Being invited to speak on the topic of "Finding Common Ground" is a dream come true for me. I was thrilled when the Ohio Ecological Food...

The glaciers in Glacier National Park are melting. Will the park still be worth visiting and preserving once they're gone? I love...

Although Aldo Leopold feared they were going extinct, sandhill cranes are now a common sight in rural Michigan. I heard them first—that...

Inevitable future catastrophe - or lesson of hope from the past? Environmentalism today is very pessimistic. There’s a constant sense of...

Fertilizer Review magazine called organic farmers "witch doctors" in 1951. When I was teaching an introductory writing class at the...

Raw peach pits and moldy peanuts contain toxic chemicals. But does that mean pesticides are safe? By the 1970s, Americans were bombarded...

One definition of "organic" is "a carbon-containing molecule." But is that the only definition? As I mentioned in my post “How Health...

In the 1970s, organic food was attacked by nutritionists as a dangerous "food fad" Throughout history, most people have wanted to be...

Finally, a book that covers the connection between the counterculture and organic farming! What’s the connection between organic farming...

The Nearings made compost using an all-plant-based version of the Indore Method. Countless members of the counterculture first saw...

Helen and Scott Nearing grew all the vegetables they ate at their Vermont and Maine homesteads--all year round. When Helen and Scott...

Helen and Scott Nearing traded labor with their neighbors to build a sugar house on their Vermont homestead and made a living selling...

I appreciate Hannah Ritchie's optimism, but disagree about whether organic farming can feed the world. I’m always on the lookout for new...

This graph implies that it's impossible to feed the world with organic farming. But what data is it really based on? “Without the...

The Haber-Bosch process of fixing nitrogen produces a lot of fertilizer--but its first application was for weapons. Cut open one of the...

Biological nitrogen fixation fed the world until the end of the nineteenth century. What changed? Is it possible to feed the world’s...

When I was a student at The Ohio State University, I always wondered why Kottman Hall had so few windows. The legacies of the Cold War...

As the Korean Conflict heated up in 1950, farmers were warned about what might happen in a nuclear war. “The crippled plane with its...

On the surface, this just looks like a ranch-style house. But what's underground could destroy civilization. September 29, 2011—Rapid...

Louis Bromfield advertised his Malabar Farm produce as pesticide-free in the 1950s. Thank you to the Ohio Ecological Food and Farming...