A Savanna Life in a Technological World
These fires are not ‘natural.’ Let me be more precise. When these fires burn through areas with relatively high ecological health, areas that exhibit many of the characteristics of the ancient savannas that once covered the globe, then the fire will not be too […]
People are most confident when they don’t know what they are talking about. Well, maybe they are second most confident when they don’t know what they are talking about. They are most confident after many years of hard trials, new insights applied with persistence and […]
I traded a neighbor, an arborist, a quarter of beef for some tree work. Throwing branches on a fire is a good way to chat and we started talking about our respective businesses. He said he made a conscious decision a long time ago to […]
No one knows the best, most efficient way to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations while still making the average person better off. How do I know? Because no one has ever done it. This includes us eco-grazers, by the way. But it especially includes the central […]
I want to talk about the Green New Deal. But I am going to talk about it through the lens of ditch cleaning in western Oregon agricultural land. That’s what I want to talk about but I feel like I somehow I have to […]
In my ecological education, I have been the student, my mortgage the master. A hard, hard master. Many people in our society have a land relationship like a sexless marriage. No connection. Ships passing in the night. But what about those of us who have […]
We were born into this world with an expectation. Natural selection gave it to us. Our world is very different than the one we expected. This distance is a canyon that gets perceptibly wider and deeper all the time. It grows by sudden big events […]
On the twentieth anniversary of the movie The Matrix, I might have to remind you that the movie was about a main character given a ‘red pill’ that allowed him to see the truth, that humans were controlled by a bunch of robots which created […]
I would never tell someone what they should eat. I consider propaganda of that nature to be intrusive, condescending, and dangerous. Trying to modify someone’s diet is a pernicious form of colonialism, or an abrogation of ones liberty as a free individual. That being said […]
Buddhist teaching says that life is suffering. That overstates the point a little bit (for a good reason) but it is true. Buddhist teaching goes on to say that we suffer because we ‘desire.’ There I disagree. I think there is a much more fundamental […]
This is one family’s attempt to make a life full of savanna in a world dominated by technology. Bent Grass is a collaboration between myself (Nate Chisholm, writing) and Hanna Hart (taking the pictures that led you here in the first place). Together, with our one year old, Abel, we operate under the moniker “Meadows, Brooks, and Groves.”
In the winter, I manage grass-fed cattle in Sonoma County CA. In the summer, we will once again pack up and move cattle to our property on the Oregon Coast. There, we will again slave away for our unrelenting task masters: Meadows, Brooks, and Groves.
With the fires in Ventura County, I think we can call it official; our heavy fuel loads have come home to roost. A week ago I could convince myself, while drinking a beer and listening to rain patter on the roof, that the fires that […]
Friends and Family, The three of us Chisholm-Harts are spending our Thanksgiving eve thinking about what we are grateful for. Obviously all of you are top of mind. We are settling into our temporary digs in Petaluma, Abel is busy practicing his walking and Hanna […]
On Monday the 9th, in the first round of wildfires in Sonoma County, the tiny handmade house that my wife and I have lived in for the last six years burnt to the ground. We were married in the front yard. Our one year old […]