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1.6M views · 9.2K reactions | They say a picture is worth a thousand words… but seeing it move again? That’s priceless. ✨

AliveMoment’s AI brings your treasured moments to life—animating smiles, blinks, and subtle movements in seconds. Relive the warmth, the laughter, and the real emotion you thought was gone.

Bring Your Memories Alive | Patricia - Photo Animation Guru

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They say a picture is worth a thousand words… but seeing it move again? That’s priceless. ✨

AliveMoment’s AI brings your treasured moments to life—animating smiles, blinks, and subtle movements in...

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Eptek Art & Culture Centre | PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation

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Meet the Farmer: Chad Mooney | PEI Potatoes

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59K reactions · 2.8K shares | Create a meaningful space in your home✨
Easy to stick, remove, and re-stick. 💕 | Mixtiles

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Create a meaningful space in your home✨
Easy to stick, remove, and re-stick. 💕

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The Island Magazine | PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation

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The Island Magazine, the popular history journal of the Prince Edward Island Museum and Heritage Foundation, invites professional and amateur heritage researchers to submit articles and article proposals. These can cover any topic related to the human and natural heritage of PEI. The Island Magazine is published biannually; recently, we have published one general issue in the spring/summer and a special thematic issue in the fall/winter.

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© 2022 Government of Prince Edward Island

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Outline Sketch Drawing Photo

Free · In‑App Purchases · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.

Colorify - AI Photo to Sketch Drawing Art & Coloring Book Maker Transform any picture into a printable coloring page using the power of AI! Colorify is a fun, creative photo editor that turns your favorite images into beautiful line drawings, pixel art, or sketches - perfect for kids and adults. From family portraits to pet photos, turn memories into artistic masterpieces in seconds! With Colorify, you can easily convert a photo to pencil sketch, create cartoon-style art, or generate unique colour by number pages. Ideal for printing or digital coloring fun, it's your all-in-one coloring book maker and drawing editor - made for everyone. Key Features: * AI-powered photo to sketch conversion * Create your own Color by Number pages * Choose Simple, Detailed, or Pixel Art styles * Add doodles or edit photos with artistic effects * Draw, paint, or print anytime * Safe and ad-free - fun for kids and adults * Premium unlocks HD, advanced styles, and more Perfect for: * Parents & children who love to draw * Teachers, artists & hobbyists * Unique gifts & party activities * Anyone who enjoys sketching, painting, or editing photos To use the Colorify app you must subscribe weekly, monthly, or yearly packages. Subscription prices may vary by location and all subscriptions are automatically renewed. Questions? Visit our Help Center: support@yoyamobile.co Privacy Policy: https://www.yoyamobile.co/privacy-policy Terms and Conditions: https://www.yoyamobile.co/terms-conditions Ready to turn your pictures into printable, personal art? Download Colorify - AI Sketch & Coloring Book Editor today and bring your world to life!

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Colorify: Coloring Book Maker App - App Store

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Download Colorify: Coloring Book Maker by YOYA MOBILE TEKNOLOJI ANONIM SIRKETI on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more apps...

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Prince Edward Island has a long history with the automobile. It is considered to be the first place in all of Canada to have one. And the only province to ban them.

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Ceolas Uibhist | Traditional Music | Dance | Gaelic Courses | Outer Hebrides

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Ceolas Uibhist-Traditional Gaelic, Music courses South Uist

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Traditional Music | Dance | Gaelic Courses | Outer Hebrides

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The Mi’kmaq have called Epekwitk (Prince Edward Island) home for thousands of years, living in harmony with the land and its resources. However, colonization drastically disrupted this way of life, leading to the widespread loss of Mi’kmaq lands, culture, and inherent rights. Treaties, intended to establish peaceful coexistence and shared stewardship, were undermined by colonial ... Read more

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Mi’kmaq Rights

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P.E.I. slang: How to talk like an Islander

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Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.) lost 12.3% of its farmland between 2016 and 2021, At this rate, the island could lose half of its farmland by 2050

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🚗 Discover Souris, PEI: A Scenic 4K Drive Through Coastal Beauty! 🌊📹

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The Getty Makes Nearly 88,000 Art Images Free to Use However You Like

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Since the J. Paul Getty Museum launched its Open Content program back in 2013, we’ve been featuring their efforts to make their vast collection of cultural artifacts freely accessible online.

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A Long Walk on a Small(ish) Island - The Island Walk

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THE NEW YORK TIMES / USA TIMES – September 8, 2023 by Elaine Glusac Never underestimate the difficulty of a flat trail over a great distance. After my first five-hour day following the Island Walk, a new 435-mile trail that rings Prince Edward Island, in Canada’s smallest province, I limped into Points East Coastal Inn …

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#eastportlanelavenderfarm #eastportlane #lavenderfields #lavender #pei | Eastport Lane Lavender Farm

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Research project in P.E.I. potato field confirms the oldtimers were right about manure | CBC News

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It may sound like a no-brainer to Islanders who grew up raising cows and growing potatoes. But new research from Agriculture Canada shows adding a small amount of manure to cover crops can give spuds later planted in the same field a big boost.

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The outdoor gallery: art and the elements in the Outer Hebrides | Art UK

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Discover artworks, explore venues and meet artists. Art UK is the online home for every public collection in the UK. Featuring over 300,000 artworks by over 50,000 artists.

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Explore a captivating collection of Irish history podcasts that weave social history, legendary tales, and revolutionary narratives. Perfect for history enthusiasts, these shows offer a tapestry of forgotten stories, comedic retellings, and insightful discussions. Delve into Ireland's military past, cultural folklore, and immigrant journeys, as historians and storytellers bring to life the rich heritage and vibrant stories of Ireland. A must-listen for anyone eager to uncover Ireland's diverse historical landscape.

Irish History Podcasts

Here are 15 Best Irish History Podcasts worth listening to in 2024

Irish History Podcasters

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15 Best Irish History Podcasts You Must Follow in 2024

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Best Irish History Podcasts. Episodes explore the causes, characters & aftermath of the Irish War of Independence, all aspects of revolutionary Irish history with experts, stories of Ireland's ancient High Kings, daily life through the ages, and more

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No Mow May is a bee conservation movement that has surged in popularity over the last few years, in part, due to its simplicity. To participate, all you need to do is leave your lawn alone in May. This allows lawn flowers to bloom and feed hungry native bees emerging from hibernation when other flowers are scarce.

Native bees (honeybees are European imports) certainly need our help. One in four native bee species in North America is at risk of extinction, partly because of habitat loss. Neatly kept lawns typically provide little food for bees. No Mow May encourages people to understand it doesn't have to be this way. But No Mow May isn't perfect. It has a number of known drawbacks that have people questioning whether it is worth continuing to promote. Here's what you should know before participating, according to experts.

Downsides of No Mow May

Despite No Mow May's popularity, many pollinator experts and scientists are concerned that the movement is oversimplifying things. "No Mow May is a nice hashtag and a great title, but the reality of it is way more complicated than that," says Matthew Shepherd, director of outreach and education at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

Over the last few years, the movement has encountered several criticisms. Specifically, it only provides food for bees for a single month, stresses your lawn by letting grass grow unchecked for an entire month, and not everyone appreciates dandelions and unkempt lawns. Additionally, the original research study that supported the movement was retracted. All these factors have contributed to confusion about whether participating in No Mow May is still beneficial.

Despite these concerns, No Mow May still has value, according to experts. "I'm a big believer that the pursuit of perfection should not be the enemy of good," says Clay Bolt, manager of pollinator conservation at the World Wildlife Fund-US. Shepherd also notes that the Xerces Society continues to promote No Mow May as part of its Bee City USA initiative.

Matthew Shepherd

Upsides of No Mow May

Here are three reasons why experts believe that No Mow May is still worth supporting.

1. Participation is free and easy.

While meadows and prairies provide ideal habitats for bees, they can take a significant amount of time and money to install in a yard. No Mow May is an initiative that people can participate in regardless of their finances or amount of free time, says Bolt. "The entry fee is nothing."

2. Lawn flowers do provide some food for bees.

Lawns hold tremendous potential to help bees, with over 40 million acres of them across the United States, says Shepherd. "We might think of habitat loss and imagine bulldozers and chainsaws, but mowers and leaf blowers are almost as bad," he explains. However, lawns don't have to be ecological deserts.

While the research study on No Mow May was retracted, Shepherd notes that several other studies have underscored the value of lawn flowers in supporting a high diversity of bees. In Massachusetts, 63 plant species and 111 bee species were found in herbicide-free lawns, accounting for more than a quarter of the bee species found in the state. In Minnesota, 56 bee species were collected off white clover growing in city parks. In Kentucky, 37 species of bees were found feeding on dandelions and white clover growing in lawns.

While dandelions often get a bad rap, Bolt notes that "dandelions are better than grass and do provide some food for pollinators." However, both Bolt and Shepherd agree that relying solely on dandelions and other lawn weeds to feed bees for a single month isn't enough. "The endpoint of conservation shouldn't be growing dandelions," says Shepherd.

3. No Mow May sparks conversations about bee conservation.

Both Shepherd and Bolt regard No Mow May as an excellent tool for introducing people to bee conservation and starting conversations on how to transform our lawns into habitat that is more welcoming to wildlife. "The discussions that start between neighbors within communities about what we can do to make these areas better for bees is for us the real benefit of No Mow May," explains Shepherd.

Bolt experienced this impact firsthand in Livingston, Montana where he helped initiate the city's participation of No Mow May in 2021. As interest in the program grew over the following years, the city expanded its bee conservation efforts. Instead of focusing solely on No Mow May, it now more broadly encourages people to plant more native wildflowers, mow less frequently, and reduce pesticide use. People were enthusiastic about No Mow May, says Bolt, and it got more people to think about other ways to help native bees.

Tips for Participating in No Mow May

If you decide to participate in No Mow May this year, here are some tips for making it a positive experience for both you and your neighbors.

Educate your neighbors.

After a few weeks of not mowing, your neighbors will wonder about the long grass. The Xerces Society offers free, print-at-home signs including a kids' version that children can color. This helps the whole family get involved in helping bees. Once your neighbors understand why you're letting your lawn get "weedy," they may even want to participate in No Mow May themselves.

Check your local rules.

Many cities and homeowner associations have regulations that restrict grass height to eight or ten inches. If such rules are enforced in your area, you might get fined if your lawn gets too tall. However, communities that adopt No Mow May will often suspend enforcement of their grass height regulations for participants.

Cut back your lawn gradually.

Lawns can grow pretty shaggy after a month of not mowing. When it's finally time to mow, aim to reduce the height of your grass gradually. The best practice is to only cut off a third of the length of your grass each time you mow. Depending on your grass's height, it could take a few weekends with the mower to get your lawn back to the length you want to maintain.

Consider alternative timing.

While No Mow May is a catchy phrase, depending on your location, "No Mow March" or "No Mow April" might make more sense. The idea is the same: bees emerging in spring need food. So, whatever your climate, refrain from mowing when lawn flowers start blooming.

No Mow May Alternatives

If you like the idea of No Mow May, but don't want such tall grass, you have several alternatives that all stem from the same concept: Simply mow less.

"Low Mow May" has been adopted by numerous communities. To participate in Low Mow May, mow your lawn twice in May instead of weekly. This modified schedule allows lawn flowers to bloom while keeping grass at a more manageable height. Low Mow May is a great option for those in communities with grass height restrictions and where No Mow May has not been adopted.

Another excellent option is " Slow Mow Summer." This initiative encourages residents to increase their mowing height and decrease their mowing frequency throughout the summer to allow lawn flowers to bloom. This approach also provides food for bees all season long instead of just for one month.

Mowing less to help bees is also backed by research. One study found that lawns mowed biweekly attracted more bees than those mowed weekly.

Whether you choose to participate in No Mow May, Low Mow May, or Slow Mow Summer, adopting a less intensive approach to lawn care can help lawn flowers flourish and support bees. If you want to delve further into bee conservation at home, consider delaying spring cleanup, installing a bee lawn or a meadow, providing a bee hotel, or simply planting some native plants in your garden beds. Native bees will thank you.

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Does "No Mow May" Actually Help Pollinators? Here's What Experts Say

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No Mow May has become a popular bee conservation movement but it has several drawbacks. So, is it still worth supporting?

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From shades of grey to vibrant colour, a new book by a UPEI professor gives a bird's eye view of Prince Edward Island's journey to the modern day through aerial photography.

Joshua MacFadyen's Time Flies provides an overview - literally - of P.E.I.'s changing urban, rural and coastal areas between 1935 and 2020.

The book's four chapters blend the aerial photos with historical analysis to show how the Island's communities and ecosystems have changed in those 85 years.

What emerged through the research was a tale of the transportation revolution's effect on our landscape, MacFadyen said.

"From rivers and railways to racetracks and roundabouts, the book is a study of how we get around on P.E.I.," he said. "As we moved pretty quickly to automobile transportation, the rest of the Island's shape pretty quickly followed."

MacFadyen is an associate professor in the applied communication, leadership and culture program at UPEI. He also holds a Canada research chair in geospatial humanities.

Time Flies has been in the works for the past 10 years. Alan MacEachern, a colleague of MacFadyen's at Western University in Ontario, planted the seed of the idea while the two were studying aerial photos for a project involving Prince Edward Island National Park.

The book that sprouted from that seed includes between 40 and 45 photos of sites across the Island as it charts often-surprising changes to the landscape.

"Each one of them looks slightly different, but some of them - even the iconic ones - look very different," MacFadyen said. "Bonshaw Provincial Park and Robinsons Island in P.E.I. National Park, they're almost unrecognizable 85 years later, either from forest regrowth over old farms or from dramatic changes in Robinsons Island when they built the dike on the east end of it."

MacFadyen moved back to Prince Edward Island in 2018, and several of his students at UPEI helped him finish the book.

'It was really poignant'

The final draft was submitted for peer review in 2022, just weeks before post-tropical storm Fiona hit the province. The devastation further highlighted the research MacFadyen had been doing.

"It was really poignant," he said. "I was thinking quite a bit about, 'Are we ready for more events like that?' And I think you'd have to say no."

More and more people started to work in the city than in rural areas. To do that, they paved a lot of the city over and made space for those automobiles.​ - Joshua MacFadyen

Another major theme to emerge from the photographs was an agricultural transition.

While the province is almost evenly split between urban and rural areas today, MacFadyen said the early photos show about 14,000 smaller farms spread across P.E.I. Now there are less than 1,200, mostly larger ones.

Even so, updated environmental protections have led to a greener province as waterways and wetlands are more protected. The newer photos also show a boom in aquaculture, he said, with harbours and rivers becoming littered with buoys.

But the cost of urbanization and modern transportation present some of the more striking images - the photo of Government Pond, for example, mostly paved over to create parking for Charlottetown's provincial government offices at the foot of Kent Street.

MacFadyen explains it's all part of suburban sprawl and people's willingness to move "toward" cities but not quite "into" them.

"It's a legacy of the city's development in a period where people drove farther and farther... from the core of the city," he said.

"More and more people started to work in the city than in rural areas. To do that, they paved a lot of the city over and made space for those automobiles, including paving over Government Pond."

This is the author's third book, which will eventually be accompanied by an interactive website where readers can investigate several aerial photographs from the collection.

MacFadyen gathered most of the images from the National Air Photo Library in Ottawa and the P.E.I. government's own archives.

He thinks the images highlight that the province has needed a land-use plan for a long time. Some communities have disappeared from the maps, while many that remain are rapidly growing without a plan.

All of our decisions have impacts. They change our communities and they change our infrastructure and they change our environment. - Joshua MacFadyen

MacFadyen hopes readers will gain a better understanding of how the Island's landscape has changed, for better or worse, and make informed decisions about how they want the shape of the Island to evolve in the future.

"All of our decisions have impacts. They change our communities and they change our infrastructure and they change our environment," he said.

"We need to make better decisions going forward in a time of climate change, but we also need to demand that our government makes better decisions."

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P.E.I. from above: What a new book tells us about the Island's past and future | CBC News

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From shades of grey to vibrant colour, a UPEI professor's new book gives a bird's eye view of Prince Edward Island's journey to the modern day through aerial photography.

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Current Exhibits Main Floor 2nd Floor 3rd Floor Check out the wide variety of displays the museum has had in the past.

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Prince Edward Island is losing farmland at a dangerous rate, an official with the P.E.I. Federation of Agriculture warns.

The Island will lose half of its farmland by 2050 if more action is not taken to preserve it, executive director Donald Killorn said before the province's Standing Committee on Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability on Thursday.

"This is Prince Edward Island's most valuable natural resource," Killorn said. "What we have here, how we produce economic impact, is with the land."

The province lost 12.3 per cent of its farmland between 2016 and 2021, the federation of agriculture said.

Killorn said that between those years, the volume of farmland fell from 260,000 hectares to just over 200,000 - a rate seen only once before, during the 1970s.

Farmland loss has "dramatic" spinoffs on the province's economy because of its impact on farm production and the facilities processing the product created, he said.

Killorn said that large processors like Cavendish Farms, Amalgamated Dairies Limited and Atlantic Beef Products require a certain level of raw product to stay in business.

"Maintaining farmland isn't just about ensuring that our farmers have enough land, but it's about ensuring that our economic impact remains what it is," he said.

"If we don't protect it, we will see significant drops in the economic performance of the province."

The continued success of the tourism industry also hinges on how farmers maintain their land, Killorn said. He said that when tourists see rolling green fields and pastures filled with livestock it's a "big part" of their experience on the Island.

Maintaining agricultural land also plays a role in taking care of the environment. Killorn said the province's net-zero emission and biodiversity goals are dependent on farmers implementing best practices on their lands.

"When we lose farmland, we lose those environmental co-benefits."

Federation suggests moratorium

The federation said subdivisions and development often drive farmland loss. It said adopting a subdivision development moratorium in areas without an official land-use plan could curb losses until a provincial plan is created.

Farmers have previously told CBC News residential and commercial development has put them in a hard position, saying they have less land to work with and that farmland has grown way more expensive.

"For a beef farmer to justify paying that amount for an acre of land, it doesn't really make any sense. It kind of puts the beef farmer at a disadvantage," Dennis Hogan, chair of the P.E.I. Cattle Producers Association, said back in February.

"Some of this land is being turned into subdivisions, and they obviously can pay more money for that land because there's more profit in selling it for a house lot than growing crops to feed cattle on it."

We think the provincial government should be the one making decisions. - Donald Killorn, P.E.I. Federation of Agriculture

The provincial government is still working on an official P.E.I. land-use plan. The federation said it would like provincial authorities to have decision-making power on how forests and farmlands are used.

"Farmland isn't something that just benefits a municipality," Killorn said. "It's a very important economic driver for the whole province. And as such, we think the provincial government should be the one making decisions."

A plan like this would grow municipalities by disincentivizing development outside of municipal boundaries, Killorn said, adding there is a "serious long-term cost" to the rural-residential sprawl.

Killorn says creating denser and more populated municipalities is "the only way our province can accommodate 200,000 Islanders alongside a thriving agricultural industry."

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P.E.I. on track to lose half its farmland by 2050, says federation of agriculture | CBC News

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Officials with the federation told provincial MLAs population growth and lower taxes in rural areas have led to too much development outside municipalities, cutting into farmland.

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In 1994, four years before the opening of Te Papa, Samoan novelist and scholar Albert Wendt was an advisor for the planned Pacific exhibitions. He requested that we abandon the use of terms like 'traditional art' in our labels and display signage. 'Traditional means nothing to me!' he said. At the time, I didn't understand what he was talking about.
I had gone through university learning about traditional societies. As a person of Samoan descent, I was used to hearing about our traditional culture and customs. As a museum worker, I talked about traditional cultures all the time.

However, Wendt was asking us, as Pacific people and museum workers to decolonise the language we use in our exhibitions. In his view, the word 'traditional' as used in categories such as 'traditional arts' and 'traditional practices' was the vocabulary of Western ways of writing about and cataloguing indigenous peoples.

We in museums had bought into it, and our communities had internalised it.

Later, in an interview I had with him in 2008 he explained his position to me in more detail:

'I came to feel very uncomfortable with terms such as traditional, folk history, folk art...Colonial scholars and researchers used them whenever they referred to us but not to their cultures. Such terms I concluded were part and parcel of the Euro-centric colonial vocabulary. Traditional inferred our cultures were /are so tradition-bound they were static and slow to change; that they weren't dynamic and growing and changing; that because they were slow to change and fixed in history they were 'simple and easy to understand.' Traditional also had implications about how we were viewed as people even to the extent that, because we were tradition bound, we behaved out of habit and past practice and [were] slow to adapt to other ways or change our own ways, that we didn't want to think for ourselves, or were incapable of individual thinking and expression.'

Towards a New Oceania

This year, marks 40 years since Wendt first published these ideas in his inspiring essay Towards a New Oceania. It was 1976, and a formative period for Pacific literature, new art forms, and their developing markets.

In his essay, he argued, 'Any real understanding of ourselves and our existing cultures calls for an attempt to understand colonialism and what it did and is still doing to us.'

Wendt challenged the idea of 'traditional cultures' and cultural essentialisms, criticising corruption and the use of 'tradition' by our political and cultural leaders.

He argued that, 'There is no state of cultural purity (or perfect state of cultural goodness),' and warned of stagnation, 'an invitation for a culture to choke in its own bloody odour, juices, and excreta.'

He reminded us, 'No culture is ever static and can be preserved . . . like a stuffed gorilla in a museum' (Wendt 1976, 58, 53, 52).

He asked a series of questions that are as relevant today as they were 40 years ago:

(a) Is there such a creature as traditional culture?

(b) If there is, what period in the growth of a culture is to be called traditional?

(c) If traditional cultures do exist in Oceania, to what extent are they colonial creations?

(d) What is authentic culture?

(e) Is the differentiation we make between the culture(s) of our urban areas (meaning foreign) and those of our rural areas (meaning traditional) a valid one? . . .

(f) Why is it that the most vocal exponents of preserving our true cultures live in our towns and pursue life-styles which, in their own terminology, are alien and unpure?

(g) Are some of us advocating the preservation of our cultures not for ourselves but for our brothers, the rural masses, and by doing this ensure the maintenance of a status quo in which we enjoy privileged positions?

(h) Should there be ONE sanctified/ official/ sacred interpretation of one's culture? And who should do this interpreting? (Wendt 1976, 52; italics in original)

In his request to the Pacific staff at Te Papa, Wendt was challenging us to decolonise our curatorial practice. To take care with the concepts and language we used in our representation of Pacific peoples.

However, Wendt's questions around tradition are not purely academic or relevant only to museums.

Pacific artists, painters, sculptors, choreographers, dancers, composers, tattooists, and even orators have struggled with the 'traditional' in 'traditional Pacific arts' and the limits it places on their practices.

In 2016, Wendt's call to understand colonialism and its historical and contemporary implications continues to provide a current of urgency in our work for Pacific Cultures at Te Papa.

This year, Te Papa returned a sacred 'ahu'ula (cloak) to Hawaii on long term loan, developed new collections of works from artists in Guåhan, and appointed a Curator of Pacific Art - the first position of its kind in an institution in New Zealand.

These kinds of activities are the decolonising mechanisms through which museums can remember the past, document the present, and secure the future of the communities they represent.

For your inspiration Albert Wendt, fa'afetai tele!

References:

Albert Wendt (1976) Towards a New Oceania. Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature ( January) 1 (1): 49-60. Reprinted most recently in The Arnold Anthology of Post-colonial Literatures in English, edited by John Thieme, 641-651. London: Edward Arnold, 1996.
Relevant links: Albert Wendt's Critical and Creative Legacy in Oceania: An Introduction Albert Wendt Biography
This content of this blog first appeared in the article Against Tradition by Sean Mallon (PDF, 90 KB)

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Opinion: why we should beware of the word 'traditional' | Te Papa's Blog

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In 1994, four years before the opening of Te Papa, Samoan novelist and scholar Albert Wendt was an advisor for the planned Pacific exhibitions. He requested that we abandon the use of terms like 'traditional art' in our labels and display signage. 'Traditional means nothing to me!' he said.

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Shaping Epekwitk’s Future | As we’ve strengthened our bonds as Epekwitnewaq Mi’kmaq, we’ve also made real progress towards a bright future. Have a look! | By L'nuey PEI - Facebook

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As we’ve strengthened our bonds as Epekwitnewaq Mi’kmaq, we’ve also made real progress towards a bright future. Have a look!

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Genetic mapping reveals ancestry between Ireland & Scotland

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Ireland and Scotland's common ancestry has been revealed in the findings of a recent genetic mapping project that spans Great Britain and Ireland.

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Festival showcases 1970s Hebridean film archive

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Footage shot by a community education project features as part of the Hebrides International Film Festival.

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Contemporary Name: Morell River 
Mi’kmaq Name: Puku’samkek Sipu 
Pronunciation: Boo-goo-sahm-geg see-boo 
Mi’kmaq meaning: At the place in the river,... | By L'nuey PEI | Facebook

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Contemporary Name: Morell River 
Mi’kmaq Name: Puku’samkek Sipu 
Pronunciation: Boo-goo-sahm-geg see-boo 
Mi’kmaq meaning: At the place in the river,...

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The impact Viking and Norman DNA had on the Irish

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A study carried out by researchers at Trinity College Dublin shows that Viking and Norman DNA may have had more of an impact on the Irish than previously considered. New genetic clusters in Ireland were discovered, leading to the belief that we may have far more Viking and Norman ancestry than previously evidenced.

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Earles Picture Restoration Prince Edward Island

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Georges-Antoine Belcourt had the first automobile in Canada 
and it was from Prince Edward Island in 1869 or so,it ran on steam
Another piece of evidence as to the existence of the vehicle and that...

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Irish language's centuries-old roots explored in new DNA study

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A DNA expert's research has suggested that the Irish language can trace its roots to the arrival of settlers from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe in Eastern Europe around 4,500 years ago.

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Top movies about The Troubles in Northern Ireland

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Some of the greatest and biggest box office actors have played roles in films relating to the era of The Troubles in Northern Ireland.

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Siobhán McSweeney is currently to be seen in the Disney+ superhero comedy Extraordinary. Now, with Finding Brigid (RTÉ One, Tuesday, 10.15pm, and available to stream on RTÉ Player), she is back home celebrating a very Irish superhero: St Brigid, whom she praises as a "kick-ass warrior poet and goddess".

Few people have described St Patrick as kick-ass. Which is probably why Brigid has come to be regarded as a sort of Celtic Wonder Woman to St Patrick's Shamrock Superman. Where Patrick is sadly synonymous with kitsch, rain-whipped parades and Americans wishing you a Happy St Patty's Day, Brigid is feminine and mysterious.

She embodies a side of Irishness the rest of the world doesn't know about and isn't interested in. She is both ethereal and wild, familiar and unknowable. And she has also just given us an extra day off, in the form of the new February bank holiday. No wonder we can't stop blabbing about Brigid.

[ St Brigid's Day: Events celebrating our matron saint and Irish women around Ireland and the world ]

McSweeney roves far and wide in her quest to discover the true identity of Ireland's warrior nun. In Dundalk she's delighted to see a mural that captures the dual aspects of Brigid, the Christian saint and the Celtic shield maiden.

Her mission to understand Brigid then takes her to Galway, where she sits in a stone circle with a group of women with a special interest in the saint.

They include the broadcaster Mary Kennedy, who grew up close to St Brigid's Well in Clondalkin in Dublin and is the co-author of a book on Brigid. "I did feel that by researching and by writing about Brigid I got more of a sense of me as a woman, as an Irish woman, as a woman with Celtic roots and a confidence," she says.

McSweeney also meets the former president Mary McAleese, who says that the reclamation of Brigid as feminist icon is long overdue. Brigid's legacy has been distorted by misogyny, she believes.

The new public holiday, she adds, is not just in Brigid's honour. "It's in honour of that whole tribe of people, going back generations, who insisted that her story be told, because it was worth the telling and worth remembering ... what we owe her."

A pagan priestess is of course going to attract an eclectic fan base. In Glastonbury, the English town now better known for the music festival held nearby but also long famous for the area's links to Arthurian legend, McSweeney meets a group of Druidic cosplayers who hum and sway through the streets and who, in doing so, veer on Paddy's Day kitsch.

And she meets a lawyer turned priestess, Marion Brigantia, who sees Brigid as a manifestation of the natural world. "The goddess tradition is all about the reclaiming of our wild selves, of our really primordial connection with the land ... and as a goddess, I think, Brigid is very powerful."

These are esoteric waters, and it would be easy to become lost in New Age psychobabble. But McSweeney never loses sight of dry land: her portrait of a saint reborn for a new Ireland is both heartfelt and illuminating.
Finding Brigid is available to stream on RTÉ Player

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St Brigid the 'kick-ass warrior poet and goddess': Siobhán McSweeney finds a very Irish superhero

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Siobhán McSweeney is currently to be seen in the Disney+ superhero comedy Extraordinary. Now, with Finding Brigid (RTÉ One, Tuesday, 10.15pm, and available to stream on RTÉ Player), she is back home celebrating a very Irish superhero: St Brigid, whom she praises as a "kick-ass warrior poet and goddess".

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The eight sacred Celtic holidays of the year

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There are eight special sacred days, holidays, and festivals in Ireland that date back to the old Celtic world.

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Scottish folklore

The Will-o'-the-Wisp

The will o' the wisp (called in Gaelic Teine biorach = sharp fire) is said to be of quite modern appearance, at least in South Uist. It was first seen, it is said, in 1812, and is the haunting spirit of a young girl from Benbecula, who frequented the machair, or sandy plain beside the sea, in search of the galium verum, used in the dyeing of the local cloth or tweed. Her sin was that of seeking to get an undue share of a product which should have been equally divided for the common good, and which has at all times to be husbanded as one of the plants which bind the sandy soil together where it has been redeemed from the sea.

There is, however, another story as to the origin of the jack o' lantern. The haunting spirit is that of a blacksmith, who could get no admittance even into hell. He was very cold, and begged for a single ember to warm himself, and at last one was given him, and he has gone shivering about with it ever since.

A special interest of this story is that it tells against the common Hebridean tradition of a cold hell, a tradition one soon learns to accept in South Uist, the land of cold mist and sweeping winds, and damp, and drafts, and rain, where even the nether regions with a fire in them have a suggestion of comfort. Hell is therefore discouragingly known as "the place of the wind of the cold passages, or the wind of the cold channels."

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Good and bad luck signs from Irish folklore

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From four-leafed shamrocks to a whistling woman - superstitions found in old Irish folklore that'll give you pause for thought. A look at the traditional ancient good and back luck signs that pop up in ancient Irish folklore.

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Scottish clan system

Scottish clan (from Gaelic clann, literally 'children', more broadly 'kindred' is a kinship group among the Scottish people. Clans give a sense of shared identity and descent to members, and in modern times have an official structure recognised by the Court of the Lord Lyon, which regulates Scottish heraldry and coats of arms. Most clans have their own tartan patterns, usually dating from the 19th century, which members may incorporate into kilts or other clothing.

The modern image of clans, each with their own tartan and specific land, was promulgated by the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott after influence by others. Historically, tartan designs were associated with Lowland and Highland districts whose weavers tended to produce cloth patterns favoured in those districts. By process of social evolution, it followed that the clans/families prominent in a particular district would wear the tartan of that district, and it was but a short step for that community to become identified by it.

Many clans have their own clan chief; those that do not are known as armigerous clans. Clans generally identify with geographical areas originally controlled by their founders, sometimes with an ancestral castle and clan gatherings, which form a regular part of the social scene. The most notable clan event of recent times was The Gathering 2009 in Edinburgh, which attracted at least 47,000 participants from around the world.

It is a common misconception that every person who bears a clan's name is a lineal descendant of the chiefs.Many clansmen, although not related to the chief, took the chief's surname as their own to either show solidarity, or to obtain basic protection or for much needed sustenance. Most of the followers of the clan were tenants, who supplied labour to the clan leaders. Contrary to popular belief, the ordinary clansmen rarely had any blood tie of kinship with the clan chiefs, but they sometimes took the chief's surname as their own when surnames came into common use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, by the eighteenth century the myth had arisen that the whole clan was descended from one ancestor, perhaps relying on Scottish Gaelic clann originally having a primary sense of 'children' or 'offspring'.

Many clans have often claimed mythological founders that reinforced their status and gave a romantic and glorified notion of their origins.Most powerful clans gave themselves origins based on Irish mythology. For example, there have been claims that the Clan Donald were descended from either Conn, a second-century king of Ulster, or Cuchulainn, the legendary hero of Ulster.Whilst their political enemies the Clan Campbell have claimed as their progenitor Diarmaid the Boar, who was rooted in the Fingalian or Fenian Cycle.

On the other hand, the Clans Mackinnon and Gregor claimed ancestry from the Siol Alpin family, who descend from Alpin, father of Kenneth MacAlpin, who united the Scottish kingdom in 843.Only one confederation of clans, which included the Clan Sweeney, Clan Lamont, Clan MacLea, Clan MacLachlan and Clan MacNeill, can trace their ancestry back to the fifth century Niall of the Nine Hostages, High King of Ireland.

However, in reality, the progenitors of clans can rarely be authenticated further back than the 11th century, and a continuity of lineage in most cases cannot be found until the 13th or 14th centuries.

The emergence of clans had more to do with political turmoil than ethnicity.The Scottish Crown's conquest of Argyll and the Outer Hebrides from the Norsemen in the 13th century, which followed on from the pacification of the Mormaer of Moray and the northern rebellions of the 12th and 13th centuries, created the opportunity for war lords to impose their dominance over local families who accepted their protection. These warrior chiefs can largely be categorized as Celtic; however, their origins range from Gaelic to Norse-Gaelic and British.By the 14th century, there had been further influx of kindreds whose ethnicity ranged from Norman or Anglo-Norman and Flemish, such as the Clan Cameron, Clan Fraser, Clan Menzies, Clan Chisholm and Clan Grant.

During the Wars of Scottish Independence, feudal tenures were introduced by Robert the Bruce, to harness and control the prowess of clans by the award of charters for land in order to gain support in the national cause against the English. For example, the Clan MacDonald were elevated above the Clan MacDougall, two clans who shared a common descent from a great Norse-Gaelic warlord named Somerled of the 12th century.Clanship was thus not only a strong tie of local kinship but also of feudalism to the Scottish Crown. It is this feudal component, reinforced by Scots law, that separates Scottish clanship from the tribalism that is found in aboriginal groups in Australasia, Africa, and the Americas.

During the 1638 to 1651 Wars of the Three Kingdoms, all sides were 'Royalist', in the sense of a shared belief monarchy was divinely inspired. The choice of whether to support Charles I, or the Covenanter government, was largely driven by disputes within the Scottish elite. In 1639, Covenanter politician Argyll, head of Clan Campbell, was given a commission of 'fire and sword', which he used to seize MacDonald territories in Lochaber, and those held by Clan Ogilvy in Angus.As a result, both clans supported Montrose's Royalist campaign of 1644-1645, in hopes of regaining them.

When Charles II regained the throne in 1660, the Rescissory Act 1661 restored bishops to the Church of Scotland. This was supported by many chiefs since it suited the hierarchical clan structure and encouraged obedience to authority. Both Charles and his brother James VII used Highland levies, known as the "Highland Host", to control Campbell-dominated areas in the South-West and suppress the 1685 Argyll's Rising. By 1680, it is estimated there were fewer than 16,000 Catholics in Scotland, confined to parts of the aristocracy and Gaelic-speaking clans in the Highlands and Islands.

When James was deposed in the November 1688 Glorious Revolution, choice of sides was largely opportunistic. The Presbyterian Macleans backed the Jacobites to regain territories in Mull lost to the Campbells in the 1670s; the Catholic Keppoch MacDonalds tried to sack the pro-Jacobite town of Inverness, and were bought off only after Dundee intervened.

Highland involvement in the Jacobite risings was the result of their remoteness, and the feudal clan system which required tenants to provide military service. Historian Frank McLynn identifies seven primary drivers in Jacobitism, support for the Stuarts being the least important; a large percentage of Jacobite support in 1745 Rising came from Lowlanders who opposed the 1707 Union, and members of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

In 1745, the majority of clan leaders advised Prince Charles to return to France, including MacDonald of Sleat and Norman MacLeod. By arriving without French military support, they felt Charles failed to keep his commitments, while it is also suggested Sleat and MacLeod were vulnerable to government sanctions due to their involvement in illegally selling tenants into indentured servitude.

Enough were persuaded, but the choice was rarely simple; Donald Cameron of Lochiel committed himself only after he was provided "security for the full value of his estate should the rising prove abortive," while MacLeod and Sleat helped Charles escape after Culloden.

In 1493, James IV confiscated the Lordship of the Isles from the MacDonalds. This destabilised the region, while links between the Scottish MacDonalds and Irish MacDonnells meant unrest in one country often spilled into the other. James VI took various measures to deal with the resulting instability, including the 1587 'Slaughter under trust' law, later used in the 1692 Glencoe Massacre. To prevent endemic feuding, it required disputes to be settled by the Crown, specifically murder committed in 'cold-blood', once articles of surrender had been agreed, or hospitality accepted.Its first recorded use was in 1588, when Lachlan Maclean was prosecuted for the murder of his new stepfather, John MacDonald, and 17 other members of the MacDonald wedding party.

Other measures had limited impact; imposing financial sureties on landowners for the good behaviour of their tenants often failed, as many were not regarded as the clan chief. The 1603 Union of the Crowns coincided with the end of the Anglo-Irish Nine Years' War, followed by land confiscations in 1608. Previously the most Gaelic part of Ireland, the Plantation of Ulster tried to ensure stability in Western Scotland by importing Scots and English Protestants. This process was often supported by the original owners; in 1607 Sir Randall MacDonnell settled 300 Presbyterian Scots families on his land in Antrim.

This ended the Irish practice of using Highland gallowglass, or mercenaries, while the 1609 Statutes of Iona imposed a range of measures on clan chiefs, designed to integrate them into the Scottish landed classes. Whilst there is debate over their practical effect, they were an influential force on clan elites in the long term.

Intended to weaken or eliminate the use of Gaelic language and customs, the Statutes obliged clan chiefs to reside in Edinburgh, and have their heirs educated in the English-speaking Lowlands.Since the Highlands were a largely non-cash economy, this meant they shifted towards commercial exploitation of their lands, rather than managing them as part of a social system. The resulting chronic indebtedness eventually led to the sale of many of the great Highland estates in the late 18th and early 19th century.

During the 18th century, in an effort to increase the income from their estates, clan chiefs started to restrict the ability of tacksmen to sublet. This meant more of the rent paid by those actually farming the land went to the landowner. The result, though, was the removal of this layer of clan society. In a process that accelerated from the 1770s onward, by the early 19th century the tacksman had become a rare component of society. Historian T. M. Devine describes "the displacement of this class as one of the clearest demonstrations of the death of the old Gaelic society." Many tacksmen, as well as the wealthier farmers (who were tired of repeated rent increases) chose to emigrate. This could be taken as resistance to the changes in the Highland agricultural economy, as the introduction of agricultural improvement gave rise to the Highland clearances.The loss of this middle tier of Highland society represented not only a flight of capital from Gaeldom, but also a loss of entrepreneurial energy. The first major step in the clearances was the decision of the Dukes of Argyll to put tacks (or leases) of farms and townships up for auction. This began with Campbell property in Kintyre in the 1710s and spread after 1737 to all their holdings. This action as a commercial landlord, letting land to the highest bidder, was a clear breach of the principle of dùthchas.

The Jacobite rising of 1745 used to be described as the pivotal event in the demise in clanship. There is no doubt that the aftermath of the uprising saw savage punitive expeditions against clans that had supported the Jacobites, and legislative attempts to demolish clan culture. However, the emphasis of historians now is on the conversion of chiefs into landlords in a slow transition over a long period. The successive Jacobite rebellions, in the view of T.M. Devine, simply paused the process of change whilst the military aspects of clans regained temporary importance; the apparent surge in social change after the '45 was merely a process of catching up with the financial pressures that gave rise to landlordism.The various pieces of legislation that followed Culloden included the Heritable Jurisdictions Act which extinguished the right of chiefs to hold courts and transferred this role to the judiciary. The traditional loyalties of clansmen were probably unaffected by this. There is also doubt about any real effect from the banning of Highland dress (which was repealed in 1782 anyway).

The Highland Clearances saw further actions by clan chiefs to raise more money from their lands. In the first phase of clearance, when agricultural improvement was introduced, many of the peasant farmers were evicted and resettled in newly created crofting communities, usually in coastal areas. The small size of the crofts were intended to force the tenants to work in other industries, such as fishing or the kelp industry. With a shortage of work, the numbers of Highlanders who became seasonal migrants to the Lowlands increased. This gave an advantage in speaking English, as the "language of work". It was found that when the Gaelic Schools Society started teaching basic literacy in Gaelic in the early decades of the 19th century, there was an increase in literacy in English. This paradox may be explained by the annual report of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) in 1829, which stated: "so ignorant are the parents that it is difficult to convince them that it can be any benefit to their children to learn Gaelic, though they are all anxious ... to have them taught English".

The second phase of the Highland clearances affected overpopulated crofting communities which were no longer able to support themselves due to famine and/or collapse of the industries on which they relied. "Assisted passages" were provided to destitute tenants by landlords who found this cheaper than continued cycles of famine relief to those in substantial rent arrears. This applied particularly to the Western Highlands and the Hebrides. Many Highland estates were no longer owned by clan chiefs,[a] but landlords of both the new and old type encouraged the emigration of destitute tenants to Canada and, later, to Australia. The clearances were followed by a period of even greater emigration, which continued (with a brief lull for the First World War) up to the start of the Great Depression.

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The Irish are known for their gift of the gab. From matters of the heart to thoughtful advice and stirred encouragement, these Irish proverbs, phrases and quotes from famous Irishmen will move you.

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Inside the Hedge Schools of Ireland (#722) - A Letter from Ireland

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We take a trip inside the “Hedge Schools” of Ireland - places of learning that were dotted around Ireland right up to the mid-1800s.

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WATCH: This Tyrone singer’s ancient Irish ballads will give you chills

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Dàibhidh Stiùbhard from Co Tyrone chats about his passion for his Irish heritage and how it inspires his blossoming music career.

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The Uist Unearthed project allows people to use their phones to see what Iron Age structures would have looked like thousands of years ago.

Visitors are now able take a trip back in time to see a new perspective at the island's most important archaeological sites.

One of the app creators, Dr Emily Gal, from the University of the Highlands and Islands Outer Hebrides, said: "We were really inspired by the archaeology and the landscapes we've got here in Uist.

"We have loads of fantastic sites and they are very well known in archaeological circles, but not by the wider public, visitors or local community.

"In addition to that, we don't have many upstanding remains - it's all lumps and bumps in the landscape and not much in the way of physical interpretation.

"That led us to explore some new digital techniques like augmented reality."

The Uist Unearthed app was created by archaeologists from Lews Castle College UHI and supported by Western Isles Council.

It's already proving popular with visitors keen to see the landscape in a new light.

Dr Gal said: "We already know that archaeology can have huge benefits for people's social life, for the economy and for things for people to do.

"We have the existing Hebridean Way Trail infrastructure here in Uist and this enhances that by offering an additional thing to do, for people to get out an explore these landscapes.

"What's really important is that these reconstructions are only available at the sites, so you have to be here to see them."

Two new North Uist sites - Dun Torquil and Dun an Sticir - are being added to the app later this year.

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Uist Unearthed: Western Isles history brought to life with new app

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The Uist Unearthed project allows people to use their phones to see what Iron Age structures would have looked like thousands of years ago. Visitors are now able take a trip back in time to see a new perspective at the island's most important archaeological sites.

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Why people in P.E.I. inhale to say 'yes?' | Why do Islanders inhale to say yes? It probably comes from the Vikings. www.cbc.ca/1.3463465 | By CBC Prince Edward Island | Facebook

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54K views, 215 likes, 10 loves, 72 comments, 431 shares, Facebook Watch Videos from CBC Prince Edward Island: Why do Islanders inhale to say yes? It probably comes from the Vikings. www.cbc.ca/1.3463465

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The evolution of St. Patrick’s Day - why we celebrate

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St. Patrick’s Day is just around the corner and we hope you’re looking forward to it as much as we are.

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WATCH: Heartwarming interview captures the wonder of real Irish storytelling

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From village dances to dead donkeys, a Sligo man shares his stories of growing up in rural Ireland. StoryTracks scratches behind the surface and shares the authentic stories of Ireland, in this case, the incredible storytelling of Andy Hegarty.

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Rate of farmland loss on P.E.I. more than triples | CBC News

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The loss of farmland on P.E.I. is accelerating at a rate not seen in 50 years — and farmers fear there’s not enough being done to rein in the rapid changes.

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Eliza Knockwood in a Two Spirit Mi'kmaq filmmaker living and working out of Epekwitk (also known as Prince Edward Island, Canada) started in the broadcast television industry at the young age of nineteen. Within a year she became the production coordinator on a television series and held that role for three years.

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Earles Picture Restoration Prince Edward Island

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An Interesting Video Clip of How Time Marches Onward Into the Future on Prince Edward Island and California U.S.A. | By Earles Picture Restoration Prince Edward Island | Facebook

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5.7K views, 109 likes, 12 loves, 12 comments, 47 shares, Facebook Watch Videos from Earles Picture Restoration Prince Edward Island: An Interesting Video Clip of How Time Marches Onward Into the...

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This short film uses photographs from various public and private collections, interwoven with the memories of islanders who lived at the turn of the century, to tell the ...

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This film offers a look at Canada's smallest province, Prince Edward Island. Known worldwide for its potatoes, the islanders are expert lobster fishermen as well as world leaders ...

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This short fictional film features the picturesque seaside landscape of Prince Edward Island as the setting for a summer romance between a girl from Winnipeg and a young ...

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The Irish language, also known as Gaelic or Gaelige, is a Celtic language that has a rich and fascinating history. The origins of the Irish language can be traced back to the 4th century AD, when it evolved from a common Celtic language spoken by the ancient Celts who lived in Ireland.

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"Scots speakers, especially from the heartlands where I come from, 'modulate' in and out of the dense Scots depending on who they are speaking to," he added. "The historian Billy Kay has described Scots as a 'language spoken in private by consenting adults.' "

"Unlike Gaelic, Scots is a low status language, partly because it has no standardized spelling," Gilbert observed. "Sir Walter Scott, the so-called champion of Scotland put Scots into the mouths of the 'lower orders' in his novels, keeping standard English for the main characters."

"When I was educated at first in the 1950s, you could be punished physically for using Scots in class and especially to the teacher - it was considered 'impudent' " he continued. "But you could win prizes for reciting the poetry of Robert Burns, much of which of course is in a form of Scots."

"We are at the tail-end of an education period that started in the 18th century that had the implicit message that you had to speak 'English' to 'get on' " Gilbert said. "Things are changing and Scots is now recognizably part of our heritage."

Indeed, in 2010, the Scottish Government began making a proactive effort to revitalize the Scots language. These efforts include developing a national Scots language policy and educational curriculum, for which Scotland provided around £400,000 in funding.

The country's 2011 census included a question on the Scots language for the first time. 1.5 million people reported that they could speak Scots and 1.9 million reported that they could speak, read, write or understand Scots.

People Are Culture's interviews and stories offer a free valuable resource to teachers looking for meaningful material for their culture lesson plans.

Changes in Attitude Toward the Gaelic Language

In 2005, the Scottish Parliament passed the Gaelic Language Act, seeking to secure the status of Gaelic as an official language of Scotland commanding equal respect to the English language.

Yet in 2020, research by a University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) team of Gaelic experts and socio-linguists found that only 11,000 Scottish people living in the country's island communities were regular Gaelic speakers. These latest figures reflect a downward trend; in the 1980s, the number of native speakers fell below 80%.

Donalda McComb grew up being discouraged from speaking her native tongue-Gaelic. Today she is the head teacher (akin to principal in the U.S. education system) of the Glasgow Gaelic School, which is one of a number of schools in which the curriculum is taught in Gaelic. I asked her about the popular view of Gaelic when she was a youngster.

"I grew up on South Uist and I was the third oldest from a family of nine," she said. "Gaelic was our first language and we lived on a croft - small farm- in a Gaelic speaking community. We had our own hens, sheep and cows. We grew our own vegetables and also cut peat for fuel. It was not an easy life and although we were probably poor in financial terms we did not know it."

"When my youngest brother went to school in the early 70's he went speaking English as by then we had a television which highlights the influence of the media on languages and in this case the decline," she continued. "Even at that time there were certain areas on South Uist that were identified as Gaelic communities and others that were not. Within Education the message was that learning in English would equip you for the modern world and what use would Gaelic do for you."

"At the age of 16 in order to progress to higher education I had to move to the Isle of Lewis and stay in a hostel," she explained. "From then, two years later I went to Glasgow to complete my teacher training. I returned to South Uist four years later and taught in a local bilingual Primary school for two years before returning to the mainland."

"The two years in South Uist set me on the Gaelic medium education path and I became one of the first teachers in a new Gaelic medium unit in Bishopbriggs called Meadowburn on the outskirts of Glasgow," Dr. MComb recalled. "I taught in Meadowburn for 10 years until I became the Headteacher of the first stand-alone Gaelic Medium Primary school. Six years later in 2006 this campus opened and I have been the Headteacher at Sgoil Ghàidhlig Ghlaschu since then."

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The Movement to Increase Numbers of Gaelic Speakers

A total of 58,652 people speak Gaelic in Scotland today according to the last Census, and more than half of them live in the Western Isles and the West Highlands. There has been a steady decline in the number of Gaelic speakers in Scotland in the last hundred years. There were 230,806 Gaelic speakers in Scotland in 1901 according to the Census.

But a growing movement in support of revitalizing the use of Gaelic in Scotland seems to be gaining momentum. According to the 2012 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey conducted by Soillse, an inter-university Gaelic language research project, 76% of people saw the Gaelic Language as being an important part of Scottish heritage.

Perhaps not surprising when you consider the country was named for early Gaelic-speaking settlers known as the Scotti.

Starting Them Young

The number of youngsters speaking Gaelic is now increasing due to the rapid growth of Gaelic schools across Scotland. Children living in 28 of the 32 Scottish Local Authority areas have access to Gaelic primary education.

Since opening in 1999, Glasgow Gaelic School has flourished.

"Our school has a combined roll of over 600 pupils," said Dr. McComb. "We provide a broad curriculum with many cultural, academic and sporting opportunities. Pupils in the primary have the opportunity to learn violin, fiddle, chanter/bagpipes and the clarsach. They go through an audition process for this. All pupils sing and perform in various school and local national events. The school has a junior and senior choir."

Dr. McComb said pupils at all levels of the school participate in the local and national Mod, which is the main festival of Scottish Gaelic literature, song, arts and culture, and one of the more notable cultural festivals in Scotland. The school has a Gaelic arts development officer who promotes, organizes and generates funding for Gaelic arts/culture.

Interestingly, Dr. McComb told me that 60-70% of students do not have a Gaelic connection, but are drawn to the school by word-of-mouth, attracted by its community ethos.

Those who have some familiarity with Gaelic may have fluent speaking parents or grandparents. Many families who moved to the city for work did not teach their children Gaelic as there was a perception that it would not benefit them. Many of these parents express disappointment and are committed to introducing it to their own children.

"There is a perception that the parents of the students are all either doctors or BBC employees, which is not true," asid Dr. McComb. "There is a wide range of backgrounds including religious that span from Glasgow's East End to the West End. The West End is considered to be the leafy suburbs with the majority of the residents being affluent professional people. The East End is an area considered to be built up estates with high unemployment and poverty."

The "Immersion Phase"

She explained that the nursery and primary operates an immersion phase where the language and the work of the class is solely in the Gaelic language.

"The majority of teaching staff are fluent Gaelic speakers but we have some staff in the Secondary who are developing their language skills and some who do not speak Gaelic," she noted. "This situation is due to the curriculum we offer and the lack of Gaelic speaking staff in particular subjects e.g. computing, chemistry, home economics etc."

Scottish Languages Offer Opportunities for Bilingualism

In addition to preserving a piece of Scotland's cultural heritage, Dr. McComb is a firm believer that bilingualism offers many benefits. The school's motto is "Two Languages, Two Cultures, Many Opportunities."

"We are preparing the students for a world with fast paced technology and we have to carefully balance the Gaelic culture and language and the requirements for this," said Dr. McComb. "Our motto is apt as it expressed the importance of having two languages, or three or four, the exposure to other cultures and the many opportunities that underpin the ethos of our school."

"Bilingualism has many benefits but generally it provides the young people with two windows on the world," she observed. "Speaking two languages increases their cognitive abilities, informs them of a culture that they may not have encountered or experienced before, broadens their choice of future careers and increases their economic opportunities."

The three languages of Scotland reflect the country's rich and diverse heritage. The current level of interest in the revival of Scots and Gaelic will soon be revealed. In March of 2022 the Scottish Government began conducting a new census that will include examining public attitudes about the the country's indigenous languages.
More Stories on Scottish People

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"Scots speakers, especially from the heartlands where I come from, 'modulate' in and out of the dense Scots depending on who they are speaking to," he added. "The historian Billy Kay has described Scots as a 'language spoken in private by consenting adults.'

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If you're looking to purchase a lobster fleet - licence, boat and gear - it may cost you more than you think.

There's a range, and the price depends on the harbour where the person selling the fleet has been fishing. For example, the price could be higher if it's being bought from a harbour that's seen higher lobster catches.

Mark Hackett is a broker who works with people looking to buy and sell fishing licences, boats and gear, such as traps.

He recently retired after 50 years of fishing for lobster out of Seacow Pond in western P.E.I.

Hackett said these are the highest prices he's ever seen - up to $1.8 million in some cases.

"I never ever thought they'd be as high as they are now. It could start dropping, or it could go higher. I have no idea. Seems like there's no downturn yet. It could drop right down, depending on the interest rate," he said.

It was different when Hackett got into the fishery.

Catches and prices going up

"Back when I started back in the early 80s, they [licences] were 25 grand back then. But there was no money being made. If you didn't have something else to do, you'd never survive because the catches weren't there and the price wasn't there," he said.

"Now the catches are going up, the price is going up, it's driving the price of licences up ... just supply and demand."

Hackett said sometimes people will give their family members a break on the price. But not always.

He said it's a busy time of year for him, with four deals ready to be done by the end of the month. In an average year, he'd make eight transactions for lobster fleets.

Hackett said not just anyone can be approved by DFO to own a lobster licence. He said you need two years' experience lobster fishing, for at least five weeks a year. And there's paperwork that can take months - something a broker like himself can help with.

Charlie MacGeoghegan said he started fishing on his own 23 years ago.

He said back then a lobster licence in lobster fishing area 26a on P.E.I.'s south side cost around $225,000. In retrospect, MacGeoghegan said he wishes he'd bought his a fishing licence earlier, when it was about half as much.

It's great for the guys who are retiring ... but it makes it hard for the young guys getting into the fishery. - Charlie MacGeoghegan

He said the current price is good for some, but not others.

"It's great for the guys who are retiring. It's a lot better for them but it makes it hard for the young guys getting into the fishery as well," he said.

"Any of the young fishermen getting in have to really look at their accounting very close to see what their fuel bills are going to be and what their bait bill is going be. And there's fixed costs like hired help and insurance and things like that," said MacGeoghegan.

"So they have to factor all that in and then be able to take a wage out of it and put their loan over 20 years and see if it makes sense or not. In some cases it does and other cases it doesn't, so that's kind of where things are at right now."

He said on P.E.I. when someone buys a lobster fleet, they usually stay in the harbour where the licence was purchased.

"Some harbours put harbour freezes in ... some harbours were getting a lot of boats congregating at their harbour and just the physical harbour didn't have room for more boats in a lot of cases," he said.

"And it keeps a lot more peace on the water if you just keep it where it was. Typically that's the way it works, is you buy a licence in a certain harbour and you fish it there."

Interest rates may determine the future

MacGeoghegan said it's hard to say what will happen in the future. His best advice for someone looking to get in?

"I guess I would say what some of the older fishermen told me when I was getting out of high school. They said if you really enjoy fishing and you know that that's what you want to do in the end, then you just gotta make a decision," he said.

He said they told him waiting five or 10 years wasn't going to help him. MacGeoghegan said, it turns out they were right.

"But at the same time, you want to make a sound financial decision.... You gotta run the numbers too and make sure that it works and right now with interest rates and the cost of licences, doing those numbers and making sure they're right is more important than ever."

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Looking to get into lobster fishing? You'll need deep pockets | CBC News

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If you're looking to purchase a lobster fleet - licence, boat and gear - it may cost you more than you think. There's a range, and the price depends on the harbour where the person selling the fleet has been fishing.

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A novel about a P.E. I. lobster fisher who has an existential crisis.

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What's in a name? Well, if it's a Western surname, it likely originated from a trade, a place name, relationship, a physical characteristic, or a nickname/moniker. A lot of the basics of this Fire of Learning video won't likely be new to you, but the origins of some of the surnames might.
Image: Screengrab

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A look at the meaning and origins of Western surnames | Boing Boing

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https://youtu.be/xT6ixR1doQg What's in a name? Well, if it's a Western surname, it likely originated from a trade, a place name, relationship, a physical characteristic, or a nickname/moniker. A lot of the basics of this Fire of Learning video won't likely be new to you, but the origins of some of the surnames might.

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The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere

Paulette F.C. Steeves

University of Nebraska Press (2021)

Well into The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, Paulette Steeves wearily observes: "Disagreements between archeologists over the peopling of the Americas have been so fierce that the field has been described as a battleground and an archeological badlands."

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A battlefield might be a strange place to find Steeves: she is a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Healing and Reconciliation, as well as an associate professor of sociology, at Algoma University. Of Cree-Métis ancestry, she is a force to be reckoned with on any academic battlefield.

Steeves argues, on good evidence, that Indigenous peoples are not just recent Asian immigrants, but peoples long and deeply entangled in what we call the Americas. Both they and their lands transformed one another thousands of years before the Europeans belatedly stumbled in. In that sense, they have indeed been here "forever."

Yet many archeologists refuse to believe it and reject or ignore the evidence. Worse yet, they discourage research that might prove them wrong. American archeology is indeed both a battlefield and a badlands.

Anthropologists and archeologists began the scientific study of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas in the 19th century. They started from the premise that those peoples were literally moribund, doomed to disappear as European settlers overwhelmed them. Science could record the death pangs of Indigenous cultures, but little more. And those cultures certainly couldn't provide anything that might enrich settler cultures.

Of course it was a European science, asking European questions and demanding European standards of evidence. And consciously or not, its purpose was to assert European superiority over the benighted peoples it studied.
Racist foundations
One of the key questions was how long the Indigenous peoples had been in the Americas. In 1912 Aleš Hrdlička, head curator of the Smithsonian's United States National Museum, said they must have migrated from Asia no earlier than 3,000 years ago. Given the diversity of the peoples, their languages, and their ways of life, this was a deeply stupid theory soon demolished by evidence. In the 1920s, archeologists began to find a distinctive kind of arrowhead known as a Clovis point all across North America. These points were eventually carbon-dated to about 11,500 years ago.

The new "Clovis First" theory, which I was taught in school, was that Asian hunters had crossed over to North America during the most recent glacial period, when sea levels were much lower. Then they spread south via an ice-free corridor east of the Rockies into the rest of the continent. They lived as big-game hunters using Clovis points on their spears. (They were also presumed to have driven most big mammals like horses and dire wolves into extinction).

I also learned the "diffusion" theory: that some Indigenous peoples had actually been civilized by white culture-bringers long before Columbus. Thor Heyerdahl argued that a pale-skinned people from North Africa had crossed the Atlantic in reed boats, founding the great civilizations of Peru, before then sailing west on balsa-wood rafts to populate Polynesia. Others thought the Phoenicians had arrived in Mexico and civilized the Olmecs, Maya and Toltecs.

Of course such ideas were not only wrong, but racist. They assumed that Indigenous peoples, however long they'd been in the Western Hemisphere, had been too stupid and ignorant to build civilizations like those in Mexico and Peru.

Archeologists also had an ulterior motive in defining Indigenous peoples as new and unenterprising arrivals. If they were recent immigrants from Asia and hadn't even "developed" the place, European conquest looked less like the armed robbery it was.
Migration both ways
Steeves builds her counter-arguments slowly and carefully. She notes that countless animals had migrated both ways between Alaska and Siberia for over a million years. Yet somehow humans, the most mobile of the primates, had stayed in Africa and Eurasia.

As Steeves puts it, "any two-legged or four-legged mammal could have migrated east to west or west to east over what we know today as the Bering land area during the Pleistocene" - that is, long before the Clovis hunters.

They may not even have arrived on foot. The ancestors of Indigenous peoples in Australia had the skills to build seagoing vessels at least 60,000 years ago, and their cousins in northeast Asia could also have paddled along the shores of Asia to Alaska and beyond.

A few very old sites are accepted, notably Monte Verde in Chile which is demonstrably 33,000 years old. But Steeves reports on sites that are dangerously old. One, near Puebla, Mexico, held bones butchered by stone tools. The bones have been dated to 250,000 to 275,000 years ago. The Calico site in California's Mojave Desert, studied by British archeologist Louis Leakey, dates back as far as 200,000 years; the Cerutti Mastodon site, approximately 275 kilometres southwest of Calico, has been dated to 130,000 years ago.

Steeves cites the research on these and scores of other very old sites, and lists them in her online Indigenous Paleolithic Database of the Americas. She doesn't argue that they make an open-and-shut case for very early humans in the Western Hemisphere. But given the implications of those dates, they certainly deserve more research.

Yet archeology is a conservative field where money is scarce for "controversial" projects.
Decolonizing both sites and names
Much of the conservatism is in the very language of archeology. "Paleolithic" is a term applied to the Eastern Hemisphere; the earliest inhabitants here are lumped together as "Paleoindians," part of the "Amerindian" populations going back to Clovis.

But such terms derive from European names, and misnomers like "Indians." Even place names are mostly European, as Steeves keeps reminding us by using expressions like "the area known today as Ellesmere Island." She prefers "Western Hemisphere" instead of "the Americas."

Steeves writes: "Eurocentrically framed histories of Indigenous people represent a body of work that strips the landscape of diverse Indigenous identities, languages and cultures."

Similarly, the field defines evidence in European terms alone, ignoring Indigenous Oral Traditions. This is a mistake, and Steeves brings in oral accounts as legitimate evidence - for example, of early human contacts with now-extinct species like the mammoth. Such stories are generally dismissed as mere folklore and myth.
The case for Indigenous Oral Tradition
But we now know that preliterate Indigenous peoples in the Americas were capable of projects like the Poverty Point earthworks in Louisiana that were built over centuries by peoples from all over the Mississippi basin. Some Indigenous peoples were experts in horticulture and mariculture. Farming peoples designed stone calendars designed to tell them when to plant and harvest corn.

Underlying those achievements were peoples whose communication skills and memories must have far exceeded ours. They needed the skills of science: powers of observation, the ability to think inductively and deductively, to calculate, and to argue for their findings. They needed to hold all their information in their heads, and then to pass it on to others in correct detail - for centuries. Indigenous teaching must have been dramatically superior to ours as well.

"Indigenous peoples tell stories of the past and present," Steeves writes, "of a vibrant world in which all things have life and are respected. Oral Traditions are not merely stories or histories. They are living intergenerational experiences of respectful cohabitation, where humans considered themselves to be only one of many beings in a sacred landscape.... To interpret Oral Tradition requires more than a Native informant. It requires academics to step outside the colonial mainframe and become open to understanding other realities, to surrender their authority, power and preconceived notions of 'others.'"

Europeans destroyed most of that hard-won, carefully preserved tradition, and dismissed the rest as savage superstition. Then, in five centuries, they burned through the resources that had sustained Indigenous peoples for 25,000 (or 250,000) years.

Steeves's book is intended for her colleagues, challenging them to learn and apply Indigenous science as well as their own to learn the true history of this hemisphere's peoples. If they take up that challenge, we will all be the better for it.

I would like to see her and other Indigenous archeologists bring their science to a wider audience through less technical books and articles. Once we all understand how long the lands we call the Americas have been inhabited, we will be eager to fund more archeological digs. We could also learn about how ancient peoples lived and flourished in different climates and ecosystems, and learn how to do the same. As we transform our understanding of the lands, the lands will transform us as well.

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canada research chair in healing and reconciliation

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the indigenous paleolithic of the western hemisphere book

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Indigenous People Have Been Here Forever. Why Won't Archeologists Believe It? | The Tyee

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The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere Paulette F.C. Steeves University of Nebraska Press (2021) Well into The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, Paulette Steeves wearily observes: "Disagreements between archeologists over the peopling of the Americas have been so fierce that the field has been described as a battleground and an archeological badlands."

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Eltuek (el-du-eg) is a Mi'kmaw word that means "We are making (it) together." The (it) refers to whatever it is (we) decide to make - art, ideas, music, community, social change. Eltuek Arts Centre is accessible, inclusive, and continuous.

Eltuek Arts Centre is in Sydney, Unama'ki (Cape Breton Island). Eltuek features artist studios, Open Studio for shared artist workspaces, gallery and exhibition spaces, the Better Bite Café and Meals on Wheels, Nova Scotia Community College Music Arts Program, Celtic Colours International Festival, NovaStream, and The Coast 89.7 FM Radio Station.

Our private studios are currently at capacity. Please contact us at eltuek@newdawn.ca to be added to the waitlist. We will be opening more desk workspaces in the Open Studio in 2022.

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A contemporary space. A creative community to inspire artists, residents, and visitors. Artist-led and artist-focused. - Eltuek Arts Centre

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Eltuek (el-du-eg) is a Mi'kmaw word that means "We are making (it) together." The (it) refers to whatever it is (we) decide to make - art, ideas, music, community, social change. Eltuek Arts Centre is accessible, inclusive, and continuous. Eltuek Arts Centre is in Sydney, Unama'ki (Cape Breton Island).

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Saving Glenaladale | Mainstreet PEI with Matt Rainnie | Live Radio | CBC Listen

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The Glenaladale Heritage Trust is set to host a 10-day celebration in Tracadie Cross that will see the official opening of the Glenaladale Estate to the Public. It features a concert series, workshops, highland games... and the screening of a new documentary called Saving Glenaladale.

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Its sting hurts a lot, but if they were to disappear, it would hurt much more.

The Earthwatch Institute concluded in the last debate of the Royal Geographical Society of London, that bees are the most important living being on the planet, however, scientists have also made an announcement: Bees have already entered into extinction risk.

Bees around the world have disappeared up to 90% according to recent studies, the reasons are different depending on the region, but among the main reasons are massive deforestation, lack of safe places for nests, lack of flowers, use of uncontrolled pesticides, changes in soil, among others.

WHY HAVE BEES BEEN DECLARED AS THE MOST VALUABLE LIVING BEING ON OUR PLANET?

The Apiculture Entrepreneurship Center of the Universidad Mayor (CeapiMayor) and the Apiculture Corporation of Chile (Cach) with the support of the Foundation for Agrarian Innovation (FIA), conducted a study where it was determined that bees are the only living being that it is not a carrier of any type of pathogen, regardless of whether it is a fungus, a virus or a bacterium.

The agriculture of the world depends on 70% of these insects, to put it more clearly and directly, we could say that 70 of 100 foods are intervened in favor of bees.

Also, the pollination that the bees make allows the plants to reproduce, of which millions of animals feed, without them, the fauna would soon begin to disappear.

The honey produced by bees, not only serves as food but also provides many benefits to our health and our skin.

"According to a quote attributed to Albert Einstein, If the bees disappear, humans would have 4 years to live."

WHAT ARE THE REASONS AND HYPOTHESES ATTRIBUTED TO THE EARLY DISAPPEARANCE OF BEES?

The Federal Institute of Technology of Switzerland proposes a theory that blames the waves produced thanks to mobile telephony. They explain that these waves emitted during calls are capable of disorienting bees, causing them to lose their sense of direction and therefore their life is put in danger.

The researcher and biologist Daniel Favre, along with other researchers, made 83 experiments that show that bees in the presence of these waves produce a noise ten times higher than usual, behavior that has been observed to make it known to other bees They are in danger and it is important to leave the hive.

Undoubtedly, the greatest reason for its disappearance is attributed to the constant fumigation of crops, an example of this is what happens in Colombia since during the last three years 34% of bees with agro toxins have died of poisoning.

ARE THERE SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM?

There are indeed solutions, the problem is that it is very difficult to carry them out, because there are very entrenched practices in production and agriculture.

However, three solutions are proposed with the hope that they can be done in a short time:

1. Prohibit, not reduce, the use of toxic pesticides.

2. Promote completely natural agricultural alternatives.

3. Perform constant research and monitoring of the health, welfare, and conservation of bees.

This is an example of the problem that is being experienced with bees and the urgency of creating changes in our management of resources, says Luciano Grisales, representative to the Chamber of Commerce of Colombia.

It is of vital importance to establish the strategic nature of the protection and repopulation of bees and other pollinators since not doing so in 10 years would not be counted on bees in Colombia. This would lead to a food catastrophe and a health crisis in the country. - Luciano expressed to Sustainable Week.

Its sting hurts a lot, but if they were to disappear, it would hurt much more.

The Earthwatch Institute concluded in the last debate of the Royal Geographical Society of London, that bees are the most important living being on the planet, however, scientists have also made an announcement: Bees have already entered into extinction risk.

Bees around the world have disappeared up to 90% according to recent studies, the reasons are different depending on the region, but among the main reasons are massive deforestation, lack of safe places for nests, lack of flowers, use of uncontrolled pesticides, changes in soil, among others.

WHY HAVE BEES BEEN DECLARED AS THE MOST VALUABLE LIVING BEING ON OUR PLANET?

The Apiculture Entrepreneurship Center of the Universidad Mayor (CeapiMayor) and the Apiculture Corporation of Chile (Cach) with the support of the Foundation for Agrarian Innovation (FIA), conducted a study where it was determined that bees are the only living being that it is not a carrier of any type of pathogen, regardless of whether it is a fungus, a virus or a bacterium.

The agriculture of the world depends on 70% of these insects, to put it more clearly and directly, we could say that 70 of 100 foods are intervened in favor of bees.

Also, the pollination that the bees make allows the plants to reproduce, of which millions of animals feed, without them, the fauna would soon begin to disappear.

The honey produced by bees, not only serves as food but also provides many benefits to our health and our skin.

"According to a quote attributed to Albert Einstein, If the bees disappear, humans would have 4 years to live."

WHAT ARE THE REASONS AND HYPOTHESES ATTRIBUTED TO THE EARLY DISAPPEARANCE OF BEES?

The Federal Institute of Technology of Switzerland proposes a theory that blames the waves produced thanks to mobile telephony. They explain that these waves emitted during calls are capable of disorienting bees, causing them to lose their sense of direction and therefore their life is put in danger.

The researcher and biologist Daniel Favre, along with other researchers, made 83 experiments that show that bees in the presence of these waves produce a noise ten times higher than usual, behavior that has been observed to make it known to other bees They are in danger and it is important to leave the hive.

Undoubtedly, the greatest reason for its disappearance is attributed to the constant fumigation of crops, an example of this is what happens in Colombia since during the last three years 34% of bees with agro toxins have died of poisoning.

ARE THERE SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM?

There are indeed solutions, the problem is that it is very difficult to carry them out, because there are very entrenched practices in production and agriculture.

However, three solutions are proposed with the hope that they can be done in a short time:

1. Prohibit, not reduce, the use of toxic pesticides.

2. Promote completely natural agricultural alternatives.

3. Perform constant research and monitoring of the health, welfare, and conservation of bees.

This is an example of the problem that is being experienced with bees and the urgency of creating changes in our management of resources, says Luciano Grisales, representative to the Chamber of Commerce of Colombia.

It is of vital importance to establish the strategic nature of the protection and repopulation of bees and other pollinators since not doing so in 10 years would not be counted on bees in Colombia. This would lead to a food catastrophe and a health crisis in the country. - Luciano expressed to Sustainable Week.

Its sting hurts a lot, but if they were to disappear, it would hurt much more.

The Earthwatch Institute concluded in the last debate of the Royal Geographical Society of London, that bees are the most important living being on the planet, however, scientists have also made an announcement: Bees have already entered into extinction risk.

Bees around the world have disappeared up to 90% according to recent studies, the reasons are different depending on the region, but among the main reasons are massive deforestation, lack of safe places for nests, lack of flowers, use of uncontrolled pesticides, changes in soil, among others.

WHY HAVE BEES BEEN DECLARED AS THE MOST VALUABLE LIVING BEING ON OUR PLANET?

The Apiculture Entrepreneurship Center of the Universidad Mayor (CeapiMayor) and the Apiculture Corporation of Chile (Cach) with the support of the Foundation for Agrarian Innovation (FIA), conducted a study where it was determined that bees are the only living being that it is not a carrier of any type of pathogen, regardless of whether it is a fungus, a virus or a bacterium.

The agriculture of the world depends on 70% of these insects, to put it more clearly and directly, we could say that 70 of 100 foods are intervened in favor of bees.

Also, the pollination that the bees make allows the plants to reproduce, of which millions of animals feed, without them, the fauna would soon begin to disappear.

The honey produced by bees, not only serves as food but also provides many benefits to our health and our skin.

"According to a quote attributed to Albert Einstein, If the bees disappear, humans would have 4 years to live."

WHAT ARE THE REASONS AND HYPOTHESES ATTRIBUTED TO THE EARLY DISAPPEARANCE OF BEES?

The Federal Institute of Technology of Switzerland proposes a theory that blames the waves produced thanks to mobile telephony. They explain that these waves emitted during calls are capable of disorienting bees, causing them to lose their sense of direction and therefore their life is put in danger.

The researcher and biologist Daniel Favre, along with other researchers, made 83 experiments that show that bees in the presence of these waves produce a noise ten times higher than usual, behavior that has been observed to make it known to other bees They are in danger and it is important to leave the hive.

Undoubtedly, the greatest reason for its disappearance is attributed to the constant fumigation of crops, an example of this is what happens in Colombia since during the last three years 34% of bees with agro toxins have died of poisoning.

ARE THERE SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM?

There are indeed solutions, the problem is that it is very difficult to carry them out, because there are very entrenched practices in production and agriculture.

However, three solutions are proposed with the hope that they can be done in a short time:

1. Prohibit, not reduce, the use of toxic pesticides.

2. Promote completely natural agricultural alternatives.

3. Perform constant research and monitoring of the health, welfare, and conservation of bees.

This is an example of the problem that is being experienced with bees and the urgency of creating changes in our management of resources, says Luciano Grisales, representative to the Chamber of Commerce of Colombia.

It is of vital importance to establish the strategic nature of the protection and repopulation of bees and other pollinators since not doing so in 10 years would not be counted on bees in Colombia. This would lead to a food catastrophe and a health crisis in the country. - Luciano expressed to Sustainable Week.

Its sting hurts a lot, but if they were to disappear, it would hurt much more.

The Earthwatch Institute concluded in the last debate of the Royal Geographical Society of London, that bees are the most important living being on the planet, however, scientists have also made an announcement: Bees have already entered into extinction risk.

Bees around the world have disappeared up to 90% according to recent studies, the reasons are different depending on the region, but among the main reasons are massive deforestation, lack of safe places for nests, lack of flowers, use of uncontrolled pesticides, changes in soil, among others.

WHY HAVE BEES BEEN DECLARED AS THE MOST VALUABLE LIVING BEING ON OUR PLANET?

The Apiculture Entrepreneurship Center of the Universidad Mayor (CeapiMayor) and the Apiculture Corporation of Chile (Cach) with the support of the Foundation for Agrarian Innovation (FIA), conducted a study where it was determined that bees are the only living being that it is not a carrier of any type of pathogen, regardless of whether it is a fungus, a virus or a bacterium.

The agriculture of the world depends on 70% of these insects, to put it more clearly and directly, we could say that 70 of 100 foods are intervened in favor of bees.

Also, the pollination that the bees make allows the plants to reproduce, of which millions of animals feed, without them, the fauna would soon begin to disappear.

The honey produced by bees, not only serves as food but also provides many benefits to our health and our skin.

"According to a quote attributed to Albert Einstein, If the bees disappear, humans would have 4 years to live."

WHAT ARE THE REASONS AND HYPOTHESES ATTRIBUTED TO THE EARLY DISAPPEARANCE OF BEES?

The Federal Institute of Technology of Switzerland proposes a theory that blames the waves produced thanks to mobile telephony. They explain that these waves emitted during calls are capable of disorienting bees, causing them to lose their sense of direction and therefore their life is put in danger.

The researcher and biologist Daniel Favre, along with other researchers, made 83 experiments that show that bees in the presence of these waves produce a noise ten times higher than usual, behavior that has been observed to make it known to other bees They are in danger and it is important to leave the hive.

Undoubtedly, the greatest reason for its disappearance is attributed to the constant fumigation of crops, an example of this is what happens in Colombia since during the last three years 34% of bees with agro toxins have died of poisoning.

ARE THERE SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM?

There are indeed solutions, the problem is that it is very difficult to carry them out, because there are very entrenched practices in production and agriculture.

However, three solutions are proposed with the hope that they can be done in a short time:

1. Prohibit, not reduce, the use of toxic pesticides.

2. Promote completely natural agricultural alternatives.

3. Perform constant research and monitoring of the health, welfare, and conservation of bees.

This is an example of the problem that is being experienced with bees and the urgency of creating changes in our management of resources, says Luciano Grisales, representative to the Chamber of Commerce of Colombia.

It is of vital importance to establish the strategic nature of the protection and repopulation of bees and other pollinators since not doing so in 10 years would not be counted on bees in Colombia. This would lead to a food catastrophe and a health crisis in the country. - Luciano expressed to Sustainable Week.

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The Bee Is Declared The Most Important Living Being On The Planet

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Its sting hurts a lot, but if they were to disappear, it would hurt much more. The Earthwatch Institute concluded in the last debate of the Royal Geographical Society of London, that bees are the most important living being on the planet, however, scientists have also made an announcement: Bees have already entered into extinction risk.

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The Mi'kmaq Heritage Actors are back at The Charlottetown Festival with the show Epekwitnewaq Mi'kmaq Voices, and the show's co-writer says audiences can expect new and exciting elements in this year's production.

Julie Pellissier-Lush said that in addition to sharing new Mi'kmaw stories, songs and teachings, the group hired a professional choreographer to teach hip-hop inspired moves to the ensemble for two rap songs included in the show.

"[The cast members] said, 'well, rapping isn't really Indigenous.' I said, 'it's Indigenous people that are doing it, so that makes it something that we are allowed to showcase and share.'"

The noon-hour show opened on Thursday to a packed outdoor amphitheatre. It features traditional drumming and dancing, as well as songs and vignettes about Mi'kmaw legends.

"I could feel the love that they have for the stories, and the dances and our actors and our drummers. Everything that we shared today was so appreciated, and I could feel it from the stage," said Pellissier-Lush.

The Mi'kmaq Heritage Actors have been performing since 2011.

Richard Lush, Pellessier-Lush's son and co-writer of the show, knows the Charlottetown Festival well.

He started performing 14 years ago with the production, The Talking Stick.

He said leading this year's production promotes Mi'kmaw culture and identity.

It's like the ancestors are watching. And they're singing so proudly with us. - Richard Lush

"We always get a little eerie feeling sometimes when the youth are dancing, because it's like the ancestors are watching. And they're singing so proudly with us. It gives me goosebumps to think about," Lush said.

"For me to see our kids flourishing, it makes me a little emotional."

The mother-son duo say they love sharing their culture not only with a wider audience, but with the ensemble cast of young people, who are as young as eight years old.

"When I was growing up, I so wished that I had something like this to connect to, that would give me that pride that I'd be able to learn my language, sing my songs and wear my regalia," said Pellissier-Lush.

"These children will grow up never knowing a time where it wasn't a part of their lives."

Lexis Francis, 12, is in her second year with the company and said she enjoys dancing, particularly the jingle, shawl and hoop dances.

She said part of her goal in performing is spreading the Mi'kmaw language, and that she loves being part of the group.

"It means the world to me. I get to do it with my family and friends, and people I love."

Epekwitnewaq Mi'kmaq Voices will be performed every day at noon, except on Sundays. It runs until July 22, 2022.

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Entirely Indigenous cast launches new show, sharing language and traditions | CBC News

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The Mi'kmaq Heritage Actors are back at The Charlottetown Festival with the show Epekwitnewaq Mi'kmaq Voices, and the show's co-writer says audiences can expect new and exciting elements in this year's production. Julie Pellissier-Lush said that in addition to sharing new Mi'kmaw stories, songs and teachings, the group hired a professional choreographer to teach hip-hop inspired moves to the ensemble for two rap songs included in the show.

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This year it's slugs. Since the mid 1970's I've grown vegetables. For a few years to sell to restaurants and food co-ops in eastern Ontario. When I realized I was better suited to talking about agriculture on CBC, I still got my hands dirty every spring. I fit the stereotype back then. Long hair, beard, and, yes, I farmed organically. Still do, but a little more open minded now.

I started a number of transplants in late March and, with the exceptional weather through May and June, confidently planted them in my garden. I was diverted for a couple of days in the second week of June. When I went to check on things, the lettuce was gone, spinach shredded but still standing, a few squash plants barely hanging on and beans disappeared. You get the picture. A few nights of cheap beer in small cat food cans rounded up most of the slugs. I hope they died happy.

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Conventional farmers becoming more organic

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This year it's slugs. Since the mid 1970's I've grown vegetables. For a few years to sell to restaurants and food co-ops in eastern Ontario. When I realized I was better suited to talking about agriculture on CBC, I still got my hands dirty every spring. I fit the stereotype back then.

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Old Photographs South Uist Outer Hebrides Scotland

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Director of Photography: Andy Mackinnon

Exec Producer: Margaret Cameron, Mark Thomas

Produced by: John Archer, Andy Mackinnon

Music: Donald Shaw

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The lie that invented racism | John Biewen

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Welcome to State of Mind, a new section from Slate and Arizona State University dedicated to exploring mental health. Follow us on Twitter.
Veteran Timothy Ryan had been working on anger management for a year in therapy when, while refueling his Dodge Ram in a Virginia Beach gas station, a white customer next to him made a racist joke. Ryan realized that because he was also white and drove a pickup, the other man assumed Ryan would be amused. Instead, he was outraged. "There was a pumping in my chest," he recalled. "I was getting hot and tingly." But he feared challenging the man's comment and then felt ashamed for not speaking up. Later that week, Ryan brought the experience to therapy, where he began to sort through his response.

Ryan is an example of how some white people are bringing issues related to race to therapy. Though therapists say that such work with white clients isn't common, Oakland-based therapist Jill Sulka, who conducts clinical trainings on whiteness in the Bay Area, said that professional communities exploring these issues have been developing for several years, and the trend has increased since the summer 2020 racial justice protests, when many more white Americans began to realize the urgency of having deeper conversations about race. The question is, are therapists also ready to have these conversations?

According to Sulka and the eight other therapists I interviewed who've done this race work with white people, if their clients bring up race, it's usually because interpersonal experiences with people of color surface deeper psychological issues. To be clear, the issues these therapists identify as suitable for therapy work do not include hateful racism or the type of paranoid, violent extremism that produced the recent massacre in Buffalo, New York. Rather, the work involves white people with a conscientious outlook who may feel guilt and shame discovering their racial prejudice and insensitivity; harbor feelings of superiority; idealize people of color or desire their approval; or fear calling out overt racism by other white people, especially family.

Such problems not only damage personal relationships, but they also perpetuate larger societal patterns of racial harm. For that reason, most therapists who engage in this work emphasize that lasting healing requires that clients reach beyond the therapy container to do reparative work in their everyday personal and public lives, which often means connecting with other white people committed to doing anti-racist work.

Over several decades, researchers and clinicians have been developing methods to treat the race trauma people of color experience-essential work that still needs to be expanded and made more widely available. New York-based therapist Kenneth Hardy, who is Black and a leader in race trauma work, said that many therapists of color explicitly identify this as an area of expertise, and university clinical training programs now often include a race trauma component.

White people don't experience such race trauma, but they have complex relationships of race and power-and no widely adopted, research-based treatment tools are in place to work with them on those issues.

Hardy, who is now drawing from his background to implement training on whiteness and therapy, believes that psychotherapy can further the education-based race work many white people have sought since the 2020 protests, when Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility became bestsellers. "Kendi and DiAngelo's books provide enlightenment about race, but where they can fall short is in keeping us upstairs in our head, dealing with ideas and not dealing with all the emotional stuff that comes up," he said.

David Drustrup, a white therapist and Ph.D. candidate in counseling psychology at the University of Iowa, worked with a woman who came to therapy because she felt isolated during the summer 2020 lockdowns and protests. She said she supported Black Lives Matter, but stopped communicating with a longtime Black friend after being angered by the friend's Facebook posts that supported defunding the police. Drustrup took a dual approach, exploring both the client's fixed political assumptions about policing and her relationship choice to stop contacting a close friend. When the client expressed interest in reading more about race and policing, Drustrup gave her a copy of James Baldwin's "A Report From Occupied Territory." She began to look at policing more from her friend's perspective and then decided to speak about policing in an Iowa City Council meeting on Zoom, leading her to reconnect with her friend. "Finding this hook for white clients to connect concerns about white racism to their own lives is essential for long-term buy-in," Drustrup said.

Kevin Henze, a white therapist in Boston, described a similar situation in which a white college student examined how a pattern of discounting his Black girlfriend's accounts of racial distress was a form of racism. He felt shame and guilt and realized he had a responsibility to confront his prejudiced parents who disapproved of the relationship. "Anti-racism happens in relationships," Henze said. "To take root, there have to be interpersonal relationships where the new way of doing race and being white is held." Henze also encouraged the student to join a multiracial activist community on campus so that the therapy work wouldn't be limited to just improving his individual relationship. (Identifying details of both the clients above have been changed to protect their privacy.)

Henze first became interested in working on race with white clients during his Ph.D. training at Boston College, where he studied a white racial identity development theory designed by Janet Helms, director of the school's Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture. But Henze noted that therapists lack accessible clinical tools to assess race-based psychological problems. "If a client comes in with depression, I can administer a questionnaire, relay the scores, get their input, and then fill in for them the common symptoms of depression," he said. "But if a client comes in and says the country is fading away and they're concerned about their immigrant next-door neighbors, it's not acceptable for me to hand out a screening tool for racial bias."

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These therapists agree that the most important training tool to support this work is their own racial self-investigation. "You have to engage in a process of self-interrogation," Hardy explained. "What does it mean to you personally to be white? Where are your blind spots? The training is designed to get people to do a deep dive into their psyches. Then the skill part becomes easier." Sulka's trainings involve ongoing personal reflection and self-disclosure in multiracial and separate race groups about one's position in a system of structural racism and unequal privilege. For white therapists, Sulka said, "a stance of humility is key. I need to acknowledge that I'm subject to the same conditioning as my clients."

Therapists of color face distinct dynamics working with white clients directly on race. White clients might not speak openly to a therapist of color about their own prejudices, or they may hope the therapist will provide reassurance or easy solutions. For this reason, said Maryam Jernigan-Noesi, a Black therapist in Atlanta, it's crucial for more white therapists to take on this work. "If we know that white people will be more comfortable talking in uncensored ways, to help facilitate this work, we have to make sure white clinicians are comfortable talking about race and sitting with those views," Jernigan-Noesi said.

Ultimately, the most important factor in promoting healing may be the therapist's commitment to deeply self-examine. "My vision," Jernigan-Noesi said, "is that such training becomes a norm for everyone."

State of Mind is a partnership of Slate and Arizona State University that offers a practical look at our mental health system-and how to make it better.

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Can Therapy Help White People Work on Race Issues?

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Welcome to State of Mind , a new section from Slate and Arizona State University dedicated to exploring mental health. Follow us on Twitter . Veteran Timothy Ryan had been working on anger management for a year in therapy when, while refueling his Dodge Ram in a Virginia Beach gas station, a white customer next to him made a racist joke.

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When wandering around a forest, it is the overall health of the ecosystem that most often captures my attention. Is there a diversity of trees, shrubs, wildflowers, ferns, mosses, etc? It can be a long list, as there are hundreds of plants native to this province. Is there a lot of wildlife in the area, everything from birds and mammals to amphibians and insects? Or not, which is too often the case in our woodlands.

As I learn more about forests, my interest in diversity keeps growing. When thinking about insects and pollinators, I was always drawn to the flowers of shrubs such as willow, serviceberry, and hawthorn. These native shrubs flower very early in the year and are important sources of nectar and pollen for a wide variety of bees, wasps, flower flies and other pollinators.

One of the things that has piqued my interest lately is the work being done on using willows, especially native ones, around blueberry fields and orchards. They are very attractive to a wide range of pollinators and provide important food sources so that these insects stay around even when there is no food available from the fruit crops.

A recent article in the Canadian Journal of Plant Science, titled "Willows as pollen and nectar sources for sustaining fruit and berry pollinating insects," provided some interesting insights into this topic. And yes, I know this continues to paint a picture of me as a plant nerd. Guilty, for sure.

The authors recognized that wild bee populations have been "declining due to loss and degradation of nesting sites and floral resources, landscape fragmentation, intensive agronomic and monoculture practice, displacement of native floral hosts by exotic plants, use of pesticides..." In response, they studied insect populations on willow plantings and the timing of when they had food available for pollinators.

One of the conclusions drawn was that "With the multitude of problems currently facing honey bees, native willows could be used to support the diversity and abundance of wild pollinator populations and enhance pollination and associated fruit and seed set in many agricultural crops."

This is an example of trying to work with nature to try to find solutions, and to do that, you must have a good understanding of the environment.

More information about pollinators and their needs came from a friend with a much deeper knowledge about both native and non-native pollinators. It was she who, on an early spring walk, pointed out the bees making great use of flowers on nearby red maple trees.

None of our native trees have big, showy flowers, so we tend to dismiss them as food sources. But all of those maple keys, birch seeds, and acorns started as flowers. Red maple flowers are quite beautiful, and there are thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, on a mature specimen in the spring. If they flowered mid-summer when there was lots of other food around, they might not be so popular. But in the spring, that's when they shine!

Keep an eye out for the swelling red maple buds, and when the flowers emerge, it has been best described as a "blaze of red" decorating the trees. On a warm day you'll see bumblebees, honey bees, mason bees, wasps, hover flies and many other insects feeding on both the pollen and nectar.

These are just a few of the many native species that help create diversity within our forests. Especially with growing concerns over the health of our pollinator populations, we need to keep improving the health of our ecosystems whenever possible.

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When wandering around a forest, it is the overall health of the ecosystem that most often captures my attention. Is there a diversity of trees, shrubs, wildflowers, ferns, mosses, etc? It can be a long list, as there are hundreds of plants native to this province.

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James Hubbard Meacham was a savvy Canadian entrepreneur looking to make a killing on a very trendy business: Map-making.

In the late 1870s, Meacham and his partner, Clement Allen, set up a publishing company in his home province of Ontario that would be dedicated to making county atlases, books of maps that were in vogue in North America for about a decade.

"We're talking about the 1870s, the period of growth after the American Civil War," Island historian Reg Porter said. "The interest in moving to uninhabited parts of the country, both in the U.S. and Canada - people wanted to know what the country looked like."

Meacham's team of surveyors and illustrators produced maps of counties in Ontario and Nova Scotia.

But it was in 1880 when the company published what was perhaps its finest work: A full atlas of Prince Edward Island that gives modern audiences a glimpse at how the Island looked 150 years ago.

"These huge maps [show] every property, every mill, every bridge, where there was wilderness, where there was marsh - everything was indicated in the most astonishing detail," Porter said. "It's almost as if 100 years before their time, they had aerial photographs to work from."

Porter, who has done extensive research on the story of Meacham's Atlas, some of which can be found in his blog, said it captured a pivotal time in the history of the province.

"The atlas defined the province of Prince Edward Island in a way that no other province has been defined before, since. It represented every square of P.E.I.," Porter said.

"Although so many things have happened, and there have been so many businesses, fisheries have developed and farming and so forth. But when we look back 100 years, I think that represented perhaps, the high point, the end of the climb up the mountain for the Island to define itself in its topography."

Here's a look at some of the details that can be found on the map.

New landholders

P.E.I. had joined Confederation just a few years before the atlas was produced.

Less than half a decade before that, the province wasn't too different from how it looked in 1764, when surveyor Samuel Holland set out to make what Porter calls the "perfect British colony," dividing the land into 67 lots, giving it to landlords who ran it as a sort of feudal fiefdom.

"Nobody really owned their property, but they paid rent to landlords," Porter said.

However, a wave of revolutionary sentiment that began in Europe in the mid-1800s would soon turn things on their head in P.E.I.

"By the time the 1840s come, there was trouble all over the world," Porter said. "In Europe especially there were revolutions where people were revolting against aristocratic control. And here on the Island, those European revolutions were reflected when tenants began to fight with their landlords."

That period of turmoil would last until the 1870s. The large estates were divided into individual farms as the more progressive landlords made concessions to the gentry.

That change is reflected across Meacham's maps.

"All the land that used to belong to landlords and which we can see in older maps, is now land belonging to specific people, their names are there, and the number of acres that they have are indicated as well. And where there's still land open for settlement, it belongs to the government."

Migration and conflict

The names in the maps also tell the story of the massive influx of settlers arriving on P.E.I. from the British Isles in the decades following the expulsion of the Acadians.

"When you study various lot maps, you find that they're completely filled with Scottish names. You go to another place ... and you're surprised to see that half and half are Irish names, and the others are French names."

Lot 1 in Prince County is a good example. Most of the lot being divided between Acadians, who settled the area in 1799 to get away from their landlords, and newly arrived Irish settlers.

Coexistence wasn't easy.

"There are all kinds of conflicts and troubles because the Acadians were unhappy the Irish were invading their world. The Irish are aggressive," he said.

"There's one particular story, which was told in the centennial booklet printed in 1899, about how an Acadian and an Irishman had a tremendous fight. The Irishman took a wooden shovel and smashed it on the Acadian's head. But he didn't hurt him or injure him very much. That went down as a legend, and the man afterwards was nicknamed ... 'the Shovel Splitter.'"

Lennox Island and the church

In the 1870s, the Aborigines' Protection Society purchased Lennox Island on behalf of the local Mi'kmaq. It was the first reservation in the country to be fully owned by its Indigenous people.

Porter said the Meacham depiction of the island is very detailed. One thing that immediately jumps out is the church, which in 1895 would be replaced by the current St. Anne's Parish building.

"When you reach the island, on your left was the Catholic church, there was a Catholic school and on your right there was a Catholic cemetery," Porter said.

"It shows the determination of the Catholic church to establish itself extremely prominently on Lennox Island. Now, there had been other Christians, the Baptist especially, who had wanted to convert the Island Mi'kmaq. But all of their efforts ... failed. It was the Catholics who succeeded."

A second detail is harder to notice, but may also be telling of the relationship between the church and Indigenous peoples in the 19th century: Some homes on the map are represented by squares and others by triangles.

Porter believes that indicates the surveyor's distinction between the Mi'kmaq who lived in wooden houses and those who lived in wigwams.

"This was a time when the Catholic church was encouraging the Mi'kmaq to get rid of their old ways, and to start dressing like Westerners, and to start living in wooden houses, which for 10,000 years they had never done," he said. [Some] hold out and continue to live in wigwams. And they will do so into the 20th century."

Charlottetown

The grid for Charlottetown had been planned many decades before Meacham's Atlas was published. But the city did not start growing immediately.

In fact, Porter said almost half a century after the city had been laid out there were still tree stumps everywhere and a big swamp on Great George and Euston streets.

"It was a mess. But in time, this would change very rapidly," he said.

After the 1840s, the city's population boomed. By the time Meecham arrived in Charlottetown, the city was looking similar to how it looks today.

"Charlottetown is filled up with names of property owners, of stores. The railway is there, City Hall is there, the Legislative Assembly is in Queen Square, there's a great big market building, there is a big post office," Porter said. "It's a thriving, exciting city, full of activity, full of growth, full of money."

Towns and the railway

The establishment of the P.E.I. Railway in the 1870s also changed things outside Charlottetown, with communities across the Island which were once isolated now linked to the port city and, as such, to the rest of Canada.

"All kinds of things could move from the ports of Charlottetown, right up eventually to Tignish and Souris," Porter said.

While P.E.I. had to be rescued from bankruptcy by the federal government after it financed the railways, these along with improved communications from the telegraph lines did eventually lead to a growth spurt for some small communities in the Island.

"Summerside, which was on nobody's mind at any time suddenly appears because it's a perfect place for a port," Porter said. "Victoria, which nobody had ever planned in, which didn't appear on on anybody's maps suddenly appears and is laid out in a grid system, about the same time in the middle of the century."

Factories started to spring up on the landscape. Some, such as the new fish and lobster canneries set up shortly after the technology was invented, were illustrated in the atlas.

"Meacham is a critical point in the development, the economic development of the Island," Porter said. "And also the development of the topography, because everything changes. The country is filled with little villages."

After completing the P.E.I. atlas, Meacham went on to make his fortunes in the county atlas market in the U.S. He wouldn't be able to accomplish much else: He was killed in a hunting accident in 1887.

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A look at the 19th-century atlas that 'defined' P.E.I. | CBC News

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James Hubbard Meacham was a savvy Canadian entrepreneur looking to make a killing on a very trendy business: Map-making. In the late 1870s, Meacham and his partner, Clement Allen, set up a publishing company in his home province of Ontario that would be dedicated to making county atlases, books of maps that were in vogue in North America for about a decade.

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Your Authentic Connection to Ireland - the Irish Pagan School was co-founded by Irish authors and educators, Lora O'Brien and Jon O'Sullivan.

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eneath our feet is an ecosystem so astonishing that it tests the limits of our imagination. It's as diverse as a rainforest or a coral reef. We depend on it for 99% of our food, yet we scarcely know it. Soil.

Under one square metre of undisturbed ground in the Earth's mid-latitudes (which include the UK) there might live several hundred thousand small animals. Roughly 90% of the species to which they belong have yet to be named. One gram of this soil - less than a teaspoonful - contains around a kilometre of fungal filaments.

When I first examined a lump of soil with a powerful lens, I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. As soon as I found the focal length, it burst into life. I immediately saw springtails - tiny animals similar to insects - in dozens of shapes and sizes. Round, crabby mites were everywhere: in some soils there are half a million in every square metre.

Then I began to see creatures I had never encountered before. What I took to be a tiny white centipede turned out, when I looked it up, to be a different life form altogether, called a symphylid. I spotted something that might have stepped out of a Japanese anime: long and low, with two fine antennae at the front and two at the back, poised and sprung like a virile dragon or a flying horse. It was a bristletail, or dipluran.

As I worked my way through the lump, again and again I found animals whose existence, despite my degree in zoology and a lifetime immersed in natural history, had been unknown to me. After two hours examining a kilogram of soil, I realised I had seen more of the major branches of the animal kingdom than I would on a week's safari in the Serengeti.

That this thin cushion between rock and air can withstand all we throw at it and still support us is a dangerous belief

But even more arresting than soil's diversity and abundance is the question of what it actually is. Most people see it as a dull mass of ground-up rock and dead plants. But it turns out to be a biological structure, built by living creatures to secure their survival, like a wasps' nest or a beaver dam. Microbes make cements out of carbon, with which they stick mineral particles together, creating pores and passages through which water, oxygen and nutrients pass. The tiny clumps they build become the blocks the animals in the soil use to construct bigger labyrinths.

Soil is fractally scaled, which means its structure is consistent, regardless of magnification. Bacteria, fungi, plants and soil animals, working unconsciously together, build an immeasurably intricate, endlessly ramifying architecture that, like Dust in a Philip Pullman novel, organises itself spontaneously into coherent worlds. This biological structure helps to explain soil's resistance to droughts and floods: if it were just a heap of matter, it would be swept away.

It also reveals why soil can break down so quickly when it's farmed. Under certain conditions, when farmers apply nitrogen fertiliser, the microbes respond by burning through the carbon: in other words, the cement that holds their catacombs together. The pores cave in. The passages collapse. The soil becomes sodden, airless and compacted.

ut none of the above captures the true wonder of soil. Let's start with something that flips our understanding of how we survive. Plants release into the soil between 11% and 40% of all the sugars they make through photosynthesis. They don't leak them accidentally. They deliberately pump them into the ground. Stranger still, before releasing them, they turn some of these sugars into compounds of tremendous complexity.

Making such chemicals requires energy and resources, so this looks like pouring money down the drain. Why do they do it? The answer unlocks the gate to a secret garden.

These complex chemicals are pumped into the zone immediately surrounding the plant's roots, which is called the rhizosphere. They are released to create and manage its relationships.

Soil is full of bacteria. Its earthy scent is the smell of the compounds they produce. In most corners, most of the time, they wait, in suspended animation, for the messages that will wake them. These messages are the chemicals the plant releases. They are so complex because the plant seeks not to alert bacteria in general, but the particular bacteria that promote its growth. Plants use a sophisticated chemical language that only the microbes to whom they wish to speak can understand.

When a plant root pushes into a lump of soil and starts releasing its messages, it triggers an explosion of activity. The bacteria responding to its call consume the sugars the plant feeds them and proliferate to form some of the densest microbial communities on Earth. There can be a billion bacteria in a single gram of the rhizosphere; they unlock the nutrients on which the plant depends and produce growth hormones and other chemicals that help it grow. The plant's vocabulary changes from place to place and time to time, depending on what it needs. If it's starved of certain nutrients, or the soil is too dry or salty, it calls out to the bacteria species that can help.

Take a step back and you will see something that transforms our understanding of life on Earth. The rhizosphere lies outside the plant, but it functions as if it were part of the whole. It could be seen as the plant's external gut. The similarities between the rhizosphere and the human gut, where bacteria also live in astonishing numbers, are uncanny. In both systems, microbes break down organic material into the simpler compounds the plant or person can absorb. Though there are more than 1,000 phyla (major groups) of bacteria, the same four dominate both the rhizosphere and the guts of mammals.

Just as human breast milk contains sugars called oligosaccharides, whose purpose is to feed not the baby but the bacteria in the baby's gut, young plants release large quantities of sucrose into the soil, to feed and develop their new microbiomes. Just as the bacteria that live in our guts outcompete and attack invading pathogens, the friendly microbes in the rhizosphere create a defensive ring around the root. Just as bacteria in the colon educate our immune cells and send chemical messages that trigger our body's defensive systems, the plant's immune system is trained and primed by bacteria in the rhizosphere.

Soil might not be as beautiful to the eye as a rainforest or a coral reef, but once you begin to understand it, it is as beautiful to the mind. Upon this understanding our survival might hang.

e face what could be the greatest predicament humankind has ever encountered: feeding the world without devouring the planet. Already, farming is the world's greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of the global loss of wildlife and the greatest cause of the global extinction crisis. It's responsible for about 80% of the deforestation that's happened this century. Of 28,000 species known to be at imminent risk of extinction, 24,000 are threatened by farming. Only 29% of the weight of birds on Earth consists of wild species: the rest is poultry. Just 4% of the world's mammals, by weight, are wild; humans account for 36%, and livestock for the remaining 60%.

Unless something changes, all this is likely to get worse - much worse. In principle, there is plenty of food, even for a rising population. But roughly half the calories farmers grow are now fed to livestock, and the demand for animal products is rising fast. Without a radical change in the way we eat, by 2050 the world will need to grow around 50% more grain. How could we do it without wiping out much of the rest of life on Earth?

Just as farming is trashing crucial Earth systems, their destruction threatens our food supply. Sustaining even current levels of production might prove impossible. Climate breakdown is likely, on the whole, to make wet places wetter and dry places drier. One more degree of heating, one estimate suggests, would parch 32% of the world's land surface. By the middle of this century, severe droughts could simultaneously affect an arc from Portugal to Pakistan. And this is before we consider the rising economic fragility of the global food system, or geopolitical pressures, such as the current war in Ukraine, that might threaten 30% of the world's wheat exports.

It's not just the quantity of production that's at risk, but also its quality. A combination of higher temperatures and higher concentrations of CO ₂ reduces the level of minerals, protein and B vitamins that crops contain. Already, zinc deficiency alone afflicts more than a billion people. Though we seldom discuss it, one paper describes the falling concentrations of nutrients as " existential threats ".

We might barely detect the loss of a soil's resilience until, when drought strikes, fertile lands turn to dustbowls

Some crop scientists believe we can counter these trends by raising yields in places that remain productive. But their hopes rely on unrealistic assumptions. The most important of these is sufficient water. The anticipated growth in crop yields would require 146% more fresh water than is used today. Just one problem: that water doesn't exist.

Over the past 100 years, our use of water has increased six-fold. Irrigating crops consumes 70% of the water we withdraw from rivers, lakes and aquifers. Already, 4 billion people suffer from water scarcity for at least one month a year and 33 major cities, including São Paulo, Cape Town, Los Angeles and Chennai, are threatened by extreme water stress. As groundwater is depleted, farmers have begun to rely more heavily on meltwater from glaciers and snowpacks. But these, too, are shrinking.

A likely flashpoint is the valley of the Indus, whose water is used by three nuclear powers (India, Pakistan and China) and several unstable regions. Already, 95% of the river's flow is extracted. As the economy and the population grow, by 2025 demand for water in the catchment is expected to be 44% greater than supply. But one of the reasons why farming there has been able to intensify and cities to grow is that, as a result of global heating, glaciers in the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas have been melting faster than they've been accumulating, so more water has been flowing down the rivers. This can't last. By the end of the century, between one- and two-thirds of the ice mass is likely to have disappeared. It is hard to see this ending well.

And all this is before we come to the soil, the thin cushion between rock and air on which human life depends, which we treat like dirt. While there are international treaties on telecommunication, civil aviation, investment guarantees, intellectual property, psychotropic substances and doping in sport, there is no global treaty on soil. The notion that this complex and scarcely understood system can withstand all we throw at it and continue to support us could be the most dangerous of all our beliefs.

Soil degradation is bad enough in rich nations, where the ground is often left bare and exposed to winter rain, compacted and wrecked by overfertilisation and pesticides that rip through its foodwebs. But it tends to be even worse in poorer nations, partly because extreme rainfall, cyclones and hurricanes can tear bare earth from the land, and partly because hungry people are often driven to cultivate steep slopes. In some countries, mostly in Central America, tropical Africa and south-east Asia, more than 70% of the arable land is now suffering severe erosion, gravely threatening future production.

Climate breakdown, which will cause more intense droughts and storms, exacerbates the threat. The loss of a soil's resilience can happen incrementally and subtly. We might scarcely detect it until a shock pushes the complex underground system past its tipping point. When severe drought strikes, the erosion rate of degraded soil can rise 6,000-fold. In other words, the soil collapses. Fertile lands turn to dustbowls.

Some people have responded to these threats by calling for the relocalisation and de-intensification of farming. I understand their concerns. But their vision is mathematically impossible.

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A study in the journal Nature Food found the average minimum distance at which the world's people can be fed is 2,200km. In other words, this is the shortest possible average journey that our food must travel if we are not to starve. For those who depend on wheat and similar cereals, it's 3,800km. A quarter of the global population that consumes these crops needs food grown at least 5,200km away.

Why? Because most of the world's people live in big cities or populous valleys, whose hinterland is too small (and often too dry, hot or cold) to feed them. Much of the world's food has to be grown in vast, lightly habited lands - the Canadian prairies, the US plains, wide tracts in Russia and Ukraine, the Brazilian interior - and shipped to tight, densely populated places.

As for reducing the intensity of farming, what this means is using more land to produce the same amount of food. Land use is arguably the most important of all environmental issues. The more land farming occupies, the less is available for forests and wetlands, savannahs and wild grasslands, and the greater is the loss of wildlife and the rate of extinction. All farming, however kind and careful, involves a radical simplification of natural ecosystems.

Environmental campaigners rail against urban sprawl: the profligate use of land for housing and infrastructure. But agricultural sprawl - using large amounts of land to produce small amounts of food - has transformed much greater areas. While 1% of the world's land is used for buildings and infrastructure, crops occupy 12% and grazing, the most extensive kind of farming, uses 28%. Only 15% of land, by contrast, is protected for nature. Yet the meat and milk from animals that rely solely on grazing provide just 1% of the world's protein.

One paper looked at what would happen if everyone in the US followed the advice of celebrity chefs and switched from grain-fed to pasture-fed beef. It found that, because they grow more slowly on grass, the number of cattle would have to rise by 30%, while the land area used to feed them would rise by 270%. Even if the US felled all its forests, drained its wetlands, watered its deserts and annulled its national parks, it would still need to import most of its beef.

Already, much of the beef the US buys comes from Brazil, which in 2018 became the world's largest exporter. This meat is often promoted as "pasture-fed". Many of the pastures were created by illegally clearing the rainforest. Worldwide, meat production could destroy 3m sq km of highly biodiverse places in 35 years. That's almost the size of India.

Only when livestock are extremely sparse is animal farming compatible with rich, functional ecosystems. For example, the Knepp Wildland project in West Sussex, where small herds of cattle and pigs roam freely across a large estate, is often cited as a way to reconcile meat and wildlife. But while it's an excellent example of rewilding, it's a terrible example of food production.

If this system were to be rolled out across 10% of the UK's farmland and if, as its champions propose, we obtained our meat this way, it would furnish each person here with 420 grams of meat a year, enough for around three meals. We could eat a prime steak roughly once every three years. If all the farmland in the UK were to be managed this way, it would provide us with 75kcal a day (one 30th of our requirement) in meat, and nothing else.

Of course, this is not how it would be distributed. The very rich would eat meat every week, other people not at all. Those who say we should buy only meat like this, who often use the slogan "less and better", present an exclusive product as if it were available to everyone.

Campaigners, chefs and food writers rail against intensive farming and the harm it does to us and the world. But the problem is not the adjective: it's the noun. The destruction of Earth systems is caused not by intensive farming or extensive farming, but a disastrous combination of the two.

o what can we do? Part of the answer is to take as much food production out of farming as we can. As luck would have it, the enabling technology has arrived just as we need it. Precision fermentation, producing protein and fat in breweries from soil bacteria, fed on water, hydrogen, CO ₂ and minerals, has the potential to replace all livestock farming, all soya farming and plenty of vegetable oil production, while massively reducing land use and other environmental impacts.

But this remarkable good fortune is threatened by intellectual property rights: it could easily be captured by the same corporations that now monopolise the global grain and meat trade. We should fiercely resist this: patents should be weak and anti-trust laws strong. Ideally, this farm-free food should be open source.

Then we could relocalise production: the new fermentation technologies could be used by local businesses to serve local markets. As some of the world's poorest nations are rich in sunlight, they could make good use of a technology that relies on green hydrogen. Microbial production horrifies some of those who demand food sovereignty and food justice. But it could deliver both more effectively than farming does.

Such technologies grant us, for the first time since the Neolithic period, the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship with the living world. Vast tracts of land can be released from both intensive and extensive farming. The age of extinction could be replaced by an age of regenesis.

A British farmer's revolutionary model of horticulture looks like magic, but is the result of years of meticulous experiments

Of course, we would still need to produce cereals, roots, fruit and vegetables. So how do we do it safely and productively? The answer might lie in our new understanding of the soil.

On a farm in south Oxfordshire, techniques developed by a vegetable grower called Iain Tolhurst - Tolly - seem to have anticipated recent discoveries by soil scientists.

Tolly is a big, tough-looking man in his late 60s, with etched and weathered skin, a broad, heavy jaw, long blond hair, one gold earring, hands grained with earth and oil. He started farming without training or instruction, without land or any means to buy it. After a string of misadventures, he managed to lease seven hectares (17.3 acres) of very poor land at a reduced rent, 34 years ago.

"No conventional grower would even look at this ground," he told me. "It's 40% stone. They'd call it building rubble. It isn't even classed as arable: an agronomist would say it's only good for grass or trees. But over the past 12 months, we harvested 120 tonnes of vegetables and fruit."

Astonishingly, for these 34 years Tolly has been farming this rubble without pesticides, herbicides, mineral treatments, animal manure or any other kind of fertiliser. He has pioneered a way of growing that he calls "stockfree organic". This means he uses no livestock or livestock products at any point in the farming cycle, yet he also uses no artificial inputs.

Until he proved the model, this was thought to be a formula for sucking the fertility out of the land. Vegetables in particular are considered hungry crops, which require plenty of extra nutrients to grow. Yet Tolly, while adding none, has raised his yields until they've hit the lower bound of what intensive growers achieve with artificial fertilisers on good land: a feat widely considered impossible. Remarkably, the fertility of his soil has climbed steadily.

On my first visit, one June, I was struck by the great range and health of Tolly's crops. One plot was a blue haze of onion plants, another a patchwork of sea greens: young cauliflower plants, several kinds of cabbage and kale. There were rows of rainbow chard with gold, green, white and crimson stems. Broad bean pods had begun to sprout from tight pillars of flower. His potatoes were in full bloom, nightshade sinister, stamens like yellow stings. Courgettes extruded rudely behind their trumpet flowers. There were carrots, tomatoes, peppers, beans of all kinds, herbs, parsnips, celeriac, cucumbers, lettuces. He raises 100 varieties of vegetables, which he sells in his farm shop and to subscribers to his veg box.

Separating the plots were untended banks, in which scientists studying his farm have found 75 species of wildflowers. These banks are an essential component of his system, harbouring the insect predators that control crop pests. Though he uses no pesticides, none of the vegetable plants I saw showed signs of significant insect damage: the leaves were dark and wide, with scarcely a hole or a spot.

Almost single-handedly, through trial and error, Tolly has developed a new and revolutionary model of horticulture. At first it looks like magic. In reality, it's the result of many years of meticulous experiments.

Two of his innovations appear to be crucial. The first, as he puts it, is to "make the system watertight": preventing rain from washing through the soil, taking the nutrients with it. What this means is ensuring the land is almost never left bare. Beneath his vegetables grows an understorey of "green manure", plants that cover the soil. Under the leaves of his pumpkins, I could see thousands of tiny seedlings: the "weeds" he had deliberately sown. When the crops are harvested, the green manure fills the gap and soon becomes a thicket of colour: blue chicory flowers, crimson clover, yellow melilot and trefoil, mauve Phacelia, pink sainfoin.

"There's green manure under the green manure," Tolly told me. "As soon as we cut the bigger plants, it comes into flower, and the bees go crazy."

Some of the plants in his mix put down deep roots that draw nutrients from the subsoil. Every so often, Tolly runs a mower over them, chopping them into a coarse straw. Earthworms pull this down and incorporate it into the ground. "The idea is to let the plants put back at least as much carbon and minerals as we take out."

Tolly tells me that "the green manure ties up nutrients, fixes nitrogen, adds carbon and enhances the diversity of the soil. The more plant species you sow, the more bacteria and fungi you encourage. Every plant has its own associations. Roots are the glue that holds and builds the soil biology."

The other crucial innovation is to scatter over the green manure an average of one millimetre a year of chipped and composted wood, produced from his own trees or delivered by a local tree surgeon. This tiny amendment appears to make a massive difference. In the five years after he started adding woodchip, his yields roughly doubled. As Tolly explains: "It isn't fertiliser; it's an inoculant that stimulates microbes. The carbon in the wood encourages the bacteria and fungi that bring the soil back to life." Tolly believes he's adding enough carbon to help the microbes build the soil, but not so much that they lock up nitrogen, which is what happens if you give them more than they need.

What Tolly appears to be doing is strengthening and diversifying the relationships in the rhizosphere - the plant's external gut. By keeping roots in the soil, raising the number of plant species and adding just the right amount of carbon, he seems to have encouraged bacteria to build their catacombs in his stony ground, improving the soil's structure and helping his plants to grow.

Tolly's success forces us to consider what fertility means. It's not just about the amount of nutrients the soil contains. It's also a function of whether they're available to plants at the right moments, and safely immobilised when plants don't need them. In a healthy soil, crops can regulate their relationships with bacteria in the rhizosphere, ensuring that nutrients are unlocked only when they're required. In other words, fertility is a property of a functioning ecosystem. Farm science has devoted plenty of attention to soil chemistry. But the more we understand, the more important the biology appears to be.

Can Tolly's system be replicated? So far the results are inconclusive. But if we can discover how to mediate and enhance the relationship between crop plants and bacteria and fungi in a wide range of soils and climates, it should be possible to raise yields while reducing inputs. Our growing understanding of soil ecology could catalyse a greener revolution.

I believe we could combine this approach with another suite of innovations, by a non-profit organisation in Salina, Kansas, called the Land Institute. It's seeking to develop perennial grain crops to replace the annual plants from which we obtain the great majority of our food. Annuals are plants that die after a single growing season. Perennials survive from one year to the next.

Large areas dominated by annuals are rare in nature. They tend to colonise ground in the wake of catastrophe: a fire, flood, landslide or volcanic eruption that exposes bare rock or soil. In cultivating annuals, we must keep the land in a catastrophic state. If we grew perennial grain crops, we would be less reliant on smashing living systems apart to produce our food.

For 40 years, the Land Institute has been scouring the world for perennial species that could replace the annuals we grow. Already, working with Fengyi Hu and his team at Yunnan University in China, it has developed a perennial rice with yields that match, and in some cases exceed, those of modern annual breeds. Farmers are queueing up for seed. While annual rice farming can cause devastating erosion, the long roots of the perennial varieties bind and protect the soil. Some perennial rice crops have now been harvested six times without replanting.

Perennials are their own green manures. The longer they grow, the stronger their relationships with microbes that fix nitrogen from the air and release other minerals. One estimate suggests that perennial systems hold five times as much of the water that falls on the ground as annual crops do.

The Land Institute is developing promising lines of perennial wheat, oil crops and other grains. The deep roots and tough structures of perennial plants could help them to withstand climate chaos. The perennial sunflowers the institute is breeding have sailed through two severe droughts, one of which entirely destroyed the annual sunflowers grown alongside them.

While no solution is a panacea, I believe that some of the components of a new global food system - one that is more resilient, more distributed, more diverse and more sustainable - are falling into place. If it happens, it will be built on our new knowledge of the most neglected of major ecosystems: the soil. It could resolve the greatest of all dilemmas: how to feed ourselves without destroying the living systems on which we depend. The future is underground.

George Monbiot will discuss Regenesis at a Guardian Live event in London on Monday 30 May. Book tickets to join the event in person, or via the livestream here.

Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet by George Monbiot is published by Penguin Books at £20 on 26 May. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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The secret world beneath our feet is mind-blowing - and the key to our planet's future

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eneath our feet is an ecosystem so astonishing that it tests the limits of our imagination. It's as diverse as a rainforest or a coral reef. We depend on it for 99% of our food, yet we scarcely know it. Soil.