Link: Biodiversity Heritage Library

In searching for the full text of an old reference from vegetable varieties from the 1920's, I stumbled across an amazing project over on the Internet Archive called the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

At first glance, it appears to be a huge collection of old (but still very useful) texts on a great variety of topics.

Some random titles from the top of the stack include:
Insects, their ways and means of living
On growth and form
Fish hatchery management (sound familiar, oh beautiful rescuer of library cards?)
Ants and some other insects; an inquiry into the psychic powers of these animals (!!!!)
Birds in legend, fable and folklore


And oh so many, many more.

In a separate post soon I will post links to a variety of more practically useful texts I have found on Internet Archive, some of which are not part of the BHL... so stay tuned for that.

This almost (almost) makes me want an eBook reader, so I can peruse this awesomeness in bed at my leisure.

Link: "An Eerie Winter"

Kurt Cobb over at Resource Insights has many of the same misgivings I do about this winter/spring's odd weather patterns.

His piece just happens to be a lot better researched and written than mine.

Definitely worth a read.

My lovely, brainy and talented girlfriend has just started blogging over at http://foxgloveandfolksongs.blogspot.com/

Drop by and check out what she/we are up to.

What Are We Composting?

This just in, from The Onion.

The World After Abundance...

Another excellent post by John Michael Greer deserves your full attention.

What all this implies, in a single phrase, is that the age of abundance is over. The period from 1945 to 2005 when almost unimaginable amounts of cheap petroleum sloshed through the economies of the world’s industrial nations, and transformed life in those nations almost beyond recognition, still shapes most of our thinking and nearly all of our expectations. Not one significant policy maker or mass media pundit in the industrial world has begun to talk about the impact of the end of the age of abundance; it’s an open question if any of them have grasped how fundamental the changes will be as the new age of post-abundance economics begins to clamp down.

Most ordinary people in the industrial world, for their part, are sleepwalking through one of history’s major transitions. The issues that concern them are still defined entirely by the calculus of abundance. Most Americans these days, for example, worry about managing a comfortable retirement, paying for increasingly expensive medical care, providing their children with a college education and whatever amenities they consider important. It has not yet entered their darkest dreams that they need to worry about access to such basic necessities as food, clothing and shelter, the fate of local economies and communities shredded by decades of malign neglect, and the rise of serious threats to the survival of constitutional government and the rule of law.

A call to garden...

John Michael Greer (whose blog is consistently excellent and on my short-list of must reads each week) has posted a "call to garden" of sorts, positing the once common but now lost concept of backyard gardening as a valuable tool to insulate families and individuals from economic shocks.

As this is a central concept to the life I'm trying so hard to build, I thought it was well worth a link.

Managing Alternative Pollinators... free PDF

With honeybees (sadly) seemingly in decline, it will be ever-important going forward for us to be able to manage other kinds of pollinating insects to keep the food supply on-line.

An informational book on this very topic has just been released, and you can download it here for free.

Happy pollinating!