Rambling Historian

first thing you’re gonna need to do is have a normal life as a moderately successful young adult novelist for about eight years. You can pay the rent because you’ve got a partner who also works. That kind of thing. then unexpectedly you’ll need to sell thirty million books in three years.

Then you should have a mental health crisis that is partly born of your need to be liked by strangers and partly due to a total lack of meaning in your life and partly due to bad brain wiring. eventually you’ll need to realize that you didn’t deserve to sell thirty million books but you also don’t deserve the catastrophically bad brain wiring. Deserving, you’ll belatedly realize, is the wrong framework through which to look at the miracle of consciousness.

this crisis of meaning will be no joke. What should you do with your resources—not just all the money they gave you for those books but also the time that remains to you? Eventually you’ll need to decide to that the money and time are only useful if you do something with them. So you try to do that, in part by starting a business that donates its revenue to charity instead of paying you money you don’t need.

it will of course be very easy to lose sight of your good luck because you breathe your privilege like oxygen, but hopefully you are now at least doing the beginning of something with the absurd lottery you won.

You do not understand

Most modern Ag operations don’t even have a proper A-Horizon. They’re too busy turning the earth every time they replant. The A-horizon is the Black Gold that makes Soil Soil. It’s a structurally complex soil horizon that must be built in place by the interactions of Plants and Fungi and Insects. It is The Thing that soaks up rain and holds onto it for plants. The A-Horizon is The Thing that builds up when you let a field sit fallow. The act of tilling creates fecundity by breaking up the A-horizon. On a really good Organic no-till farm you might find an A-horizon between 3-6 inches.

His A-horizon was 4 feet deep. 50 inches.

I-

I have no context. His farm was covered in a living skin thick enough for a child to stand in.

Gives me hope for what we could accomplish if we got our collective heads on straight, you know? Like. This was one guy. A brilliant man, who knew what he was up to, but. The thing about brilliant ideas is they can be shared.

Humus, or Humic Compounds, are a cryptic and poorly understood set of organic substances. As the final metabolic result of once-living things being digested first by macroscopic organisms, and then by microorganisms, they resist most forms of analysis, and have cryptic structures. A few that we have managed to isolate and study are the Humic & Fulvic Acids.

Humus has a number of remarkable tendencies. It is capable of retaining water far better than any raw mineral clay; it also retains electrically charged clay granules, which themselves retain mineral ions, all of which is essential to make a soil a high-quality resource for Plants to grow in.

A composter is a box that contains an environment that is conducive to the production of Humus, but the best way to produce it is in-place, by laying layers of organic material down over an unbroken earth and growing things out of that. The interaction of the plants rooting, the fungus weaving itself through everything, the bacteria and archaea metabolizing as they do, and inorganic weathering forces all combine to gradually build up the microscopic equivalent of a complex megastructure capable of retaining far more water, and containing far more nutrients, than any inorganic substrate.

This stuff is black gold. This is the stuff that determines whether or not a plot of land is going to be “productive.” The knowledge of how to make it, how to care for it, is an essential piece of wisdom that our civilization needs to remember.

Fortunately, folks seem to have the right response:

Farmers are more important to the continuity of civilization than administrators, no matter what the elitists say. This knowledge is important.

The owner of the drone was so impressed by the brilliant attack that he suggested organizing a competition for bringing down “dragons” with short spears next year.

On the seventh day of May in the year of 2016 on hither spot the mighty warrior Ulf hath slain a dragon with his spear.