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by Rebecca Lerner
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Most of us are familiar with English walnuts, but black walnuts are lesser known and far better -- rich and sweet, the flavor suggests a hint of maple syrup! Black walnut processing is messy, and there is a lot less nutmeat than with English walnuts. You have to wipe away the gooey outer covering by hand and wash them in water to get to the actual nut, then lay it out to dry. For a neat second use, you can also boil the husks in water and use the mixture as a brown dye. |
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by Rebecca Lerner
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 I started the day with a nourishing tea made of pine needles, rose hips, mint and mallow greens, all gathered within a half block of my apartment in the city. It was more like a broth than a tea, because mallow has a gooey quality that thickened the mixture and gave it a hearty texture. Mallow is a prolific weed that grows close to the ground on sidewalks all over the city. |
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by Rebecca Lerner
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If I had waited until this week to gather the food, I’d be in trouble. It took myself and a group of eight people at the wilderness skills school TrackersNW more than a day to turn a few buckets of acorns into flour in September. We had to crack the shells with a hammer, extract the nutmeat with our fingernails, grind it, boil it twice in a big vat to get the bitter astringent properties out, and then strain it and dry it. |
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by Culture Change
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News release
Survival Challenge:
Can a Portland, Ore. Woman Live Off Wild Food for Thanksgiving Week In the City?
Most people head to the supermarket to prepare for Thanksgiving dinner, but urban forager Rebecca Lerner is trying an entirely different approach: the sidewalk! From Friday Nov. 20 through Thanksgiving dinner on Nov. 26, Lerner will attempt to survive exclusively on wild food she gathers from sidewalks, parks, wilderness areas and yards in the city of Portland, Ore. |
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by Peter Goodchild
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In "developing" countries, not to mention a few that are never to be developed, the average laborer lives in a milieu of poverty, overcrowding, misery, and injustice. Here in Oman on the weekends I get up before sunrise, avoiding the heat, to go for long walks, encountering laborers from the Indian subcontinent on their way to work. Most of them are heading toward construction sites. At houses and similar buildings, that means working entirely without machinery, even when the temperature stays in the mid-fifties Celsius for days. |
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by Keith Farnish and Dmitry Orlov
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 Are you still talking about Cyclone Nargis? Have you ever heard of Cyclone Nargis? Here’s a reminder: on 1 May 2008 a weakening low-pressure system suddenly picked up energy as it approached Burma from the Bay of Bengal. By the second day of this rapid strengthening, Cyclone Nargis was blowing in excess of 135 MPH and made landfall on the low-lying southern coast of Burma armed with vast reserves of cyclonic energy, a storm surge beneath, and constant heavy rain from above. |
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by Peter Crabb
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The driving force behind the anthropogenic destruction of Planet Earth is locked inside our skulls. Neuroscientists are just beginning to identify the neural networks of the Technological Mind, but one thing is certain: the irresistible impulse to use tools is the product of natural selection over the last 1.5 million years, and so it is probably more deeply ingrained than even our impulse to use language. |
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by Center for Biological Diversity
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 Sign the Center for Biological Diversity's Petition to save Richardson Grove!
Ask any visitor to California's North Coast who has driven the Redwood Highway north from San Francisco, and they'll be able to tell you exactly where they passed through the fabled "Redwood Curtain." |
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by Peter Goodchild
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Is there a correlation between the human psyche ― mood, world view ― and material resources? Or, more specifically, is there a correlation between the psyche and a relative change in resources, i.e. within one culture, from an earlier decade or century to a later one? Is there a sort of psychological history that parallels the material one? And can we see that correlation in these early years of the 21st century?
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by Jan Lundberg, oil-industry analyst
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The retail price of gasoline in the U.S. is extremely low, not just compared to the summer of 2008. Subsidies both direct and hidden create a true cost at least a few times higher than the visible price. The actual cost is paid largely through income taxes (such as for wars in the Middle East and domestic infrastructure), in the purchase of goods and services associated with "free" parking, and even medical care for car/fuel related mortality and morbidity. When the average gasoline price is $2.66 a gallon, according to news reports on the most recent Lundberg Survey, the message to the consumer is "Buy that big vehicle." |
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by Albert Bates
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 "The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise. |
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by Peter Goodchild
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Most of what are called grains are members of the grass family, which has the scientific name of Gramineae or Poaceae. Grains are the most important plants in human diet, contributing most of the carbohydrates as well as a certain amount of protein, vitamins, minerals, and fiber. Generally speaking, grains are quite undemanding in terms of soil or weather. |
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