Especially when building a larger oven, there are some clear earth oven building errors to avoid. (Building an oven is simple, but the truth is that nothing is quite as simple as it may first appear, especially when you build a fire in it.) Heather Coiner of Hat Creek Farm in Virginia (in photo) has generously documented some of the mistakes they made on a commercial-scale oven they built (and used successfully) on their farm -- and which they recently took down after building their next oven -- a full-scale brick oven built by Eric Moshier, of Solid Rock Masonry. Here's the link. It bears . . .
The Value of Water
The thirsty drink water from a bowl made of mountains, hills, and trees... In the rural area where I lived for 20 years -- and throughout Oregon, as well as elsewhere -- "watershed management" has become a common term. Farmers and ranchers compete with urbanites and salmon for water to feed us all. The media call them "water wars," but without water, no one eats and no one "wins." If the salmon lose, we lose too. The issue looms ever larger: climate change, population growth, and an economy on the verge of collapse. Fear makes it hard to manage anything, but we try. Meanwhile, "watershed . . .
Bill Coperthwaite & the Arts of Culture
A review of A Man Apart, Bill Coperthaite's Radical Experiment in Living, by Peter Forbes & Helen Whybrow A Man Apart, Bill Coperthaite's Radical Experiment in Living, by Peter Forbes & Helen Whybrow I met Bill Coperthwaite in 2007. I had recently read his book, A Hand Made Life, and was deeply impressed by his stories and practice, and the way he was trying to live out an answer to questions that, by our denial of them, define our culture: “Can you have ‘culture’ without violence?” “Is beauty useful?” “Are justice, democracy, and peace possible if most all of our . . .