Collie's Bestiary

We have roofrats! OK, not really. The new landlords decided we need a new roof, so they informed us late Saturday night via email that the roofers were scheduled to arrive at 7:30AM Monday morning. I'm not wild about the fact that the roofers are scheduled to be here all week as well, especially since [...]

This is an astonishingly "chewy" book! I'm impressed, as well as greatly enjoying Plumwood's fascinatingly erudite, logical — and yet, I feel, still thoughtfully spiritual — considerations on ecofeminism. She is, in fact, so logic-oriented that it was initially a bit disconcerting when her writing was also richly metaphorical. It's always a pleasure to discover [...]

Being a child of the US, I've only seen online, rather than face-to-face, the types of deeply vicious and misogynistic attacks which Maathai describes: [C]ertain people were jealous and wanted me to be taught a lesson and put in my place. They took pleasure in what they perceived as my comeuppance. The message was clear: [...]

There is a phrase that's apparently become popular on Twitter conversations where someone wishes to point out unconscious privilege: they state that the issue under discussion is an FWP, or "First World Problem." Reading Wangari Maathai's Unbowed: A Memoir, I found myself often reflecting with bleak amusement that all the issues I've ever faced — [...]

I dedicated most of this week to (amongst other things) catching up on the readings for this class, so I could start on the required reflection paper as soon as possible. Here are the readings to date for all those intellectual sadists who are following along: Chapter 1 of Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber & Patricia Lina [...]

I think what has astonished me the most this week is how (sometimes unwittingly?) destructive humans are. I had time to muse on this as I was wandering around the yard picking up all the various bits of trash strewn hither and yon. Not only was there an absolutely astonishing amount of garbage — and [...]

I've written several posts now on Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti, and his vision of cities as mostly-self-sufficient, compact communities instead of sprawling and isolating urban blights that consume and destroy the land they're on. I've also mentioned some of my agreements and doubts with what I saw in Arcosanti (as a concrete entity somewhat separated from [...]

So does CoH qualify as a community? Does Arcosanti as it stands today, or Lupin Lodge? Paolo Soleri (who is still alive, though I speak of his writing in the past tense) devoted quite a bit of thought to community. According to him, there is a "magic of the big city" (23) as much as [...]

What causes a feeling of community? What creates a coherent sub-culture? Both my housemates play on the on-line multiple-player game City of Heroes, which is being startlingly abruptly shut down by NCSoft, the Korean company that bought the game some years ago. Watching my housemates, I find myself faintly surprised at the real distress I [...]

Okay, this posting is going to be a not-so-quick recap of stuff I want to keep track of for my yard work, and I'll keep adding to it as I learn more stuff to do. I'll work more on the compost idea later; for now, some very useful URLs: the National Wildlife Federation's Garden for [...]