Tag Archive for: Planet

When I Dream of the Planet in Recovery

Author: Derrick Jensen | Published on: April 6, 2016

In the time after, the buffalo come home. At first only a few, shaking snow off their shoulders as they pass from mountain to plain. Big bulls sweep away snowpack to the soft grass beneath; big cows attend to and protect their young. The young themselves delight, like the young everywhere, in the newness of everything they see, smell, taste, touch, and feel.

Wolves follow the buffalo, as do mallards, gadwalls, blue-winged teal, northern shovelers, northern pintails, redheads, canvasbacks, and tundra swans. Prairie dogs come home, bringing with them the rain, and bringing with them ferrets, foxes, hawks, eagles, snakes, and badgers. With all of these come meadowlarks and red-winged blackbirds. With all of these come the tall and short grasses. With these come the prairies.

In the time after, the salmon come home, swimming over broken dams to forests that have never forgotten the feeling of millions of fish turning their rivers black and roiling, filling the rivers so full that sunlight does not reach the bottom of even shallow streams. In the time after, the forests remember a feeling they’ve never forgotten, of embracing these fish that are as much a part of these forests as are cedars and spruce and bobcats and bears.

In the time after, the beavers come home, bringing with them caddisflies and dragonflies, bringing with them ponds and pools and wetlands, bringing home frogs, newts, and fish. Beavers build and build, and restore and restore, working hard to unmake the damage that was done, and to remake forests and rivers and streams and marshes into what they once were, into what they need to be, into what they will be again.

In the time after, plants save the world.

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Patagonia is Making a Sustainable Kernza Beer

The first thing that you’ll probably notice about the new beer Long Root Ale is the can; it’s features the iconic label of apparel company Patagonia. That placement immediately begs the question: what is a company known for its clothes, puffy jackets and raingear doing making beer?

At a first glance, one might think that it has to do with the brand’s outdoor ethos; dirtbag climbers sure are a fan of the six pack, and a beer on the river is better than any cosmopolitan happy hour. But in fact, the reasons for Long Root Ale run much deeper. This beer isn’t just for beer enthusiasts; it’s a beer that’s made for making the planet better.

That may sound like a bold statement — and perhaps it is — but in the last few years, Patagonia has been taking the ethic that it has put into clothing and investing it in food. With its food brand, Patagonia Provisions, there is a serious push into making smart investments that help to better the food system.

One of those investments is The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, an organization devoted to breeding perennial grain and seed crops as a part of a larger approach to regenerative organic agriculture. One of those grains is Kernza. The Land Institute has been experimenting with Thinopyrum intermedium, a grass species related to wheat, since 1983.

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