Tale Of Two Souths

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I had the distinct pleasure of dining with a friend at Asha’s restaurant in Atlanta, and of having a discussion with Asha after dinner about our inverted common experience of operating restaurants in these two souths referenced in the title of her new cookbook (she has family in Kerala and I have family in Atlanta, and we both live in one another’s country of birth).

My foodie dinner companion and I thought it would be interesting for Asha to come to Kerala to share her culinary talents in one or more of the kitchens we were in the process of setting up at the time of that dinner a couple years ago. Asha was then, and obviously remains, quite too busy for that. Go, Asha!

Review: An Indian Twist on Southern Cuisine in ‘My Two Souths’

By SARA BONISTEEL

Can the remix be better than the original? It’s something to contemplate while working through the chef Asha Gomez’s debut cookbook, “My Two Souths: Blending the Flavors of India Into a Southern Kitchen,” with Martha Hall Foose. Ingredients make unexpected cameos that often steal the show. Continue reading →

Organic Is A Word Well Suited To Curiosity

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From the Oxford English Dictionary, skipping past the obsolete and rare definitions of the word organic, and picking the ones we find most interesting for our purposes, all of which predate by decades, and even centuries, one of the latest uses of the word organic in the categorization of a method of agriculture:

Belonging to the constitution of an organized whole; structural.

Of or relating to an organized structure compared to a living being.

Of, relating to, or characterized by connection or coordination of parts into a single, harmonious whole; organized; systematic.

Designating a work of art in which the parts seem naturally or necessarily coordinated into the whole; (Archit.) (in the writings of Frank Lloyd Wright) designating a style which attempts to make a unity of a building and its setting and environment; (also, more generally) designating any of various styles in which the character of buildings is more or less reminiscent of a living organism.

Characterized by continuous or natural development; (Business) designating expansion generated by a company’s own resources, as opposed to that resulting from the acquisition of other companies.

We care about these definitions because the word organic comes into our conversations constantly. We have avoided overuse in these pages of this and other words that we care about. But recently this word stands out, worthy of more of our attention. We will use it more, but carefully. A balance is required.

 

Banker, Genius, Good Guy

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Jose Quinonez

Jose Quinonez, 2016 MacArthur Fellow, Mission Asset Fund, San Francisco/CA, Monday, Sept. 12, 2016.

In the years following the sub-prime and related financial crises, bankers got a thorough drubbing in the global imagination. But we have been depending on bankers in all our business and conservation activities all these years and never yet met a bad apple in the bunch. Still, kind of surprised to see a banker chosen for the prestigious awards we follow each year.  This year we are happy to see some extra coverage of the recipients of this award, as the following illustrates:

A Newly Minted MacArthur Genius on the Financially ‘Invisible’

“I wanted to change the world. I didn’t think I was going to do that by being a loan servicer.”

José Quiñonez has spent most of the past decade helping the financially invisible build credit and obtain loans. Continue reading →

Hudson Gardens & Bees

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Beekeepers inspect bee frames at the Hudson Gardens community apiary near Littleton, Colo. Modeled after community gardens, community apiaries allow beekeepers to maintain hives in public spaces — and offer each tips and support. Courtesy of Hudson Gardens

We like what we have been learning about Hudson Gardens:

Beekeepers Benefit From The Hive Mind In Community Apiaries

JODI HELMER

Even though Marca Engman read countless books, watched YouTube videos and took a beekeeping class before installing her first hive in 2012, she knew she’d need help in the field.

“The whole idea of beekeeping was overwhelming,” she recalls. “Every year is different and every hive is different.”

Rather than working a backyard beehive solo, Engman installed her first hive in the community apiary at Hudson Gardens, a nonprofit garden near Littleton, Colo. Continue reading →

Pangolins, Remarkable In More Ways Than One

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More than 1 million wild pangolins have been killed in the last decade. Photograph: Paul Hilton/WCS

We honestly knew little, perhaps nothing, about these creatures until very recently when they were in the news; and they were almost gone before we learned about them. Suddenly, thankfully, pangolins have been given the attention they deserve from the folks (including all of us) who may be able to help them survive as a species:

Pangolins thrown a lifeline at global wildlife summit with total trade ban

World’s most illegally trafficked mammal wins total ban on international trade in all species under the strictest Cites protection possible

Pangolins, the world’s most illegally trafficked mammal, were thrown a lifeline at a global wildlife summit on Wednesday with a total trade ban in all species. Continue reading →

And In Other News Of Justice Related to Native Americans

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A road through the Gila River Indian Community in 2014. The tribe is one of 17 tribal governments the U.S. government announced Monday it had settled lawsuits with, over alleged mismanagement of land and resources. The Washington Post/Getty Images

Justice. Native Americans. Those are normally combined in the same sentence. But today, twice. In addition to the editorial here, we are happy to read the news below. Recognizing a mistake is a good first step. Taking action to fix the mistake is a great next step. Plenty more to be done on this one:

U.S. Government To Pay $492 Million To 17 American Indian Tribes

The U.S. government has agreed to pay a total of $492 million to 17 American Indian tribes for mismanaging natural resources and other tribal assets, according to an attorney who filed most of the suits.

In a joint press release by the Departments of Interior and Justice, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewel said, “Settling these long-standing disputes reflects the Obama Administration’s continued commitment to reconciliation and empowerment for Indian Country.” Continue reading →

Bill McKibben On Oil, Banks & Solidarity With A Just Cause

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screen-shot-2016-09-28-at-2-50-55-pmFighting Big Oil and Big Banks to Save Sacred Lands, Precious Water and Unraveling Climate

Bill McKibben

Most Americans live far from the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline—they won’t be able to visit the encampments on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation where representatives of more than 200 tribes have come together in the most dramatic show of force of this environmental moment. They won’t be able to participate in the daily nonviolent battle along the Missouri River against a $3.7 billion infrastructure project that threatens precious water and myriad sacred sites, not to mention the planet’s unraveling climate. Continue reading →

Extinction As Impetus For Travel?

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We are all used to looking at guidebooks to learn more about a country before we visit – but how often do we stop and think about the things we can’t see there anymore? We’ve created Unknown Tourism, a series of vintage-style travel posters to commemorate some of the wonderful creatures we’ve lost, and are in danger of forgetting.

We try to be glass half full, so we will wait and see where this campaign (click the banner above) is going. I am drawn to anything that raises awareness of the need for conservation. It helps that the illustrations are evocative. Bravo to Expedia UK for thinking outside the box and making it look good.

But a travel company highlighting extinction to encourage travel is certainly going to strike some as problematic. Even there, I say bravo to them for taking a step in an unusual direction, and I hope it leads somewhere meaningful (as opposed to just attractively intriguing). Continue reading →

Hotel As Showroom

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A prototype for a room in the hotel chain that the furniture retailer West Elm plans to launch in Charlotte, North Carolina, and other cities. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY WEST ELM

This article goes on to make a very specific point about the experience of this company, in the state where it is based, which is not so much what caught my attention (more on which below):

Jim Brett, the president of West Elm, the furniture chain that sells what you might call mainstream modern furniture, was looking for the brand’s next act. He didn’t think he’d find it at the mall; West Elm already has more than a hundred stores. Children’s furniture might have been a logical next step, but it is burdened by complex safety regulations. Where else do lots of people sleep and sit? Brett, a frequent traveller, had spent countless nights in sterile, unwelcoming rooms. Hotels seemed like a good opportunity.

Last year, West Elm opened a commercial division for office furniture, and the company is now making furniture for Marriott’s SpringHill Suites hotels. More significantly, West Elm also signed a deal with a partner to open its own branded hotels. Brett and other executives discussed design ideas and scouted locations in mid-tier U.S. cities whose hotel markets seemed underdeveloped. Charlotte, North Carolina, was especially promising. Continue reading →

Veggies Punching Above Their Weight

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PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC HELGAS FOR THE NEW YORKER

When scanning the hard news, feature stories, reviews and profiles we are on the lookout for stories that address any of a group of themes, generally related to better treatment of the planet we live on. We are interested in creative approaches to making better human treatment of the natural world more likely, more palatable, so to speak. After reading this article about magnificent results from modest parcels of land cared for by relatively common folk, we see a parallel theme in this restaurant review; it qualifies:

DINING FOR THE MODERN HERBIVORE

“Vegan” evokes two images: judgment for abstemious virtue or scarcity on meat-centric menus. Neither happens at Ladybird.

By Jiayang Fan

…Of some two dozen tapas, the most successful were the least expected and the most unassuming. The olives and cornichons—perfectly pert, coated in seasoned rice flour and gently fried in chili oil—proved to be the kind of addictive nibblers that make you forget the etiquette of communal dining. Continue reading →

If You Happen To Be In New York City

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SPENCER FINCH LOST MAN CREEK

October 1, 2016 – March 11, 2018

SPENCER FINCH TO CREATE A MINIATURE REDWOOD FOREST IN THE HEART OF DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN

See the website of the exhibit at Public Art Fund for this description and more:

Lost Man Creek is a miniature forest. But rather than growing naturally and of its own accord, this undulating landscape populated by some 4,000 Dawn Redwoods is a recreation. Artist Spencer Finch partnered with the Save the Redwoods League to identify a 790-acre section of the protected Redwood National Park in California. Significantly scaling down the topography and tree canopy heights, he reimagined this corner of the California forest for MetroTech at a 1:100 scale. While the original trees range from 98 to 380 feet – taller than the buildings that surround the plaza – the trees in the installation are just one to four feet in height. Continue reading →

Magnificent Ecological Services From Modest Parcels Of Trees

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Eve Lonnquist examining trees on her property with Logan Sander, a consulting forester. Leah Nash for The New York Times

An excellent article, whose title says it all, in the Science section of the New York Times this week:

How Small Forests Can Help Save the Planet

By ERICA GOODE

BIRKENFELD, Ore. — Eve Lonnquist’s family has owned a forest in the mountains of northwest Oregon since her grandmother bought the land in 1919. Her 95-year-old father still lives on the 157-acre property. And she and her wife often drive up from their home just outside Portland.

But lately, Ms. Lonnquist, 59 and recently retired, has been thinking about the future of her family’s land. Like many small-forest owners, they draw some income from logging and would like to keep doing so. But they would also like to see the forest, with its stands of Douglas fir, alder and cherry, protected from clear-cutting or being sold off to developers. Continue reading →

An Unusual Travelogue

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Publishers’ blurbs are sometimes much better than the sound of the word blurb would imply, and anyway I always trust them more than I could possibly trust Amazon’s tricky sales methods. Reviews in trusted publications are best, but they take much longer to read; this blurb has my attention, especially after pondering two decades of life online:

For Erik Reece, life, at last, was good: he was newly married, gainfully employed, living in a creekside cabin in his beloved Kentucky woods. It sounded, as he describes it, “like a country song with a happy ending.” And yet he was still haunted by a sense that the world–or, more specifically, his country–could be better. He couldn’t ignore his conviction that, in fact, the good ol’ USA was in the midst of great social, environmental, and political crises–that for the first time in our history, we were being swept into a future that had no future. Where did we–here, in the land of Jeffersonian optimism and better tomorrows–go wrong? Continue reading →

Smart Reading, 20 Years On

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screen-shot-2016-09-26-at-10-09-24-amThere is a 5-10 minute read in the upcoming issue of the New Yorker that helps put two decades into a narrow but interesting perspective. 20 years ago I was in the process of moving my family to Costa Rica for a job I had accepted one year earlier. I remember the period described below, which could be considered the transition to life online, as we now know it. Odd to think it was happening just as we moved to a kind of Garden of Eden. Slate has been a part of “life online” ever since. I was mainly drawn to Kinsley, one of the sharpest of thinkers and communicators. He is long, long gone from Slate. But the experiment was fruitful; Slate is alive and well even as the media landscape is oversaturated with copies of copies of copies:

TWENTY YEARS OF SLATE

The digital magazine’s founding editor-in-chief and his successors got together to survey its history and its contributions to online journalism.

By

It’s been twenty years since Michael Kinsley, the former editor of The New Republic, undertook a novel adventure: the creation of a magazine, underwritten by Microsoft, that was to exist primarily in what was then known as “cyberspace.” “There will be efforts to update it, perhaps on a daily basis,” the Times noted, in a report that appeared below the fold on page D1 of its issue of Monday, April 29, 1996, two months before the launch of Slate.

Recently, Kinsley, who was the editor-in-chief of Slate from 1996 until 2002, and his three successors—Jacob Weisberg, David Plotz, and Julia Turner—gathered in Washington, D.C., to record a podcast: a five-way conversation with Josh Levin, the magazine’s executive editor. It was a nostalgic and forgivably self-regarding celebration of what Turner characterized as Slate’s “smarty-pants, curious journalism, opinion, and analysis.” The editors posed, grinning, for a group photo. Continue reading →

Fly-Fishing In The Rockies

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Scott Tarrant is the fly-fishing manager at the Broadmoor resort and hotel in Colorado Springs. Ryan David Brown for The New York Times

We always think we have the best occupations, but occasionally we see what someone else is doing and start having second thoughts. But, as we know, there is a reason why it is called work:

The Curative Power of Water, Waders and a Fly Rod

Vocations As told to PATRICIA R. OLSEN

Scott Tarrant, 46, is manager of fly-fishing at the Broadmoor, a resort and hotel in Colorado Springs. Continue reading →

National Park of the Week: Ruaha National Park, Tanzania

/ Jocelyn Toll / 1 Comment

As Tanzania’s largest national park, Ruaha National Park boasts of untouched and unexplored ecosystems at the center of Tanzania. The 20,226 sq km park is the watershed between the Mzombe and the Great Ruaha rivers, with a distinctive escarpment, above which are large stretches of miombo woodland. Below lie undulating plains of dry bush country to treeless grasslands, swamps and evergreen forests, all with sand rivers intersecting through them. Continue reading →