• Make Doggerland Great Again

    Two things first drew my eyes to the work of Maxim Peter Griffin when I first encountered him on Twitter: the bold quality of his artwork, and his references to

  • The Wild East

    ‘The landward farms produced not only corn, cattle and sheep but great herds of half-wild horses and ponies with a sprinkling of donkeys. They roamed free as the wind over the wide rough grass marshes bordering the sea-wall. When the day came for them to be rounded up and sent to market at Wickford and…

  • Engage with, Protect, Regenerate and Re-enchant the places where we are 

    My friend Graham Burnett recently posted on Facebook that:

  • Azimuthal Projections, RetroSuburbia & Solarpunk

    Azimuthal Projections is not a progressive rock album but ‘a map projection in which a region of the earth is projected on to a plane tangential to the surface, usually at a pole or the equator.’ I just came across (via Transit Maps) this azimuthal equidistant projection of Columbus, Ohio, USA which is catchily titled:  

  • Where You At Q5: When was the last time a fire burned in your area?

    The fifth question in the Where You At? bioregional quiz is: When was the last time a fire burned in your area? This is one of the quiz questions that reveals its Cascadian/West Coast USA origins. As Carolyn Merchant has noted in Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (1992) the quiz is ‘culture-bound’. I write that because the…

  • Where You At Q4: What was the total rainfall in your area last year?

    The fourth question in the Where You At? bioregional quiz is: What was the total rainfall in your area last year? I think that annual average rainfall in Essex is about 600mm, but I don’t know how recent years have compared to that. The nearest Met Office ‘climate stations’ to me are at Writtle (c.29km away)…

  • Where You At Q3: What soil series are you standing on?

    The third question in the Where You At? bioregional quiz is: What soil series are you standing on? A question to which my first response is ‘soil what?’ An alternate version of the bioregional quiz frames this question as ‘Describe the type of soil around your house.’ which is a bit more approachable. Another version asks ‘Describe the basic…

  • Where You At Q2: How many days til the moon is full?

        The second question in the Where You At? bioregional quiz is: How many days til the moon is full? I’m not sure how good I would be at this calculation generally. I can’t remember seeing the moon lately but then I can’t remember looking at the night sky recently either. Today, Wednesday 11th April 2018, I’m pretty…

  • Where You At Q1: Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap

    The first question in the Where You At? bioregional quiz is: Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap. It’s a seemingly simple query. As a quick first response, I drew what I thought I knew:

  • Where You At?

        A key resource in bioregional thinking is the ‘Where You At? A Bioregional Quiz’, developed by Leonard Charles, Jim Dodge, Lynn Milliman, and Victoria Stockley, which was published in Coevolution Quarterly 32 (Winter 1981). Lightly edited – it posed the reader with these questions: