomes a hollow copy of what it was before it was isolated.