Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

As I mentioned two weeks ago, my sister (ashleighlarratt.com) has been posting lots of great pictures from our childhood on the farm. My memories get jarred a little by these, and it was such a wonderful time and place, so I really enjoy seeing the pictures a lot. Here's one from the late eighties (yes, I made those clothes) of my brother, my sister, and I.

And in the “oh how time repeats itself” department, here's Ashleigh and I doing life drawing of the dogs and cats… It's funny because it might as well be Ari and I. I really, really hope I can stay focussed on getting myself a place in the country before winter comes. It's not going to be easy to achieve.

I know it must all look terribly hill-billy from the outside but I really liked it.

There's a lot of noise in the media right now about the death of bees (see: mobile phones killing bees, etc.) since they're dying out and they pollinate about a third of our food. I'm actually not super worried about that as a North American, because when it comes right down to it, we have more farmland than we know what to do with, and other than the “problem” that we'd have to shift to organic and higher-labor farming (that is, we'd have to do the bees' work).

Either way, my personal feeling is that reconnecting people to the land is a very good thing, and that's what a bee collapse would do — and really, hands-on farming is the “worst case” for a lot of the apocalypses we worry about… if you live in North America anyway, since we're basically a big, uninvadable island with a ton of natural resources and not that many people.

That said, while I'm not too worried about bees because I think they're a problem we can solve ourselves if we have to. I'm far more concerned that the same thing is happening to soil biota.