My apologies to any reader who is already familiar with the subject of farming, its history, and practice. My intended audience is anyone who knows little to nothing about the topic but would like to learn more, including me. In the interest of time and your attention, I am condensing thousands of years of farming history into a few paragraphs, focusing instead on some of the discoveries and events that I stumbled upon during my research. As with some of the other topics I ha

Most estimates put the age of our blue planet at ~4.5 billion years. During this time, it has experienced many cataclysmic events on its way to becoming this place we call home.  Based on current evidence, homo sapiens didn’t show up until all the cataclysmic morphing events had passed, that is, about 300,000 years ago. Put into perspective, this represents ~0.007% of the planet's total lifespan. Our Sun is expected to last around 10 billion years, but life on our planet may

This C02 / Climate Change blog is a bit of a ramble--too big and complex a topic to consider covering in a single blog. So I decided to do a bit of zigzagging as I headed from one "sparkly" fact to another--my goal: help all of us become better informed. As always, your thoughts, comments, and additional sparkly facts are welcome. /November 2024 This election cycle has turned into a perfect storm of culture wars, a polarized electorate sprinkled with a healthy dose of outrig

It has been a remarkable journey out of Africa. Millions of years of weather, geologic turmoil, and contributions from many incredible groups and individuals have brought us to this point. I ran across James Clear's summary of Yuval Noah Harari's book, "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" that succinctly captures where we've been: Human history has been shaped by three major revolutions: the Cognitive Revolution (70,000 years ago), the Agricultural Revolution (10,000 year

Last month's blog ended with a brief mention of the Scientific Revolution and its impact on the Industrial Revolution in the 17th and 18th centuries. I am rehashing what most of us were fed in junior high and high school . If you were paying attention, some of it may have stuck. As for me, the details, the dates, the minutiae, lost. I am taking a meandering path through history, but the underlying context is mining and the raw materials that have profoundly impacted our envi

June 1, 2024: I started out thinking I was going to write about mining, the mining law of 1872, and eventually touch on South32. Well, hehe, I bit off more than I could chew. Consequently, this blog is more of a scattershot touching on various topics that will—hopefully--intersect with the subject of mining.    During my research, I kept trying to ignore the broader context that kept surfacing: Everyone on the planet who orders “stuff” online, or gets in a vehicle to get some

I am finally getting around to writing a follow-up to my Blue Haven blog. The '1950s-60s me' called it "Blue Haven". Eight seventy-three acres of it are now known as The Nature Conservancy's Patagonia-Sonoita Creek Preserve . I've always been curious about the history of the place before there was a Patagonia before there were roads and settlers. I wanted to rewind to the time when the non-indigenous came and claimed it as their own, back then. This is not an in-depth histor

I had originally planned on doing a short blog about the Nature Conservancy in Patagonia. Then curiosity set in and I wanted to learn more about what came before TNC -- way before. So, this has grown into a bigger project and at least two or more blogs. However, in order to meet my self-imposed deadline of January 1, here is a brief introduction. My schoolmates and I always pronounced it "Blue Haven", but the road that borders Sonoita Creek on the west side is "Blue Heaven R