Where the Woodbine Twines

We have a habit of not liking to use the right words for things, especially if they are unpleasant or deemed disgusting. Instead of backhouse, toilet or outhouse,people used to say out where the woodbine twines. Frequently woodbine was planted near the outhouse to partially cover the odor, at least during flowering. We know woodbine as honeysuckle and it is a very strongly perfumed flower. We hide the necessity for saying things like sex and fornication with such a wide variety of words that it can literally make your head spin from the beast with two backs to skroggin', bumping uglies to simply, doing it. Some prefer the horizontal bop or rolling in the hay; shagging or making babies. Of course, I could go on, and on and on... no pun intended. It seems as if language is more than happy to morph if speaking plainly could get us into trouble. Sadly, there are few other words for racist and misogynistic attittudes. Other than calling the person exhibiting such beliefs an a-hole, we need to have specific words to speak of specific horrors. But love-making gets a pass I guess, because there are so many ways to partake of the "original sin", it probably helps to have many names for one thing, coitus. The problems associated with racism and misogyny is that they are often tied up with sex and sexuality, feelings of being threatened, being out of control and/or feeling inadequate have provided the foundation of all sorts of rage and hate. Sadly, more than fifty percent of the population are womyn and people of color. Simply said racism and misogyny are only weilded by a slim minority and their wrath is exerted against quite a bit more than half of society. For instance, the typical racist believes that because he has one black friend, he's not a racist, but that leaves 42 million (just in the U.S.A.) that he does not act friendly toward. Similarly, many men say, "I can't be a mysogynist because I love womyn." but in reality, they love trying to get as much sex as possible from as many womyn as they can and sometimes whether or not the feeling is mutual. When men are brought up seeing people operating from somewhere on the power and control wheel, they learn the power dynamics of abuse early. They may not even realize that the behaviors they label "love" as just shorthand for exploitation and abuse. As much as we need pressure relief valves like swear words for when we hurt ourselves or experience great pain, blanket words to cover a lot of territory fast and avoid the distain of people who think normal human interactions and processes are dirty, we will continue to have a need for euphemisms. Without these words that don't exactly mean what they say, the double entendre would simply not exist, trying to get away with talking about things in front of the kids would be much more dificult and likely some issues would get talked abotu even less. However, I would like to make a case for speaking plainly and using terms which leave as little room for misunderstanding as possible. Back in Victorian times, where the woodbine twines was a vaguely peotic way of saying shitter. Today, we want less sylables, perhaps even a toilet emogi or acronym would work, like the British W.C. which stands for Water Closet. It is ironic that some bathrooms are now bigger than bedrooms of a century ago. Times change and so does language, but unless we speak clearly and in ways that others comprehend, our ability to communicate will suffer. Some today oppose the very pairing of words that speak volumes about the specific subject matter of racism. You probably already redneckonize where I'm headed with this, CRT (Critical Race Theory)the whipping boy du jour of every right wing apologist for our racist element. Not a theory at all, but a perspective, that blacks and other races were always human beings and both in the past and today, their lives are circumscribed by hate. It certainly is not diabolical to speak truth to power and it certainly does not make the power balance change one iota. Perhaps if we all understood it there would be less hatred and fewer people maimed and killed simply because of the color of skin they were born with. There really isn't a very eloquent pseudonym because fascists and nazis are factually immoral, not just "dirty" like sex or defecating.

Powerful Male Senators

SPEAK MORE! The Female Supreme Court Justices get interrupted 1/3 more often than men. This number actually increases as the numbers of womyn increase. Our democratic system depends on all voices being equal. This is just one case where there is a vast discrepency between those who have always held power and those who are new to the game. It can be enlightening to look at the details, look hard at what is going on. In the best case, patriarchy is taking it's last gasp. We are experiencing the death rattle of cultural systems of oppression that do not work. Just like how the racists put all their eggs in the deceitful traitor basket. Finding the micropauses, to jump in, and speaking just a little louder and a little longer than your opposition, don't let the misogynists dominate the conversation! Talking over, can be taken to an offensive level and still sound "more civil", hey, Bob, I wasn't done making my point... thus cock blocking him while making him look like the "bad guy." Those who fill the space with their ideas are most often obstacles to consensus, not helpful in any way. Changing our culture can be done in as little as twenty years, but it requires concerted efforts on the part of all of us. We are frequently distracted by bluster, misdirection, self-serving blather and opinions attempting to hold dominion over fact ad nauseum. Holding the public discussion to higher standards would require us to more highly value facts, call people out on their lies and to be heard, we would have to shout a little bit louder fo ra little bit longer than anyone who sought to shout us down. That, in fact, is why bullies win out so often. It is the same reason that culturally insensitivity seems to be peddled as the "norm", when it is obviously the opposite of that. Talking over someone does not mean that you are right or that your ideas are inherently valuable. Often, quite the opposite is true.

Working With Smart People

Today I had a great discussion with a businessman from my town. He pays attention to the claims people make and understands how to decipher fraudulent claims. In addition he knows where to look for the best and most accurate information, which leads to great conversations if you can engage him on that level. Today he mused at how wrong Republicans have gotten things. He started out by repeating back some very interesting details about our unemployment numbers. There are just under six million people in Wisconsin. There are just under four million that are working age, 15-65. Just 130,000 are unemployed. Businesses claim they have 150,000 jobs to fill, so that sounds like we need at least 20,000 more people after we get everyone unemployed to work. Expecting further reductions in unemployment without making significant changes to the availability and affordability of childcare, healthcare and education, getting to complete employment is utter fantasy. I worked for just one week with a whole crew of people who make up that last few percent, those chronically unemployed, and they have good reason for not having found a place to fit in. A short list of issues tha tthey bring are racist, sexist, jokes, comments and attitudes, professing unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, neglecting safety protocols, claiming either ignorantly or deceitfully false information is true and outright dangerous behavior. Perhaps what I'm trying to say is that most people probably don't want full employment as they have not been trained to deal effectively with sociopaths and psychopaths. Just excluding those two personality types from employment would keep unemployment at five percent! We can't just will something to happen and as much as Republicans like to claim that their policies will help create the most jobs, we have often seen the opposite to be true. Obama for instance, took office with the economy in shambles with over 10% unemployment and during his two terms cut unemployment by more than half! Clinton too, inherited an economy with near seven percent unemployment and during his time in office brought it down to just four percent. Similarly, President Carter received the economy in the worst ever postwar unemployment at 9% and reduced it slowly and steadily to under six percent, until the very end of his term when it rose to slightly above six percent. Kennedy and Johnson both had Adminstrations that presided over lowering of unemployment, Kennedy hammered it down fron over 7%, down to fiv and Johnson continued, first pretty stteply, but the trend continued until unemployment was about two points lower than he had inherited it. Even Truman had averaged under four percent unemployment through his term, although in 1949, there was a spike to nearly double that. His average unemployment rate was the lowest of all Post War Administrations. I am always honored when people that have been paying attention share with me the things they are most concerned about. I hope they feel the same way when I speak from my heart about matters that concern me. I hope that everyone develops working relationships with those who pay attention, those who can sift and winnow facts from fiction. Especially in an age of digital communication and the power of the internet, there is no excuse for not learning how to determine fact from fiction, yet millions seem to be comfortable with perpetrating delusions and flights of fancy on the public at large. Whether we care to hear them or not, they seem bent on screaming about how they have the right to their alternative facts or thinly veiled opinions baqsed on hate. When we were taught about what democracy means, they forgot to tell us that in the Revolutionary War, the majority wanted to stay with Britain. The loud-mouthed bullies have been getting their way ever since. My theory is that we no longer have a world in which we can tell people, "Leave the tribe", because wherever they go pretty much across the whole face of the earth, they will then be perpetrated upon another tribe. We have run out of islands that can be turned into penal colonies. There are too few waste lands to send these people to. I recently had to leave an employer because of dumb. All of the claims they made of professionalism were dwarfed by their real world actions, those of amateurs. Sadly, they were even amateur thinkers. I will gladly return to work with the thoughtful boss, he honors me with honestly derived information, the dolts want me to believe their delusions or at least not expose their logical fallacies. Life is too short and I have too much at risk to let that slide. Seek and don't settle for less than we all deserve! Just imagine, how well things might go if we could all agree that business thinking they can fill twenty thousand more jobs than if every single unemployed person showed up ready to work for them is simply goofy! The imaginary twenty-thousand are hard to square. If a human being was claiming to envision a cadre of twenty-thousand, where they did not exist, there would be good reason to get their mental health checked. In Wisconsin, extrapolating last month's lost jobs, we are losing about 150,000 jobs per year. It takes us more than two years to graduate that many new young people through High School into the job market. The sooner we admit that the only Post War Republican President to reduce unemployment during their term was Reagan, the sooner we can forget all the other economic gimmics they profess. The greatest irony is that before Reagan go tthe unemployment rate down, it first had to spike to a Post War high of over 10.8% he then slowly brought it down to just below six percent by the time he left office. The right wing has never been against spending, as long as it benefits the ultrawealthy, or extracts more money from the rest of us that goes right into corporate profits, not laborers pockets, not into the hands of those who need it most, never to those who have been disenfranchised or marginalized, but those who pay for campaigns. The donor class. We all see it, we are all tired of it, we must cultivate realtionships with others who see what has been done and vote to fix it! KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!

My America?

We had just under 2,200 new covid-19 cases in my county last week. Brown County, Wisconsin has less than 265,000 people, so nearly two in a hundred got a completely controlable illness last week. Some of them will die. Even at only 1% death rate, 22 people will lose their lives to covid-19 simply because they got infected in the past week. Remember, the case fatality rate is closer to two percent across the entire U.S. I have so much shame and heartache about how stupid we are acting, but that will need to be worked out elsewhere. This blog is supposed to focus on positive steps we can take to chage things for the better. I know that after more than a year, we should be past this point. I'll go over it again just in case you have forgotten.DO NOT SHARE AIR! JUST DON'T DO IT! When you must be near others, mask, wash your hands frequently, do not touch your face, maintain social distance. Also, use your brain. All of our lives we have been taught that uncovered coughs and sneezes can jettison sputum up to thirty feet or more. Increase social distance around those who cough and/or sneeze that choose to remain unmasked. I would love to go into more detail about how to re-allocate the money we wasted in Afghanistan...

As we change our focus... The fact that millions of Americans love to shoot off their ignorant pie holes about how we need to love this country or leave it, one would expect them to be true patriots and work conscientiously to make our nation a place worthy of living in. There is nothing patriotic about claiming that your "freedom" is worthy of trampling on the health and safety of others. From a foundation that thinks liberty extends to hurting others, what can you build on a foundation that horrid? We can bear witness to the fact tha tthese same people claim to be victims themselves, justifying running stoplights and spewing toxic chemicals, even into our shared drinking water. This is not the nation I was taught to love. No one has the American Dream of buying a farm in the country only to turn the spigot and get shit out of the faucet, but in millions of american homes, that is what you get. How can degrading my property values by tainting my water source be allowed? Why is it not criminal to do business in ways that kill people? My America, the one I was taught to love and respect has three primary tenets, Justice, based on legislation and rights handed down from our legal cases; freedom to choose our leaders, based on the vote and as so many love to repeat, life, liberty and persuit of happiness. (falsely called "property" by some who fight to retain their greedy self-interest in an environment that requires cooperation and mutualism.) My right to make a living never absolves me of responsibility if I negatively impact my neighbor's ability and right to health, happiness or their ability to thrive. As we look outside our own niche, we need to accept and defend the rights of everyone to find the things we all claim have value. Living life requires us to be healthy. To have ultimate freedom, we must also carry the burden of absolute responsibility. To ultimately seek and have the hope of finiding happiness, we need to know that the basic needs we all have are going to be met. The dwindling but very loud minority who claim that they have the "right" to re-define reality to suit their claims rather than accepting facts and reality doomks all of us to meeting an untimely end. How will we react in the face of lies? We the people must speak truth to these power-hungry people who claim undue influence through the media, use of capital and who cling to their outlandish claims. We have the power to change, too often what we lack is the will.

10% of our goal!

As we continue to teach people how to sequester carbon cheaply, efficiently and forever, we often overlook the fact that many either don't care or are frozen by their fear of the future. I have written often about how the oligarchs seek to turn our heads away from the truth, or perpetrate vast lies to get us to allow them to continue to rule us. Luckily, more and more people are waking up and realizing that it is the vast majority who hold the power to make change come. This has been somthing that has been talked about for decades. when the Hippies said, the people need to lead, then the leaders will have no choice but to follow, that's exactly what they meant. The status quo is struggling, we have them unsteady. Why, just the other day, I saw a sign that said, "Long-haired freaky people, please apply."
Our group just got a contribution from an anonymous donor of over five thousand dolars that will help us to buy land upon which we will continue teaching skills needed to build a sustainable culture. This puts us over 10% of the way toward our funding goals. We are continuing to seek a large enough acreage to hold classes, create demonstration plots for resoration agriculture and to provide a working habitat restoration project where people can come to learn in a hands-on way what they need to know to replicate our success. We have had more than a dozen teachers express a desire to teach at our facility and to share such diverse skills as wildcrafting herbs, foraging for wild edible plants, animal husbandry, building soil carbon, putting up the harvest for lean times natural home building and we will also continue taking people for the annual maple sugar harvest and wild rice encampment. Additionally, we have skilled tradespeople who have been building efficiency into our housing stock, reducing the overall consumption of resources and energy, all of which allow homeowners to live better for less. Even though we are saving up for a large land purchase, we continue to invest in the capabilities of our group to educate more people faster and create bigger impact with what resources we have available. Just last month, we got a larger biochar kiln that exponentially increases the amount of carbon we can sequester, allowing us to create enough biochar to amend larger acreages faster. we have already committed to taking it on the road to several private landholdings,to sequester carbon there, but also to set up at public demonstrations across the state where dozens of individuals can learn about the power of this ancient technology. The faster we grow, the faster we increase our effectiveness. As we continue to reach out, spreading the network of people who are excited about our work, the faster we seem to get invitations to present our work to others for the first time. Those contacts in turn lead to even more people hearing about what we do for the first time. We have also mad einroads with several larger groups and people involved with nation-wide and world-wide efforts to change course. It is not too late, but we must all learn the new rules, the old strategies that worked and renew our commitment to one another and the planet. Sticking our heads in the sane will not inspire or affect change.
https://gofund.me/52fa3b77 joing forces with one another and the natural world will have benefits that out-live us all. For the next seven genereations,Tony C. Saladino-Bioneer

Without Words

Many ancient cultures had wisdom that we just can't fathom. How do we put into words ideas that spring from parts of ourselves we no longer have awareness of? Two days ago, I was in an area where the ground itelf was rotten, there was something at work in the soil that smelled every bit as bad as a decomposing corpse, but the grass was thick and green, lush and seemed to be what most people would call "healthy". The stench was sickening, like a combination of baby vomit, stinky feet and musty basement with a hint of rotting food. If I were a "primitive" person, I would have fled the area and had I been a shepherd, I would have moved my flock away in short order. Instead, because it was my work zone for the day, I just tried to stay as far away from the grassy areas as much as possible, sequestering myself to the large paved areas whose runoff flooded that foetid soil even in light rains. I was attending to something that most people might not even recognize as a problem. It took me two days to come up with words to describe my experience and the only reason I did that is because it disturbed me so profoundly. It is not hard to imagine that most people, if they smelled it at all would forget about it as soon as they were out of the wafting aroma. Some may have even overlooked it completely but been distracted enough by the area and the development around that grass to think it would be a good idea to come back, or bring their children to play on the stinky grass because it is a center of recreational activity in our town, underwritten and supported by the local NFL team.
The striking thing about my experience is that I may pay closer attention to my environs than some, but I also understand that many thousands of years ago, humans had to be aware of these things, or they might perish. In recent study, I was reading about pastoral cultures that lived (and some who still live) for countless generations by moving livestock across vast ranges. In most of the rest of the world, the herding culture brings their livestock into corral at night. Small paddocks that are reinforced against intrusion by predators. These areas are easily guarded and the concentration of creatures gets unnatually high. We have these same sorts of things in our modern, industrial animal production and milk production facilities, but there are a series of fundamental differences. First, pastoral cultures ranged over large areas, their corrals were not used every day, or some times, even once a week. Animals were allowed to graze widely and occasionally, they would be penned up in these spots temporarily, something not possible on finite and fenced ranges or under grazing regimes allowed under the rules of "private" property. The corrals of more sensitive cultures were established in areas where the land was particularly inhospitable, damaged or more in need of recovery. The herds got put up for the night in places where the browse was substandard. Where the cattle or sheep or goats would not choose for themselves. We can postulate as modern science geeks are loathe to do that there was some awareness in the minds of ancient or "less educated" people that concentrating manure and urine in these areas would eventually help build the soils and create rich browse later on, but it may also have been in an attempt to put the creatures where there was little manure or urine to protect them during the "unnaturally" long periods they would spend there from disease and illness that might come had the area been more fecund. On some level it may have even been an attempt to avoid predators who had become habituated to seeing herds in the more rich areas during the day. We can't hope to understand the reality of people who would never make a long line of corrals, leaving the livstock in tight spaces for weeks or months on end, working the soils into mire and either trampling or eating every shred of greenery out of existence. Under the management scheme used by the ancients, worrying about keeping feed or green chopped food supplementation up out of the muck was not only unknown, but unheard of, because their reality was so different than our own.
Yesterday I was speaking to a friend about a class I took, Participant Observation and Interviewing Skills. It was in the school of Anthropology and was focused on being able to interact with various cultures without damaging them and/or gathering information from people from other cultures without bias, or putting our particular cultural spin on information. So many things can be conveyed without words, that when we select words, we have to be careful. Communication can be blocked in so many ways that as researchers Anthropologists need to be wary of how they approach the information they are interested in gathering. One of the assignments we had was to discuss with people from at least three different cultures that were not the dominant one we call "our own", some of their native language idiomatic phrases and some of their proverbial wisdom. Idioms are hard enough to explain to someone who has not learned to speak our language as a native speaker. "I'm pulling your leg", for example has nothing to do with what might be going on under the table for instance. Words that don't have anything to do with reality can be difficult to understand/explain if you are not part of the in crowd. I mean "in" what and I thought it was just the two of us, What crowd? It may be clear to us, but we are all coming from a similar perspective, so how do we communicate these same ideas, in other cultures, perhaps even without words? There is a story about a family that always cut off the dark meat of their turkey, placing it in a separate roasting pan. Generations followed the tradition until one Thanksgiving, the young daughter or son who was being trained to cook the turkey asked "WHY?" "Why do we cut off the wings and legs and thighs?"
The mother didn't know, the grandmother didn't know, but it was, after all Thanksgiving and the great grandmother came to dinner that night and she was asked about it. "We did that because our oven was too small for the turkey." she said, "We had a tiny little apartment and a tiny little oven back then. When your grandmother moved out, that is how she saw us make the turkey every year." Sometimes even within the same family or culture, we never get around to talking about the why or how. How did the words come to represent something so far divorced from the literal meaning. How did they gain a significance all their own? "In like Flynn", "Going like gang busters" or "To beat the ban" don't rely on knowing who Flynn actually was, which gang was being busted or what ban they were talking about, the meaning comes from beyond the words. What is interesting is some of the things you learn about other cultures by trying to find a similar meaning beyond words in our culture that is a corrolary to ones from other cultures. In the Netherlands, "He tripped but his nose went in butter" can roughly be translated to "He always comes out smelling like a rose." In essence, no matter what his trouble, he always comes out on top. Due to possible translation difficulties, we may not always get the correct words, but the meanings sometimes shine through. Also in the Netherlands, if something is starkly or plainly obvious, "I could feel it through my clog" is a rough equivalent to "Plain as the nose on your face", something undeniable and when something tastes really, really good we might say that it tastes sublime, but again, in the Netherlands it might be said, "It tastes like angels peeing on my tongue." The meaning is often and sometimes, hopefully, divorced from reality in a unique way, although many languages have idiomatic speech, it is one of the hardest parts of the language to explore. All I know is that now that I have learned about where "primitive" people place their corrals, I will be doing the same thing if I ever have a herd to tend. Proverbial language can be similar, but not quite the same. "A stitch in time, saves nine" may make sense but often bears no relation to the circumstances in which it is used. Arabic speakers may recognize, "We taught him to beg and he beat us to the doors." but in my culture we say, he's a real go-getter or sometimes we call people brown-noser or ass-kisser. A friend just said yesterday, something that may be on its way to becoming a proverb, "If you teach a man a trade, chances are he'll do it." Proverbial wisdom sidles up often extremely cose to the literal meaning, but it has implications for other situations as well. Coming down off your high horse and/or becoming a fisher of men were never about horses or bait, but about concepts that are often difficult to explain, complex or borderline offensive. Words used as shorthand for other ideas. Sometimes cultures develop that do things a certain way long enough that no one asks why, actions and activities just happen and no reasons are needed for them. When we begin to accept the excuse, that's just the way we do it, we may lose vital understanding about how appropriate that way of life is or why our ancestors were motivated to do things the way they did. It may sound odd, because I see myself as a writer, but these ways without words are as important to me as the strings of symbols I piece together, cut and paste and labor over for hours to express a single idea. When the grass looks pretty, lush and green, but reeks of death, run the other way! Don't wait for someone to tell you or to put a sign up warning you of the hazard.

10% Funded And Building!

When we made the commitment to create an outdoor school, the idea was a culmination of many years of taking ECO-Tourists out for day trips and a few overnights here and there where we would plant trees or native wild edibles, restore habitat and regenerate native plants where they had been lost. Sometimes for many decades the land had been abused and we learned many techniques for breathing life back into soil. When I was a young man, I had worked as an educator at College Settlement Camps of Philadelphia, teaching many of the same ideas and skills to young people, but as I continue to learn, many adults have never learned these important things either. As I have gotten older, the desire to start a sort of summer camp for all ages that would focus on not only rest and relaxation, but learning in a supportive and beautiful environment became my passion. I have never accepted a penny for my work in this regard. The pay offs for me come in ways that cannot be monetized. In fact, my life's savings are going into the pot as well as all the contributions that are coming in. Teaching about mutualism and the give back are far too important to hold hostage to money.
At the start of the global pandemic, I decided to change the way I thought about what I wanted to create and focused my effort on brining this outdoor school to fruition. Our group, ECO-Tours of Wisconsin, Inc. has begun to reach out to other groups, guest teachers who will share their skills and in an attempt to find the location for this new project, have poured over real estate listings for over a year. When we sold our property, more than three dozen wild edible plants filled the yard. The only real management required was to harvest some of nature's bounty each year and every few years, find others who we could give new shoots or cuttings, bulbs, corms or seeds. The profusion of life that sprung up under these plantings was amazing, the many hundreds of pounds of relatively free food we got to harvest was simply amazing and the soil these plants lived in matured as well, holding more nutrients, more water and more life than we could have imagined when we started. Now, we want to teach these same techniques to many hundreds, even thousands more people who come away to the wilds to experience first-hand what permaculture, carbon-smart farming and restoration biology can accomplish. Of course, it is not free or easy to bring together so many diverse groups and voices, so many skills and ideas into one experience, but we are on our way to doing so.
If you would like to manage your property in ways that give back to Mother Nature, that use no man-made chemicals, that revere rather than destroy natural systems, please contact us and/or contribute to our gofundme page. If you would like to learn how to store and sequester carbon in living soil, you can contact us as well. I will include a few photos of our gardens, but seeing them in person says more than the photos can capture. By teaching through actual experiences, rather than with just words, our students come away with skills and thought processes that help build community, honor the circular nature of life itself and to support diversity for the sake of all organisms involved.

Back To Work

It has been over a year since the entertainment industry closed down. I have worked nearly all my life in the business and last March, around the middle of the month, we just got sent home. From the beginning those of us who knew something about science and especially epidemiology prepared for the worst. I sold my homes because I knew that here would be at least a year of no work. Many of us were expecting a more likey two-and-a-half years of no income, especially considering the fact that we had an anti-science Administration in control of our government back then. The wealthy people who fund most television, concerts, industrial and trade shows and the theater industry started blowing smoke up our asses almost immediately. Some said that within months we would be back to work, a few said they would start up again in the fall. The implication was that by the time autumn rolled around, the worst would be over. Then, we had the low-end companies, the ones known for paying the least and working their people the hardest with the least benefits want to start up around the holidays and we all know what happenned then. Now, we are about halfway vaccinated as a population and there are some jobs coming back, slowly. The sad part has been the very vocal and ignorant people who think the stock market is the economy, and those who claim that some of us are "essential workers" when what they actually mean is they want to buy cigarettes and gatorade every day on their way to work and the only place they know they can do that is at the local stop and rob gas station. If we would have had done what the entertainment industry did right away at the start, stayed home, away from all people, refusing to breathe the air of others, we could have been done with the virus in a few weeks. Instead, we allowed access to our human Petri dishes to continue throughout the past year. We have had cheerleaders for a "return to normal" pushing, pushing, pushing for us to go back to work, back to our jobs, back into social situations before anyone was ready.Now we have just enough people vaccinated to not be sure whether the people we see out in the world are safe or not. There are still people who claim tha tthey don't want to be part of an experiment or take some "unproven" vaccination, but these same people don't realize that once more than a hundred million doses have been given, the trial size is many hundreds of times larger than any other drug ever gets tested on before being allowed into the marketplace. Clinging to the lies of the former Administration and denying science even as we continue to have people become infected with a preventable disease just makes these folks sound ignorant to those who have been paying attention. They say that a stopped clock is still right twice a day, but in the case of science deniers and Q-bots, they have not been right for more than a year. I feel for every person who was mad eto work during this time and I am watching closely what happens over the coming month or so, because as people begin to mix it up again and return to work, school and the nightclubs, we must not forget that as a nation, we are barely half vaccinated. Some parts of the country are still not even to that point yet. In my state alone, there are still places where the infection rates are high and this week I went through the data. There is a direct correlation between places that still think Deceitful Traitor won the election and the high rates. Often those in rural areas don't understand that if there are ony four hundred people in their town and two people get covid-19, their case rate is still higher than if 40 or 400 people get sick in a town of hundreds of thousands. Just because you do not understand the life cycle or natural history of a virus does not mean that it can't use you as a host. Once you are infected, it is too late to do anything about it either, so unless you isolate yourself completely and remain in quarantine until the illness has run its course, the only thing you can do is pass it on. I will be going back to work in an outdoor environment, and I am fully vaccinated, but I will continue to mask up and wash my hands often. I will continue to stay at least six feet away form people I'm not sure have been fully vaccinated, not because I'm fearful of catching the virus, but because I want others to understand that they need to get their heads around this issue, accept the science and stop listening to people who don't care about them. As much as I want a paycheck, I refuse to endanger your life for my freedom. As much as I want to "return to normal", what we had before was not working. I want everyone to understand that to get past this terrible illness, we all have to be considerat of others and do whatever it takes to create positive change for all of our neighbors, friends and families.

Silent Sports Park

When I spend time in the woods, it is amazing how many people I find out there, bringing the outside world along with them. Some do it ingeniously, but others just blunder about frogetting to unplug, desiring to see it all at a blur, passing by while flying through the trails on their smelly vehicles, spewing dust and fumes in a giant plume behind them. There are also those who choose to be so bugged about the few things they left behind that they cannot seem to relax and enjoy the moment. I must admit to being rather impressed by the guy who configured half a dozen car batteries in a wagon with a car tape deck and speakers on top, then dragging that whole apparatus over a mile back down the footpath into a State Natural Area to blast hair metal all night long. I had wished he would have stayed home, but weekend warriors being what they are, I was just glad he dragged the whole system back out when they left. It was not the same for the several cases of beer cans he and his friends brought so they could enjoy nature.
Imagine finding a place that was planned and executed to be a silent sports park instead. No 4X4s tearing away at the paths, no internal combution engines and no electrical devices to blast sounds from town. A place you could be lulled to sleep by nothing but the sound of a loon perhaps, awakened by the throaty call of a bullfrog or reminded midday whose land you were on by the shriek of a hawk high above. I have enjoyed times like this, sometimes literally miles from nowhere. In the Quetico region of Canada or the Boundary Waters, but they were many hours drive into the bush and even a dozen miles or more of paddling out past the furthest reaches of motorized traffic. Few hearty souls are willing to portage extra gear beyond the first thousand meter portage. I would like to propose somethnig much closer to home, a place where the hurly burley of the outside world is held at arm's length. A place where you might find peace and quiet without keeping one ear tuned to the whine of engines or be assured that you would not be distracted by the buzzing of chainsaws while you tried to relax and unwind. I am tired of seeing people try to get away from it all while being addicted to their gasoline powered generators or only being able to see nature down the barrel of their guns. This week I have found such a parcel of land, one that can be protected forever and held in trust perpetually to allow silent sports to rule the day. If you would like to bike, or hike, canoe or cavort, you can do it without worry of being run over or coated in a plume of dust from passing vehicles. It is quazi-public space already, but privately held and for sale. Thousands of acres stretching over headwaters of two river systems and a handful of lakes, waiting to be protected from the heavy hand of humankind. I always see opportunity in these sorts of places, a chance to have something better grow where even the remoteness had not protected it fully in the past. Places where, without being protected, more forests will fall and get carted away for pulp or lumber to feed faraway people from what is left of the woods. In my heart of hearts, I have always sought out places like this in hopes of giving back to them in ways that show Mother Nature that I value them. My tiny breaths of carbon rich air, feeding the trees which provide me shelter with a living roof of branches. Most of my travels which were never about getting anywhere but to a moment unmolested, where I could feel time unfold at the pace it always has. A place to reflect upon my self and how it fits into the puzzle pieces of nature surrounding me and to realize that all of it was fine before we came along to appreciate it and will exist long after my body returns to the earth as worm food.
I would like to share this place with as many people as possible, to secure it from the possibility of further noise and haste, quiet the wilds in a profound way that lasts forever, creating a hush that will extend through generations allowing native creatures their voice. https://americanforestmanagement.com/real-estate/properties/twin-lakes/2419 This link will take you to the site digitally, but if you want to help purchase this property, we ask you to give as generously as you are able. It may not be sub-divided and will only be for non-consumptive uses if we can raise the capital to purchase it. Unlike other investments, we are not doing this for money and will not be treating any contributions as investments, but we will manage the land to restore the soil, plant trees, expand the carbon sink that is the soil resource, bring back beaver and slow the flow of water from the landscape. The purpose of our efforts are solely to protect the headwaters of the rivers that flow from this relatively unmolested area, to recover the areas that have been denuded, planted into monocultures and exploited for timber harvest in the past. Our long term goal, as we begin is to use a minimal amount of highly selective cutting to appease the current management plans on file with the USFS and the State of Wisconsin, but to also enshrine the area as a memeorial forest to the ancient ones who once passed this way and did not leave waste or destructuon in their wake. We seek to hold this land as sacred and to encourage those who come to enjoy it to forget about the "outside" world for a while. Our intention is to use it to teach sustainability through imersion and practical, respectful enjoyment, not tearing it up as so many other places allow folks to do. Our intention is to save just under 22 square miles as a pocket of highly protected landscape and to slowly coax climax forest to re-establish itself in the Northwoods. Our goal is to use this property to sequester over 42,000 tons of carbon there over the coming years and to show as many people as possible how to use regenerative agriculture and restorative forestry practices to leave something better than what we found in the wake of our passing. We also intend to do it

without wholeale extraction and without ignoring the voice of the wind in the trees.

We have been teaching people to make and use biochar for more than a decade, but the past year we have turned almost exclusively to online classes. It has been much easier and more efficient in many respects, but there are still a number of people who would rather have in-person classes. That is why we are fundraising to buy land on which we can teach about this and other skills important to become more sustainably oriented. Permaculture design, foraging classes, animal husbandry and regenerative ag. skills, even home economics and other sustainable living skills are more necessary now than ever and there are dozens of great teachers who have offered to teach at our facility. Things from knitting to soap and candle making, canning, drying and putting up th eharves during the fat times so we still can appreciate Earth's abundance during the lean times, etc.
Making and use of biochar can be taught in a fairly comprehensive way in just two or three hours, but some of the other skills we teach can take considerably longer to learn. For guests who want or need to stay longer, we have a plan to offer glamping opportunities as well. Just enough "roughing it" with just enough luxury to have fun and stretch to the limits of our comfort level. That is why we are developing a broader plan to purchase a significant acreage upon which we can offer opportunities fo rno trace camping while teaching a variety of management strategies that layer functions, emulate nature by closing the loop on nutrients, energy, carbon, water and other "resources" and adapt creatively to our rapidly changing world. In our experience, we find that appreciating the gifts of the nature and investing in them often pay dividends that are not necessarily financial, but are every bit as important to our quality of life. what we put in, or give away often comes with unimaginable rewards.
One of the most important aspects of permaculture is that one needs to look, listen and learn, really get down to the level of what goes on in nature, before ever trying to make change happen. The often quoted belief that native people have that every decision needs to be weighed for the good of the next seven generations may seem like far too long a timeline to consider seeing as many are predicting that human actions may make our species extinct within a decade or two, but for those people who have been paying attention, we know that even if people don't want to change, they are going to have to. Far from being a drag, or predicting destruction of society as we know it, we teach ways that the recovery of sound ecological practices will enhance quality of life, jobs and the sense of community that seems to have evaporated under the powerful, but often nearly invisible hand of capitalism.

Far too many use words to describe themselves that were arrived at by focus group or polling data, so I try to refrain from naming myself, our group or the direction our guests are headed. A wise older gentleman laughed at me once, when I was struggling to give him a word to describe myself. I know that far too often descriptors can be pejorative. He said, "I know what you are, a bioneeer!" and at first it felt a bit like the same slap in the face that tree hugger had always been, but as I learned the depth of meaning behind the term and came to understand that he meant nothing negative about it, I took it to heart and more and more have grown to like it. After all, pioneers are eternally optimistic that perhaps over the next rise will be some sort of Shangrila, a place where the cool fresh springs will be plentiful enough that our livestock will have water and that the lush, green grasses will feed them abundantly, the winds and snows won't be too harsh and that we can find straight, tall and strong timbers with which to build shelters that will serve the coming generations. Bioneers do the same, but they can find their lush abundance right where they are, without packing all of our worldly goods in a prarie schooner and striking out across a vast sea of grass to get there. We often find rich abundance by turning over a single rock, or collecting enough from nearby to build the foundations of a new, rich and abundant life, through interaction with the natural world. We invest time required to turn wast to resources or trash to treasure, getting creative to save money and eliminate waste. When I was first called a bioneer, I was still a young man. I had explored hundreds of thousands of places, slept out under the stars in hundreds of them, gotten to know biota on their terms and within their various biomes. I had come to find many dozens of wild foods that thrive where I live and learned how to propagate ones that were finding it difficult to thrive, learning what they needed that had been missing, creating more stable and habitable niches not only for myself, but hundreds of thousands of other species even though I could not name them all.
At this point in my life, I may be an elder, but the motivation I have is not the same as the elders I met and saw when I was young. Most of them had exuded a holier than thou attitude and explicitly said that things were "My way or the highway." Many of the elders I had when I was growing up taught me far more abotu the wrong way to be than how to grow adapt and create meaningful positive change in the world around them.
I choose to continue to strive toward something better, more fulfilling, to learn and grow, even though it sometimes brings painful consequences. Yes, I am sometimes forced to admit I was wrong or to stretch my boundaries, adapt and change. That hope for a better place, for the bioneer lies in the same space we are in today, the same culture, the same location, we don't find it by traversing a vast wilderness. More likely it lives within us already and by digging deeply into the difference between needs and wants, understanding that there is no "away" and that once we discover how to help nature to be abundant, the hardest task becomes equitably redistributing the abundance. I have written at length about the give away, or the give back. The time I have left may be short, but the depth of experience I bring to the table will not die with me. Stories allow us to transcend death, as long as people continue to tell them and find the meaning worth putting into practice. When I teach people to make and use biochar, it is a story that was told over nine thousand years ago. Before humans had developed written language, there were those who knew how important it was to give back to the soil. The only thing that has really changed is that today it is far more important to know, instead of me speaking, think of it as our long dead human ancestors, reaching out across time to show you how to make the soil healthy and life thrive.

FDR

When we did have a Democratic Socialist, he was voted to be our President four times. The oligarchs were so afraid of people like him getting into office again that they implemented term limits. Of course, FDR brought us out of the Great Depression, The Dust Bowl and virtually all of World War II. He did it with style, compassion and in many ways more honor and respect than we have seemingly been able to muster for any President since. Many parks and libraries, infrastructure and aspects of our society that make life better to this day were funded unde the alphabet soup of agencies that he helped to create. If you are unfamiliar, it is worth going back to the speeches he gave to Congress, not telling them what to do, but what our nation needed and the elected officials got to work in order to make it so.
The Dust Bowl that blew away the single greatest resource our nation had, the very soil itself was stopped by planting over 3.5 billion trees. Under his Administration he also built over 3,000 fire towers to look after our forests. Not because he was a draconian and power hungry leader who thought it was a good idea, but because We The People banded together with common purpose and said with one voice, this is where we put our foot down, here this will end, and together, we made something that seemed impossible not only possibly but real. We rebuilt and refurbished water supply systems, modernized roads and bridges, expanded the links between and among our great cities and beat back the rising tide of poverty that threatened to mire our nation for decades. our future is still made possible by programs he signed off on. Social Security, perhaps the greatest humanitarian program ever conceived was signed into law under his term in th ehighest office in our nation. He was beloved and today, many of us still celebrate his life. Of course he was limited by the times he was living in and there were a few things he did that were not the best, but at least he had the guts to strike out, creating the CCC (Civilian conservation Corps) which paid unemployed people to improve and protect our soils, the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) and the REA (Rural Electrification Act)to bring the majority of U.S. households into the Twentieth Century. Hundreds of programs that led to increased quality of life came about bnecause of his leadership and the drive which he exhibited and was able to get the people of our nation to get excited abotu as well. It is interesting that we don't have a holiday to celebrate the birth of this great leader. He was born, January 30, 1882 and sadly passed away while still serving as President April 12, 1945. Less than four months later, his successor Harry Truman ended WWII by dropping bombs, developed under the Presidency of FDR, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima, August 6th and Nagasaki, August 9th of that same year, killing between 130,000 and 230,000 innocents. There is no doubt that he had saved more than that many lives in this nation during the course of his three full terms in office and the American People were so greatful that they rewarded him with an unprescedented fourth term. now, when a political figure tries to make sweeping changest that improve the lives of the entire nation's citizens, he is called names. Socialist has come to mean something unrecognizeable. terms like bleeding heart and dso-gooder are thrown at him almost as if the ultra-rich are spitting in the face of decent leaders. their right to serve in office is questioned, or their transgressions are magnified as if that makes their decent and logical policies suspect. The fact is that ownership of nearly all of our media has been transferred to the very oligarchs FDR taxed to pay fo rthe improvement of the lives of all our citizens. At this point, those ultra-wealthy folks have had fifty years of fighting in court, being allowed to buy candidatres who know better than to bite the hand of those who feed them and to consolidate their positions and offshore their obscene wealth.
Americans for Tax Fairness points out that: The number of Billionaires has increased more than nine fold during the three decades between 1990 and 2020. Increasing from just 66 individuals to over 615. This unfathomable amount of money had to come from somewhare and it is directly seen in th eerosion of our middle class and th ecomplete collapse of our social safety net. We need anothe rleader like FDR to put this nation back on course.

this image is just one of thousands of park shelters in use today that were built with labor provided under one of th emany programs FDR signed off on. I'm sure there are places in your town that have the hand of his Presidency upon them and we are all better off because of the sacrifices made by people who were actively participating in making our country better for generations they knew that they would never see.

700 Posts and the Surpassing 1%

When I began this project, it was with the intention of not just writing about topical subjects, but to write about events and ideas that have staying power. That lift us up, inspire, and share the powerful reality of knowing more and understanding deeply issues that have been with us for decades and centuries. Some millennea-old that need our attention and remain with us even if they are purposefully obscured from public knowledge, or easy view. I have done thousands of hours of digging through dusty archives, old-school card catalogs, poured over old arial photos and detailed studies and research papers as well as thousands of primary sources that would bore the hell out of the average person, not because it was all that much fun, but to get a grasp of what is going on around me (us) and true facts, essential aspects of our situation regarding our relationship with nature and what we know about living in harmony with rather than at odds with the planet. I know that I try to pour more into the average sentence than may be good sometimes, but this is the way I have found to bring many of my subjects to light. Seven hundred posts ago, if someone had told me that I would take hundreds of people out on ECO-Tours, teach thousands to mqake and use biochar or that a developmentally challenged friend would have the most composed and accurate understanding of why planting trees is a good thing to do, I might have scoffed. I could not have guessed that our small group of friends and a few hundred people we did not even know at th eoutset, would come together to plant over sixty-thousand trees across Northeast Wisconsin or that we would plant even more native perennial plants across our watershed. Seven hundred posts on, I no longer question whether it is "worth" it to write. I do not wonde rwhat miraculous things are yet to transpire. That was settled long ago. If one person can benefit from the thousands of hours of research, struggle to find the right words and the editing, re-writes and late nights spent burning the candle at both ends it was all worth it. There have been times when more than a thousand people a month were reading my posts and that was pretty heady stuff, but now, I have slacked off my brutal schedule of seven posts a month, choosing instead to branch out and share my works in other places. I may write here less frequently, but my aim remains true. I came to understand, as I wrote more and asked people to share something with me if my writing touched them, just how little asking can mean to some people. What I found is that few are able to step out of a capitalistic system; into whatever comes next. We stand at the threshold of a new age, but people don't know how to jump, or they stand transfixed, stock still, like deer in headlights. I know I have said it before, but this paralysis needs to stop, or we may never move on. In the landscape of pay-per-view, paywalls, service fees, premium packages, ad-free for-a-fee and endless advertisements distracting from serious content, I have taken a different tack. I put the best information I can find into words that my readers seem to appreciate. Many have followed me, or commented or even complimented me on what I have written, but this is not the same as being given th ecoin of th erealm, to help me cover the expenses involved in producing content for free. Few have felt the need to pay for the effort I have put forth. The giving economy needs to be supported in some way, but many who are getting rewards from the sacrifice of others seem to delight in their own privilege. Taking, taking, taking, becoming belicose in their consumption, as if the more they consume without giving back, the stronger they become. This only proves they have not heard the underlying message, the through line of all my years of effort. They must feel entitled to all the benefits without having to give back even the slightest amount. In no way is this meant to call people out, condemn or demean them, it is only to say that we are not yet in practice for whatever comes next. We, as a people, are hamstrung by convention. We have become so used to, or accustomed to, cash on the barrel-head and exploitation for money that when someone lets them take on an honor system, or puts a candy bowl out for people to enjoy a bit of sweet with the commerce they must enguage in, they cannot help but fill their pockets or purses without leaving anything in return. Sometimes, without leaving any for the next guy either.

Our next mega-project, mine and ECO-Tours' is to use restoration biology to build back soils on an 80 acre parcel in Northern Wisconsin and we are getting some great response to our call for help in that respect. I'm glad that protecting and regenerating the land is getting a better response than my writing has. As my last post detailed, we were at 1/120 of th eway to our goal. Less than amonth ago w ewere at that level of support and have increased the number of people supporting us and the amount raised for that purpose. We have now raised more than 1%, or 1/100 of the amount we need. We have come from one place, only to arrive at another. They say that we can never go home and in my experience, that is true, but we can return home to the landscape, the soil, our mother, Earth. We will eventually all return to her anyway, but we can choos eto do it now and learn to live in th ereciprocity of giving and taking ,as all creatures have since th ebeginning of time. When we arrive, all of our ancestors will be there with us, whether they be named or even remembered, our spirits will continue to reflect them. This reaching and surpassing the 1% mark has let us do several things. We have been able to solidify our understanding of the size, scope and extent of funding our project, make some preliminary estimates of how many people will be required to make the purchase happen and how long it might take if we continue along at our current rate of fundraising. It has also allowed us to begin to see patterns about who is helping and for what reasons. If all things stay the same as they have been, we might expect a thousand people to be involved, possibly even 1,200 by the time we reach our goal. If this is the case, each and every contributor, on average, will be saving about 3,ooo square feet! how much is that worth to you? https://gofund.me/52fa3b77

1/120

One one-hundred and twentieth is a realtionship. Is the same ratio as 44 feet is when compared to a mile. If you live in a climate where temperatures can rach 100 and also down to -20, the ratio is about the same as one degree of temperature would be compared to the whole range of possible temperatures you may experience n that location. Another way of thinking about this strange fraction is that it is a little less than 1%, about twenty percent less in fact. A handful of readers already know that I started a gofundme site late in the year and it has reached 1/120th of the goal! The project is to protect 80 acres of inholding, land completely surrounded by National Forest. Our local not-for-profit has reforested hundreds of acres already, but they were spread across ten counties and several dozen individual sites. This larger acrage will allow us to focus our efforts near the highest ppoint in Wisconsin and concentrate our ECO-Tours in a finite space so that people can more easily see the transformation, pretty much all at once. Over the last twenty years we have spent thousands of hours on logistics, making sure all of our needs woul dbe taken care of at hundreds of separate events. We have been able to plant over 60,000 native trees and millions more native perennial plants, but since they may be only a few acres, or perhaps even a site as small as a few hundred square feet, we know they are there, but it does not look like much when viewed by satellite. This 80 acre parcel will change that. target="_blank">

Now Or Never

How many times have we heard those words? I can think of dozens of times myself and oddly enough they were often the last words I heard before doing somthing pretty dumb actually. Get your driver's license they said, "It's now or never." I was twenty-five and my grandfather had never gotten his driver's license. I guess the people who cared about me most didn't want me relying on others for transport if I needed to move my body across the planet faster than walking, biking or busses might move me. I felt no compulsion to drive, no alacrity whatsoever. I had lived on the East Coast and had seen the genteel, efficient culture and lifestyle that often springs up around urban areas served by efficient transit. Walkable villages proximal to rail links, after generations of only having to have one car, can add up to tens of thousands, perhaps eventually hundreds of thousands of dollars, saved; plus time spent commuting can be infinitely more productive and rewarding than when just driving back and forth, moving your skin bag around.I have always figured that if people truly like the place they are, they won't feel th eneed to move about as much anyway. The irony of self-driving cars is they will continue to try to emulate mass transit, but they can never become as efficient or safe, because they are mixing it up on the regular streets, where accidents sometimes happen. This, combined with autonomous vehicles being small, you lose that shred of extra safety that comes from every other driver knowing, you don't want to hit a bus. You may be able to make self-driving cars not turn left into traffic, but one can never know another driver might do it to you. Another time these words were spoken was when the neighborhood kids had built a platform, high up in the largest tree on our block. There was a giant cable we had pulled out of the river that one of the crazy adults we knew attached to an even higher branch, so our "rope" swing was over sixty feet long and produced a huge swing arc. I'm not sure how, bu tsomeone managed to put a giant knot in th ebottom of the cable that even acted like a seat. Anyway, I climbed up to the top platform and the kids of the neighborhood gathered, one swung the cable to me. The idea was to hold on tight, let yourself fall off the platform and slide down thick plastic covered cable. Well, I just could not do it. I was th efat kid and the tiny knot of kids surrounding the rope swing had doubled and doubled again until I was sort-of the show. At least half the kids in the neighborhood thought I would chicken out. I probably thoguht I would too, but I knew it was safer than trying to climb back down the tree. The words were said,"It's now or never. Besides, you don't want the whole neighborhood to know you chickened out." Well, I leaned off and nothing happened I was suspended in mid air by my two hands clutching the cable and my underwear had gotten stuck on the head of a nail as I left the platform, so I was attached to the rope swing by me two arms and for a fat kid, that's scary enough, but my ass was nowhere near the wooden platform, so there was no way to go back. This may have been th efirst time in my life that time slowed down because what may have only been ten seconds seemed like half an hour. Those assembled were pointing and yelling, laughing and screaming. I saw my sister cover her eyes and knew that couldn't be good. One of the adults immediately started climbing up, bu tin th eend, the guy who chided me to "go!" stopped laughing and pointing long enough to release me, from the rear end and I came down fast, but safely. My hands burned from the friction with the great plastic sheath, but my face burned more from humiliation and disgust. No one enjoys being the butt of jokes, especially when it is because of somethnig so close to your butt! Nearly as often, though when I jumped off or got that driver's licnse, it was the start of something grand, somethnig that surpassed even my own expectations about what that decision was going to make in th erest of my life. Going to college was one of those now or never things. Making my first week long canoe trip and embarking on my Great Lakes Bicycle Trip all had that moment of fear and trepidation that comes from hearing thos ewords, so often paired with challenge and difficulties, most often unbidden. Who can know before we leap into the abyss what the future will bring? My family history is replete with stories like when we left The Coal Region of PA headed for Denver and the first day out the cooler got dumped and shorted out the main wiring harness of the car. It presented us a truly now or never choice. We would either make it back to Denver or not. That was the big question of the moment, but the repair had taken one of our three travel envelopes. We frequently travelled like that. We would add money to the envelopes equally, over a seriries of weeks or month, saving up for our trip. The envelopes were lovingly labeled Food, Fuel and Fun. The "Fun" envelope got it's contents removed, a full third of our budget for the whole trip evaporated on day one. The Sun had not even set yet and we expected to get to Iowa by nightfall. That was the start of a trip that re-introduced me to the first true love of my life. A friend from Middle School who is smart, beautiful and compassionate, exciting to be around, with high moral character and who had always been able to arouse my animal instincts. Had we not decided to go, as crazy as much of the rest of the trip was, my life would have never been the same. Sadly, I think it was me, not wanting to "now or never" something or other that led to our moving apart. All of this has been a convoluted preamble to NOW. Sometimes stories of old are not enough. They act as touchpoints, signposts or lighthouses, helping warn of the rocky shores and sandy shoals but sooner or later, we all need to leave the safety of shore and jump off, into the unknown. We need to do it before the echoes of the words "now or never" die out in our ears, we need to move! We can never plant the tree we needed to plant twenty years ago, we can only do this one in this moment. We cannot take back words not said, we can only offer what words we have now. It is impossible force opportunity to find a way back, when we find it is more conveinient for us or for us to bid opportunity wait unitl we actually feel ready. If those things were possible, we would all be famous and rich and living the life of Rilley. Strike while the iron is hot, change is gonna come, but only if we get with th eprogram and do our part. I promise, if you get caught up by the underwear, or are in over your head, I won't point and laugh, I will come to your aid. We can all see the predictions and trend lines. If we want to have seven generations revere and honor us, we have to do the same for them.

EcoTours

I never thought to offer this short video here. I will have a complete series of short videos about all six steps required to make and use biochar available soon. They are in the works as I write this and will be ready just before planting season begins.
When we formed ECO-Tours of Wisconsin, it was literally a dozen friends and we used annual tax returns to buy as many native trees as we could, planting them wherever we knew they would thrive. We even found out ways of getting free trees that I have pledged to keep to myself. After 60,000 our focus shifted. We got tired of hauling around soil and we were using so many plastic landscaping pots that I needed to have a lot of space for storage. At one point we had tree nurseries in five different people's back and side yards! The way we typically do our work now, at least for the trees is by seed harvesting and re-distribution which has reduced our carbon footprint per tree immensely and eliminates the stress on the seedlings of re-potting and planting. This simple step has freed up vast amounts of time and allowed us to do more with less, again saving orders of magnitue on time freeing us up to experiment with beneficial ground covers and more forbs, native perennial food and medicinal plants. We plant far more native pioneer species, because so many areas are so degraded that they have become too harsh for trees. In many areas that have lost virtually all of their organic matter, we have to first build soil, before we can ever hope to get trees to live. Instead of focusing one all the reasons this enjoyable process is needed, let me instead tell you about our results. There are, of course, intangibles, but in very real ways, there is plenty to document in the way of positive impacts. One of our first plant-ins, over three hundred trees were scattered across less than 2 acres. Now, they create a small block of fifty foot tall, extremely young mixed forest with conifers dominating. In addition to eliminating the cost of mowing twice each summer, which was the management scheme before our plant-in, it has both reduced summer cooling and winter heating costs, provided a buffer to road noise and made the area around the house more like an oasis. Although the tree block is well away from th ehouse, it still gives delicious afternoon shade and has eliminated a major drainage problem in the area. Another place that we had planted very in our history is a natural area that has since become a wildlife corridor. Baird's Creek Parkway is the current name. in our early days, we just guerilla gardened it with thousands of trees, not waiting for "official" protection that was to come years later. One day, at a plant in, as our group had settled down for a mid morning break, a bird landed on one of the trees that we had planted there, not a half-hour before, it perched there for fifteen or twenty seconds, long enough for everyone to see it, then it squirted some fertilizer near the bas eof the tree and flew off. Today, there is a mixed young forest there, again improving the lives of th epeople as well as th ewildlife of the area, the soil life has re-establise=hed itself and dozens of gallons of fuel are not burned to mow the area, again, the previous management of this area was heavy on th efossil energy use. We offer thorugh as many outlets as possible, opportunities to improve efficiency, save money and time, stack functions and maximize quality of life. for those who are specifically interested in biochar and the sequestration of carbon, please check out our gofundme page: https://gofund.me/52fa3b77 look down past the video, and scroll down to "older updates", click there and scroll down to the oldest, that is my slide share Powerpoint that I use for the classroom portion of our biochar classes. Anyone who gives at least fifty to the land purchase campaign can get up to two hours of consulting to go with the Powerpoint, or to help you accomplish the six steps in your, unique situation. I ask people to give what they can so that we can continue sharing our stories of success and inspiring others to be involved with rehabilitating our planet and her soils.