In the 1970s and '80s, British brothers Lorne and Lawrence Blair chronicled their journeys in Borneo and the Spice Islands in the dazzling and memorable documentary, "Ring of Fire." The…
Remember the New Alchemy Institute? Perhaps you heard of it. It was a thinktank/do-tank on Cape Cod where baby boomer idealists gathered to model the green future, with experiments in…
I know many envision me answering customer questions via cell phone while lying in a hammock (produced by local women's cooperatives) hanging from palm trees (in a sustainably managed grove)…
Ciarrai Walsh passed on this Time Magazine article about Bill Gates seeing the light of improving sanitation as one of the most effective ways to save lives in the world:…
I returned to Hilde and Earle's house around midnight. They were still up. Hilde noted the peeping coming from the vast greenhouse attached to their house, the last remnant of…
I didn’t really know Jaime Barajas, brother of environmental transformer/activist Babak Tondre. I met him briefly when Nik Bertulis and I visited Babak’s home in 2003 to view his back-yard micro-eden, with its chickens, gardens, and fruit trees. (Photos from that day are in my two later books.) Jaime, who was living in an art-filled loft over a utility shed, seemed to me a shy, lighter version of Babak. Babak worried a bit about his brother; after all, he was a Pisces.
Last week, just 10 days after spending an afternoon with Babak and his daughter visiting an eco-wastewater system and musing about the “public lore vs. reality” of the eco-activist scene in the Bay area, Babak told me by email his brother was hit by a car and killed in San Jose. Here is his obituary. On Sunday, he buried his brother in this Marin County cemetery providing “natural burial” options: Forever Fernwood.
Fernwood, according to its Web site, “uses no toxic embalming fluids, no vault, and only a biodegradable casket or a (more…)
A mallard duck and her six chicks appeared Thursday in our cellar stairwell. Here’s a link to photos.
They were darling. Mother duck and two of the chicks were able to hop up the stairs to a tray of water and bowls of oats and spinach seed heads I left at the head of the stairs. Our neighbors threw pieces of bread to them, although this isn’t recommended due to the chicks’ delicate digestion. Worried about raccoons preying on them, I called the Humane Society’s wildlife agent, who told me it was best for the ducks to find their own way out and over to the creek. I placed a wood plank over the steps, hoping they’d use it as a ramp. But it was too slippery: I watched from the balcony as one duckling hopped up 2 steps then onto the ramp, only to slide to the ground.
This would have been amusing if I didn’t go down later and see that 2 of (more…)