The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Lexicon of Sustainability

Perennials vs. annuals

Despite how much time I spend posting and commenting on our blog, I rarely explore the internet.  I check the weather, read RSS feeds of over 100 blogs, ask questions of google, visit extension service websites to see what the accepted wisdom is on agricultural issues, and use google image search to identify this and that.  But I don't surf.  I don't watch videos, I don't spend time on facebook, I don't follow people's links.

Fruit mapAnd yet...I just spent the better part of an hour poring over the Lexicon of Sustainability website:

For the past three years Douglas Gayeton and Laura Howard-Gayeton have crisscrossed the USA to learn this new language of sustainability from its foremost practitioners in food and farming.  Alice Waters on edible schoolyards.  Wes Jackson on reinventing wheat farming.  Joel Salatin on embracing the value of saner farming practices.  Vandana Shiva on the global imperative of protecting seeds.  Paul Stamets on how mushrooms can save the world.  Will Allen on Food Security.  Temple Grandin on the humane slaughter of animals.  Farmer John on the revolutionary idea of community-supported agriculture.


The images are stunning --- a mish-mash of photography and words that illustrate many of the agricultural concepts we embrace.  The website is beautiful too, but not very easy to use if you really want to pore over the images.  Instead, you'll need to right click on each image and save it to your desktop so that you can zoom in and really read what the artists/authors have to say.  I've cropped a couple of the images down so that you can read them here, but if you want a time sink, I highly recommend you go check out the rest of the site.

Our chicken waterer keeps our pastured flock healthy with POOP-free water.


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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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We have a winner: Lexicon of Sustainability

The affort to navigate it is unsustainable.

Comment by Roland_Smith Sat Sep 3 09:45:52 2011

It is a shame the way the Lexicon site is designed. There is so much information there but it is overwhelming the way you have to navigate through it. The photography is great but not when you are trying to read the captions. Someone needs to tell these people. For all their efforts they are not helping their audience. Their web designer has poor communication skills!

Comment by Rosann Sat Sep 3 13:25:12 2011

Roland and Rosann --- I know what you mean. Anytime you have to give someone instructions on how to dig information out of a website, that website has failed.

I sound a bit like an old fogey, though, complaining about flashy websites. I know there are people who would complain about our site because of all the photos and ads. :-)

Comment by anna Sat Sep 3 14:16:58 2011





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