Jim Goodman: The Hard Way

The Hard Way
We are, for better or worse, part of the land we live on. We can choose to extract as much as possible from the earth around us, the “Manifest Destiny” (or nature’s in my way) line of thinking. Or we can take as little as necessary and leave as small a trace as [...]

David Walbert’s Backyard: June 2008

David Walbert’s Backyard: A Small Patch of Dirt
When I write about gardening I sometimes, without meaning to, give the impression that I wake every morning to survey a vast domain of neatly tilled beds and a refrigerator bursting with home-grown produce. In fact we have very little space. We own an acre and a quarter, [...]

Daniel Bowman Jr. : Clearing, Stones

Clearing
By Daniel Bowman Jr.
Today I’m clearing limbs
from last night’s storm.
The morning sun is so calm
it’s as if it never happened.
The buffalo have relaxed.
The pigs look happy.
A small goat has freed himself
and will need to be retrieved.
The ride
from the ranch to the farm
is hot and dusty.
When we cross the creek,
the dog knows what to do.
It’s just [...]

Mil Norman-Risch: Downingsville Road, Vermont

Downingsville Road, Vermont
By Mil Norman-Risch
Me alone, fields on each side,
walking wrong, somehow,
on a road at night.
Silence, except shoeshuffle on gravel;
I have to make things out by contrast as I go:
Fence, field, barn, gate. What’s whitest here is road.
A far off porchlamp layers light as waves,
The hayfield’s stalktips crest and angle,
Swelling, then dimming, into nowhere.
I pass [...]

Dorothy Day: On Distributism

On Distributism: An Answer to John Cort
By Dorothy Day
[From The Catholic Worker, December 1948, 1,3.]
[Editor's Note: John Cort, who died at age 92 in 2006, was a Catholic poverty/labor activist, editor at Commonweal and author of Christian Socialism: An Informal History and Dreadful Conversions: The Making of a Catholic Socialist. "Distributism" is most simply defined [...]

Philip Bogdonoff: A Nonviolent Alternative to War

Civilian-Based Defense: A Short History of a Nonviolent Alternative to War
By Philip Bogdonoff
[First published in 1982, and used now with permission of the author.]
This article briefly documents the history of an alternative, nonviolent defense system which has been under development for several decades. Its purpose is to provide a perspective, not only on the history [...]

John Leax: The Woods, The Garden

John Leax: Two Poems
The Woods
The woods is not itself, independent, free
of history. It is a wildness in the heart
of culture, a wildness shaped by human
hand, by insect, water, wind, and time.
A ragged square bound by road, pasture, field
and sprawl of houses crawling up the hill
from town, it lives because we chose to give
a name to [...]

David Walbert’s Backyard: May 2008

David Walbert’s Backyard
When I was young my parents tended a small garden: Peas, tomatoes, lettuce, parsley, zucchini, beets. All this in the small backyard of a small house in a medium-sized northern town, sheltered from a major highway by a cinder-block laundromat. My mother pickled beets, canned apple butter and pear preserve, baked wheat bread [...]

Jim Goodman: Nature’s Way

Jim Goodman
Nature’s Way
Last month I had a pretty good idea how the cows would react to their first days on pasture, but I never get tired of seeing them acting like calves again– running, gorging on fresh grass and stretching out flat and dreaming of an endless summer. Cows love the spring and they love [...]