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Guest Article: An Earthen Oven Odyssey by Joe Kennedy

March 29, 2011

I have been making earthen ovens for over twenty years now. I made my first one in 1991 when I was working with architect Nader Khalili at CalEarth in the Mojave Desert. We were making a lot of adobe bricks at the time (friendly Persian-sized ones – 8”x8”x2”) and also building domes of regular fired bricks. I’m not sure what got it into my brain to make an oven, probably an old picture of the ovens at Taos Pueblo. One day I made a round foundation of adobe bricks in a mud mortar bed right on the ground, then hammered a string in the middle and used that as a guide to lay up a . . .

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18 Comments · oven stories, oventek, Tech, the work of art

Terra Preta and “the Biochar Solution”

March 23, 2011

The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change, by Albert Bates A review by Kiko Denzer Living trees lock up carbon, and burning releases it. That’s the conflict-ridden equation of global warming. Albert Bates has been at the front lines of the warming conflict since his 1990 title, Climate in Crisis. In this book, he defines “biochar” as “charred (pyrolized) organic matter intended to be applied to soil in farming or gardening,” and argues that partial burning of waste wood and other carbonaceous matter can effectively “lock up” carbon and store it . . .

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1 Comment · music & more, stories: building, earth, arts, stovetek, Tech, the work of art

Tribal Genealogical Patterns: A Universal Language?

March 18, 2011

[download this pattern as an envelope design here] ’the folk has thus preserved, without understanding, the remains of old traditions that go back sometimes to the indeterminably distant past, to which we can only refer as “prehistoric”…’ Had the folk beliefs not indeed once been understood, we could not now speak of them as metaphysically intelligible, or explain the accuracy of their formulation. Ananda Coomaraswamy, “The Nature of ‘Folklore’ & ‘Popular Art,’” Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society, 27, Bangalore, . . .

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4 Comments · stories: building, earth, arts, the work of art

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