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recent bookmarks from robertogrecoWhere You Are Is Where You Are - by Hadden Turner2024-02-20T19:22:14+00:00
https://overthefield.substack.com/p/where-you-are-is-where-you-are
robertogreco“A couple who make a good marriage, and raise a healthy, morally competent children, are serving the world's future more directly and surely than any political leader, though they never utter a public word. A good farmer who is dealing with the problem of soil erosion on an acre of ground as a sound grasp of that problem and cares more about it and is probably doing more to solve it than any bureaucrat who is talking about it in general. A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.”15"]]>haddenturner 2024 via:daniellucas democracy technocracy wendellberry local national global globalization centralization decentralization scale zoominginandout fulfillment governance government place placemaking community responsibility slow small burden individualism collectivism neighbors neighborliness environment politics distraction farms farming land bureaucracyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c0ce9b2b8f2e/A Website Can Be A Poem w/ Chia - USURPATOR2023-08-22T22:31:52+00:00
https://usurpatormag.com/A-Website-Can-Be-A-Poem-w-Chia
robertogrecousurpator 2023 chiaamisola web online websites webdesign poetry form community internet spaces howweread howwewrite language writing readwriteweb design platforms homegrown attention interruption slow small ambient experience love loving time digital virtual affordances development archives art poeticomputing computing philippines technology sanfrancisco place space agency subversion liberation labor ai artificialintelligence technosolutionism callcenters exploitation outsourcing activism organizing socialmedia sound youtube comments beauty bookmarking archiving collections collecting saving self-preservation preservation stewardship offline collectivism interdependence folkarchives libraries institutions grassroots knowledge tools onlinetoolkit education howwelearn search importance meaning meaningmaking worthiness communities power mutualaid praxis decay digitaldecay data linkrot ownership memory records artifacts gathering belatedness identity performance performativity archiveofonesown tags tagging taxonohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f3b9ce37b7ab/Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age | The New Yorker2022-05-14T19:15:18+00:00
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/28/wendell-berrys-advice-for-a-cataclysmic-age
robertogrecowendellberry slow small farming place radicalism conservatism writing environment ecology agriculture land 2022 dorothywickenden modernity howwewrite poetry books history dan wickenden thomasfriedman alberthoward earlbutz protest resistance community neighborliness neighbors solidarity technology luddism luddites canon bobbieannmason fiction nonfiction tobacco us politics johnberry roberthazel edmcclanahan jamesbakerhall gurneynorman marriage tanyaamyx wallacstegner slavery race racism bellhooks home homes gardening stewardship economics policy monopolies capitalism corporatism corporations humanism school schooling highered highereducation education deschooling unschooling alternative rural roots belonging deracination placemaking cycles cyclical seasons hope present future pollution mining coal appalachia organizing christianity catastrophe climatechange globalwarminghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7e8e47d35401/Making the Ordinary Visible: Interview with Yasar Adanali : Making Futures2018-12-27T03:42:16+00:00
https://www.making-futures.com/interview-with-yasar-adanali/
robertogrecourban urbanism urbanplanning cities maps mapping neighborhoods unschooling deschooling education independence lcproject openstudioproject justice visibility istanbul turkey ethnography inquiry erasure injustice infrastructure socialinfrastructure 2018 rosariotalevi speed scale transformation walking community yasaradanali space placemaking interconnectedness interconnected geography interdisciplinary crossdisciplinary socialjustice architecture design film law legal filmmaking journalism rural engagementhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:34e87694056a/crap futures — Back to nature2017-05-14T21:54:57+00:00
http://crapfutures.tumblr.com/post/160479294104/back-to-nature
robertogrecoThe difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand … embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape. … It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way.
Aside from conversation as usual, the reason we are talking about Berry is the arrival of a new film, Look & See, and a new collection of his writing, The World-Ending Fire, edited by Paul Kingsnorth of Dark Mountain Project fame. Berry and Kingsnorth, along with the economist Kate Raworth, were on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week recently chatting about the coming apocalypse and how it might best be avoided. It is a fascinating interview: you can actually hear Berry’s rocking chair creaking and the crows cawing outside the window of his house in Port Royal, Kentucky.
The normally optimistic Berry agrees somewhat crankily to read ‘the poem that you asked me to read’ on the programme. ‘Sabbaths 1989’ describes roads to the future as going nowhere: ‘roads strung everywhere with humming wire. / Nowhere is there an end except in smoke. / This is the world that we have set on fire.’ Berry admits that this poem is about as gloomy as he gets (‘blessed are / The dead who died before this time began’). For the most part his writing is constructive: forming a sensual response to cold, atomised modernity; advocating for conviviality, community, the commonweal.
Paul Kingsnorth talks compellingly in the same programme about transforming protest into action, although in truth no one walks the walk like Berry. Kingsnorth says: ‘We’re all complicit in the things we oppose’ - and never were truer words spoken, from our iPhones to our energy use. In terms of design practice, there are worse goals than reducing our level of complicity in environmental harm and empty consumerism. Like Berry, Kingsnorth talks about paths and roads. He asks: ‘Why should we destroy an ancient forest to cut twelve minutes off a car journey from London to Southampton? Is that a good deal?’
It’s a fair question. It also illustrates perfectly what Berry was describing in the passage that started this post: the difference between paths that blend and coexist with the local landscape, preserving the knowledge and history of the land, and roads that cut straight through it. These roads are like a destructive and ill-fitting grid imposed from the centre onto the periphery, without attention to the local terrain or ecology or ways of doing things - both literally (in the case of energy) and figuratively.
Another book we read recently, Holloway, describes ancient paths - specifically the ‘holloways’ of South Dorset - in similar terms:
They are landmarks that speak of habit rather than of suddenness. Like creases in the hand, or the wear on the stone sill of a doorstep or stair, they are the result of repeated human actions. Their age chastens without crushing. They relate to other old paths & tracks in the landscape - ways that still connect place to place & person to person.
Holloways are paths sunk deep into the landscape and into the local history. Roads, in contrast, skip over the local - collapsing time as they move us from one place to the next without, as it were, touching the ground. They alienate us in our comfort.
Here in Madeira there are endless footpaths broken through the woods. Still more unique are the levadas, the irrigation channels that run for more than two thousand kilometres back and forth across the island, having been brought to Portugal from antecedents in Moorish aqueduct systems and adapted to the specific terrain and agricultural needs of Madeira starting in the sixteenth century.
Both the pathways through the ancient laurel forests and the centuries-old levadas (which, though engineered, were cut by hand and still follow the contours and logic of the landscape) contrast with the highways and tunnels that represent a newer feat of human engineering since the 1970s. During his controversial though undeniably successful reign from 1978 to 2015 - he was elected President of Madeira a remarkable ten times - Alberto João Jardim oversaw a massive infrastructure program that completely transformed the island. Places that used to be virtually unreachable became accessible by a short drive. His legacy, in part, is a culture of automobile dependency that is second to none. The American highway system inspired by Norman Bel Geddes’ (and General Motors’) Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair almost pales in comparison to Jardim’s vision for the rapid modernisation of Madeira.
But when you walk the diesel-scented streets of the capital, or you drive through the holes bored deep into and out of towering volcanic mountains to reach the airport - and even when you think back in history and imagine those first settlers sitting in their ships as half the island’s forest burned, watching the dense smoke of the fires they lit to make Madeira favourable to human habitation - it’s hard not to think what a catastrophically invasive species are human beings.
Bespoke is a word we use a lot. In our vocabulary bespoke is not about luxury or excess - as it has been co-opted by consumer capitalism to suggest. Instead it is about tailored solutions, fitted to the contours of a particular body or landscape. Wendell Berry insists on the role of aesthetics and proportionality in his approach to environmentalism: the goal is not hillsides covered in rows of ugly solar panels, but an integrated and deep and loving relationship with the land. This insistence on aesthetics relates to the ‘reconfiguring’ principles that inform our newest work. The gravity batteries we’ve been building are an alternative not only to the imposed, top-down infrastructure of the grid, but also to the massive scale of such solutions and our desire to work with the terrain rather than against it.
Naomi Klein talked about renewable energy in these terms in an interview a couple of years ago:
If you go back and look at the way fossil fuels were marketed in the 1700s, when coal was first commercialized with the Watt steam engine, the great promise of coal was that it liberated humans from nature … And that was, it turns out, a lie. We never transcended nature, and that I think is what is so challenging about climate change, not just to capitalism but to our core civilizational myth. Because this is nature going, ‘You thought you were in charge? Actually all that coal you’ve been burning all these years has been building up in the atmosphere and trapping heat, and now comes the response.’ … Renewable energy puts us back in dialog with nature. We have to think about when the wind blows, we have to think about where the sun shines, we cannot pretend that place and space don’t matter. We are back in the world.
In a future post we will talk about the related subject of sustainable agriculture. But speaking of food - the time has come for our toast and coffee.]]>2017 crapfutures wendellberry paths roads madeira bespoke tailoring audiencesofone naomiklein sustainability earth normanbelgeddes albertojoãojardim levadas infrastructure permanence capitalism energy technology technosolutionsism 1969 obstacles destruction habits knowledge place placemaking experience familiarity experientialeducation kateraworth paulkingsnorth darkmountainproject modernity modernism holloways nature landscape cars transportation consumerism consumercapitalism reconfiguration domination atmosphere environment dialog conviviality community commonweal invasivespecies excess humans futurama ecology canon experientiallearninghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a3ce948dacae/Rebuild Foundation2014-07-12T06:30:22+00:00
http://rebuild-foundation.org/
robertogrecochicago art artists theastergates rebuildfoundation revitalization community participatory neighborhoods activism collaboration omaha stlouis place placemakinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c1ff9b433295/Quality of Place + Quality of Opportunity = ArtPlace « Art Works2011-10-29T21:45:44+00:00
http://www.arts.gov/artworks/?p=9493
robertogrecocarolcoletta artplace place local art glvo grants funding economics nationalendowmentforthearts economicdevelopment development lcproject placemaking arts communityhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:931296be993e/A Commitment to the Arts That Will Transform Communities « Art Works2011-10-29T21:45:11+00:00
http://www.arts.gov/artworks/?p=9710
robertogreconea nationalendowmentforthearts artplace fordfoundation 2011 funding grants glvo local place economicdevelopment economics community creativity luisubiñas culture lcproject innovation placemakinghttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4628c8d007c4/ArtPlace2011-10-29T21:44:55+00:00
http://www.artplaceamerica.org/
robertogrecoart nea nationalendowmentforthearts funding grants lcproject place placemaking local livability arts economics glvo community artplacehttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:02e087399347/Local Projects: Change by Us2011-05-30T22:16:21+00:00
http://localprojects.net/project/change-by-us/
robertogrecochange crowdsourcing placemaking social socialnetworking ceosforcities local nyc grassroots activism community civics civicengagement chicago memphis changebyus localprojects sustainability urban urbanism cities urbanplanninghttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fd255458c083/