The Great Golden Swallow Gear Review: Part 4

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A mongoose in the Havahart 1090

Havahart Medium 1-Door Collapsible Easy Set Trap, Model 1090:

Justin:  Great product all-around.  Lightweight, foldable, and easy to set once you’ve learned how to do so.  It’s a solid unit that can take some hits and very rarely did the trap spring by itself.

Garmin Oregon 650 3-Inch Worldwide Handheld GPS with 8MP Digital Camera:

Justin:  Most reliable and intuitive GPS that I’ve ever used.  The touch screen and layout is user-friendly and easy to navigate.  I chose this unit based on reviews that claimed it’s its high-sensitivity, WAAS- and GLONASS-enabled GPS receiver and HotFix® satellite prediction would allow for reliable accuracy, even in deep forest in remote locations.  Sure enough, even under the most dense canopy cover, we were always able to quickly gain satellite reception and an accuracy of 30ft or better.  In less demanding environments, satellite precision was 5ft or less.  The ability to load Continue reading →

Full-Spectrum Farming

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We haven’t met Natasha Bowens but her perspectives on the cultural empowerment of growing one’s own food tell us she’s a kindred spirit.

 Storytelling & Photography

The Color of Food is photographic and documentary in nature because I wanted to capture the personal stories of these farmers while also changing the image of agriculture as it is currently portrayed in the media. This project is not only political in it’s message, but also helps us celebrate and preserve the history, tradition and beautiful culture that make up our agricultural communities.

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Sun, Sense, Sensibility

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In Hawaii, where 12 percent of the homes have solar panels, handling the surplus power is putting pressure on the state’s biggest utility, which is fighting to reduce what it pays for the energy. By Erik Braund and Eugene Yi on Publish Date April 18, 2015. Photo by Kent Nishimura for The New York Times.

In Hawaii, where 12 percent of the homes have solar panels, handling the surplus power is putting pressure on the state’s biggest utility, which is fighting to reduce what it pays for the energy. By Erik Braund and Eugene Yi on Publish Date April 18, 2015. Photo by Kent Nishimura for The New York Times.

Thanks to the New York Times for their ongoing coverage of how we manage to make do on this planet, including in the various well known gardens of Eden:

Solar Power Battle Puts Hawaii at Forefront of Worldwide Changes

By DIANE CARDWELL

…“Hawaii is a postcard from the future,” said Adam Browning, executive director of Vote Solar, a policy and advocacy group based in California.

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Eco-Modernist Strategy

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A dam in Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica, drives a hydroelectric plant. Developing nations will require large amounts of new energy to achieve American and European living standards. Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images

A dam in Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica, drives a hydroelectric plant. Developing nations will require large amounts of new energy to achieve American and European living standards. Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images

We are in the sustainable development camp through and through, but Mr. Porter’s point is well taken:

A Call to Look Past Sustainable Development

Eduardo Porter

The average citizen of Nepal consumes about 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity in a year. Cambodians make do with 160. Bangladeshis are better off, consuming, on average, 260.

Then there is the fridge in your kitchen. A typical 20-cubic-foot refrigerator — Energy Star-certified, to fit our environmentally conscious times — runs through 300 to 600 kilowatt-hours a year.

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Brew-born Time Travel

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Chef Andrew Gerson of Brooklyn Brewery organized a dinner party featuring ingredients used by Dutch settlers and Native Americans living in 1650s New York City. Courtesy of Brooklyn Brewery

Chef Andrew Gerson of Brooklyn Brewery organized a dinner party featuring ingredients used by Dutch settlers and Native Americans living in 1650s New York City. Courtesy of Brooklyn Brewery

Thanks to the folks at the salt, and National Public Radio (USA) for this one:

Brooklyn Brewery Dares Diners To Eat Like Dutch Settlers

HANSI LO WANG

You can find food from just about any part of the world in New York City.

The Brooklyn Brewery is trying to push New Yorkers’ palates even further by going back in time.

This week, it hosted a dinner party inspired by the local cuisine of Dutch settlers and Native Americans in the 1650s.

Back when New York wasn’t even New York yet, and before the English took over in 1664, the Dutch called the city New Amsterdam.

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In The Name Of Chocolate

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The Tamshiyacu plantation in northern Peru where it is alleged a United Cacao subsidiary illegally cleared primary rainforest. Photograph: Environmental Investigation Agency

The Tamshiyacu plantation in northern Peru where it is alleged a United Cacao subsidiary illegally cleared primary rainforest. Photograph: Environmental Investigation Agency

Thanks to the Guardian‘s renewed environmental reporting efforts for this investigative delicacy:

Can Peru stop ‘ethical chocolate’ from destroying the Amazon?

NGOs allege illegal deforestation of primary rainforest to plant cacao and oil palm

David Hill

Cattle-ranching, logging, mining, highways, hydroelectric dam projects, oil and gas, soy, oil palm. . . These are what first come to mind to many people when thinking about how the Amazon is being destroyed, but what about chocolate too?

NGO Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) released a report on 7 April mainly about monoculture oil palm plantations, which it describes as a “major new threat to Peruvian forests.” The report, Deforestation by Definition, focuses on the Romero Group, Peru’s “largest economic actor”, and what it calls the “Melka Group”, a network of 25 companies recently established in Peru and controlled by businessman Dennis Melka, a major player in the destructive oil palm industry in Malaysia.

According to EIA, two “Melka Group” companies have illegally deforested an estimated “nearly 7,000 hectares” of mainly primary rainforest in Peru over the last three years, and others have acquired at least 456 “rural properties” and requested the government set aside another 96,192 hectares.

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So Much Expertise, So Little Time

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Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer With Charlie Rose as moderator, a panel of experts in science, politics, business, economics, and history shared their views during Monday's Presidential Panel on Climate Change at Sanders Theatre. “The challenge of climate change is profound. The risks it poses are dire. Confronting those dangers is among the paramount tasks of our time,” said President Drew Faust in introducing the discussion.

Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer. With Charlie Rose as moderator, a panel of experts in science, politics, business, economics, and history shared their views during Monday’s Presidential Panel on Climate Change at Sanders Theatre. “The challenge of climate change is profound. The risks it poses are dire. Confronting those dangers is among the paramount tasks of our time,” said President Drew Faust in introducing the discussion.

Thanks to the Harvard Gazette, and the panelists who took the stage last week for another in ongoing series of assessments of the urgency of need for action on climate change:

There is hope in global action to fight climate change, in the slow adoption of wind and solar power, in moves by the U.S. government to cut emissions from vehicles and power plants, in the lead taken by some businesses to clean up operations and draw attention to the problem.

But it’s too late to avoid several more degrees of warming by the turn of the next century, too late to completely stave off dramatic melting, and too late to avoid the slow swamping of Pacific island nations, whose thousands of years of history and culture seem certain to be swallowed by rising seas. Continue reading →

Stephan Brusche, Come To Kerala!

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Stephan Brusche (@isteef)

Stephan Brusche (@isteef) From left to right: tiger, WBD, elephant

Hospitality is in our DNA, but we always want to go the extra mile for the those who tickle our creative fancy. In fact, World Banana Day touches us on multiple dimensions, and we thank our newest contributor, Rosanna Abrachan, for bringing it to our attention.

Stephen Brusche is someone who clearly enjoys playing with his food, and scrolling through his gallery it was close to impossible to choose favorites from over 200 fabulously creative examples, crafted with a wink and smile at both the sacred and the profane. We settled on 2 of our iconic Kerala fauna above, but be prepared to lose yourself in the images when you visit his site. Continue reading →

The Great Golden Swallow Gear Review: Part 3

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Seth displaying his catch. Photo by Justin Proctor.

Thermarest Prolite Plus sleeping pad:

Seth: Comfortable and light, these pads kept us insulated and padded even on cement floors, but the compression sack that is supposed to store the pad is far too small. I don’t recommend sleeping on these on a hot, humid day at around noon.

Justin: This is the first thermarest I’ve used in my life. I’ll probably never have to buy another. I slept comfortably on this thermarest every night, whether it was lying on concrete, a tiled floor, or a more forgiving forest floor. I threw out the ludicrously small sack that came with this otherwise good product on the second day.

John: Don’t ask me, I just sleep on an old yoga mat. I should also point out that it took Seth and Justin a few minutes to deflate and roll these up every morning.

 

ExOfficio Men’s Boxer, Curfew, medium: (worn by Seth – see photo)

Seth: These highly expensive pairs of underwear are fast drying, don’t retain bad odors, and are quite breathable. Their only downside is that there’s a bit too much fabric in the seat, so they can be wedgie-prone.

Justin: I think Seth just wanted to beat me on the pricing of luxury undies.

John: What’s underwear?

 

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A One-Sentence Pitch For Vegetarianism

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Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

This pitch has nothing to do with ethical treatment of animals, which of course is a compelling case of its own; and is different from earlier vegetarian pitches we have shared, also compelling. It is suddenly meatless Friday. Thank you for this clear, simple pitch, vox:

California’s devastating drought is focusing attention on the water footprint of various foods — particularly delicious, delicious almonds, which require about a gallon of water each.

But as various analyses show, red meat is far worse than even almonds on this score. It takes almost twice as much water to produce a calorie of beef as it does to create a calorie of almonds. Any discussion of how to eat to best preserve water needs to begin with this sentence: Continue reading →

48 Hours Of Rainforest Fate

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Nikki Burch

Nikki Burch

We have read this in both its original home, and here on vox, and commend it as much as we recommend it:

Glenn Hurowitz sat down for his Thanksgiving meal discouraged. He’d spent 2013 flying halfway around the world to cultivate a fragile relationship with Kuok Khoon Hong, CEO of the world’s largest palm oil corporation, Wilmar. Kuok was the linchpin, Hurowitz believed — a single person who might turn the entire palm oil industry around. Wilmar buys palm oil from 80 percent of the world’s suppliers. If Kuok committed to buying only from farmers who promised not to cut down the rainforest, it would set off a chain reaction that might save hundreds of species from extinction and squelch one of the world’s biggest sources of carbon emissions. But after months of progress, the signals he’d been getting from Kuok were not encouraging. Continue reading →

Tea’s Takeover

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Photo: Milo Inman

Photo: Milo Inman

This is the longest article of its kind on our favored food blog, the salt, on National Public Radio (USA)’s website, but it is worth the read for those inclined to food history; and for those in Raxa Collective’s India operations it goes a long way to explaining those beautifully manicured tea estates in a new light:

Catherine of Braganza was an early celebrity endorser of tea. After she wed Charles II, the fad for tea took off among the British nobility. Kitty Shannon/Corbis/Lebrecht Music & Arts

Catherine of Braganza was an early celebrity endorser of tea. After she wed Charles II, the fad for tea took off among the British nobility. Kitty Shannon/Corbis/Lebrecht Music & Arts

…Tea was practically unknown in Europe until the mid-1600s. But in England, it got an early PR boost from Catherine of Braganza, a celebrity who became its ambassador: The Portuguese royal favored the infusion, and when she married England’s Charles II in 1662, tea became the “it” drink among the British upper classes. But it might have faded as a passing fad if not for another favorite nibble of the nobility: sugar.

In the 1500s and 1600s, sugar was the “object of a sustained vogue in northern Europe,” historian Woodruff Smith wrote in a 1992 paper.

Sugar was expensive

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Totem Lost & Found

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John Barrymore, left, joked that “tribal gods” might “wreak vengeance on the thief.”

John Barrymore, left, joked that “tribal gods” might “wreak vengeance on the thief.” Courtesy Bill Nelson

Read it start to finish in one read:

The Tallest Trophy

A movie star made off with an Alaskan totem pole. Would it ever return home?

By Paige Williams

The predominant natives of southeastern Alaska are the Tlingit—the People of the Tides. They are believed to have settled the Panhandle and the Alexander Archipelago more than ten thousand years ago. The Tlingit (pronounced klink-kit) were hunter-gatherers and traders who typically lived on the coastline, moving between permanent winter villages and summer encampments, where they fished, foraged, and stockpiled food. Continue reading →

The Great Golden Swallow Gear Review: nākd edition

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Given the photo above, perhaps this post would have been better suited to April Fools’ Day. However, since April 1st was the first day we had back in Ithaca, the precise editing required to keep the photo PG-rated would have been rushed and the result would have been, shall we say, sloppy. Although it may seem like a strange way of saying thanks, this post — and especially the header photo — are a token of our great appreciation for the folks at nākd (Nature Balance Foods), particularly for Traci in US operations, who coordinated everything with us! I should clarify that we created the photo above of our own volition and without any explicit sponsorship — it is not a nākd photo shoot, it’s just a naked photo shoot.

On the trail up to Blue Mountain Peak, the highest summit in Jamaica.

We had mentioned long ago that we were receiving lots of nākd bars to help us through our expeditions, and no amount of expressed gratitude can reflect the true value of these snacks to our diet during the past three months. The best part is that we could eat as many as we felt like it since they have no added sugar or artificial ingredients, and are basically just a combination of 1) dates and/or raisins, 2) almonds, cashews, or pecans, and 3) spices or natural flavoring like cocoa powder or coffee.

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Rosario Dawson, When You Come Back To Ghana, Come To Zaina Lodge!

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13dawson-pang-slide-SGMN-tmagHP

t-logo-190We are still a few months away from opening the doors, but every day we see the progress. This post is to share with our Raxa Collective and Zaina Lodge colleagues a welcome love letter from a celebrity who manages to put Ghana in the glossiest pages of the New York Times:

13dawson-pang-slide-GTZL-thumbWide-v2Rosario Dawson’s Adventures in Ghana, Celebrating Women and Her First Clothing Collection

By JEANINE CELESTE PANG

The actress shares with T the friendly faces behind Studio One Eighty Nine — and the many friends she encountered on a recent trip to Africa.