Author Archives: Wen Stephenson

The Farm Next Door

Getting to know Thoreau Farm’s neighbor, Gaining Ground

“I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus. But why should I raise them? … What shall I learn of beans or beans of me?”
Henry David Thoreau, “The Bean-Field,” Walden

Writing there in Walden of his (successful) experiment in the bean-patch, Henry Thoreau got down to basics (as he had a tendency to do). Down to the fundamental questions: Why should I raise them? What shall I learn? And learn not only about the beans but about himself.

At the outset of my very first post on this blog, back in February, I mentioned that the Thoreau Farm property (the parcel owned by Thoreau Farm Trust on which the birthplace house sits) is adjacent to — in fact seamlessly connects with — a community farm and food project called Gaining Ground, dedicated to hunger-relief in the Boston area.  Situated on 17 acres leased from the Town of Concord — on some of the oldest continually cultivated land in America (farmed for more than 350 years) — all of the farm’s organically-grown produce , more than 20,000 pounds per year, is donated to food pantries and meal programs, consumed within 20 miles of the farm and within 24 hours of harvesting. Community volunteers provide roughly two-thirds of the labor. Continue reading

Climate and the Very Serious, Cont.

The RoostThe New Yorker goes deep on geoengineering. Is this what it looks like when our Very Serious media take the climate seriously?

[UPDATE, 5/10/12: NASA’s James Hansen has a hard-hitting op-ed in today’s New York Times, which shows us what it looks like to take climate seriously. “Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening,” he writes. Describing near-term scenarios, he continues, “If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically.” Bottom line: “The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow.”]

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Back in March, just after we launched this blog at Thoreau Farm, I asked David Roberts of Grist in an email exchange what it would look like if our “Very Serious mainstream media” (as he likes to call it) started taking climate change seriously. If you missed it, the resulting exchange is worth reading (and was cross-posted at Grist).

Well, it may not have led the evening news (or even made it into your newspaper), but this past Saturday, we got to see what it looks like when ordinary citizens — all over the planet — take climate change seriously.

May 5 was the first “Connect the Dots” Climate Impacts Day, the latest “global day of action” spearheaded by Bill McKibben and 350.org. The idea was simple: thousands of people, in communities around the world, who are already feeling the impact of global warming got together for group photos, holding homemade “dots,” and sent them to 350.org. There, they joined a spectacular — and often moving — photostream at ClimateDots.org, “connecting the dots” between extreme weather and climate change (as scientists are already doing), and calling for action. (I organized an event in Wayland and spoke at the event in Concord, where more than a hundred people gathered at the Old Manse, right next to the Old North Bridge. You can see a great collection of photos from around Massachusetts at 350MA.org, a new statewide grassroots network that I’m helping to organize.)

One kind of “climate action” I didn’t see or hear mentioned on Saturday is the highly controversial (some say crazy) idea of “geoengineering.” For that, though, you can turn to this week’s issue of The New Yorker, its splashy “Innovators” issue, and a big piece by Michael Specter titled “The Climate Fixers.”

Everyone should read this piece, or at least the first two sections. Not because it adds terribly much to the well-covered topic of geoengineering (i.e., human manipulation of the atmosphere to counter the effects of climate change), but because Specter’s opening pages are as close as anything I’ve seen, in a “Very Serious” publication, to what I call the “WE’RE F****D. NOW WHAT?” framing of the climate story. A framing, in other words, that begins to level with readers about the extremity of the situation. Continue reading

A Walk and a Talk

The Roost“In my walks I would fain return to my senses.”
-Thoreau, “Walking”

I managed to get out for a much-needed walk this morning, over to a nearby conservation area in Wayland, where I live. At the heart of it is a big, open swamp, a quarter-mile wide, surrounded by thickly wooded slopes, a pond at one end. The air was surprisingly cold. The water up a bit after last week’s rains. The geese were out with their young ones. Clear sky.

“I enter a swamp as a sacred place — a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength — the marrow of Nature.”

That’s also from “Walking.” (And yes, I have a thing about that essay.)

Yesterday morning I was a guest speaker, along with two of my fellow initiators of Transition Wayland, at the historic First Parish (Unitarian Universalist) in Wayland center. I’m posting my talk here (you can read the others here). It’s not an exact transcript of my remarks (there was some ad libbing), but it’s pretty close. If you’ve been following this blog, some of it will sound familiar. The interviews and exchanges I’ve posted here in recent weeks were very much on my mind. Continue reading