To purchase a copy

Title: High Up in the Rolling Hills
Author: Peter Finch


Category: Biography, memoir, manifesto, sustainable living
Format: Trade paperback, hardcover, ebook
Publication Date: April, 2013
Pages: 204
Recommended Price: $17.95 softcover, $27.95 hardcover, $9.95 pdf
Trim: 8.5 x 5.5 inches
Available from: iUniverse; Amazon in Canada, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, Brazil; Barnes & Noble; Borders; Chapters Indigo in Canada
First Print Run: On demand (with iUniverse on-demand capabilities, there is never an out-of-stock situation)

Saturday 11 January 2014

Creative Time

Recent screenshot from my Pinterest page, www.pinterest.com/peterfinch/

It is off-season on the farm, a time for creative pursuits like reading, researching and writing. I have spent quite some hours recently - through the bone-chilling weather outside, toasty by the woodstove inside - delving into some themes that fascinate and inspire me. The media by which I have made these explorations are two-fold: books in print and Pinterest. That may sound like going from the sublime to the ridiculous, but both channels have been highly rewarding.

In books, I have been taking in There is a Season by Patrick Lane, The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane, The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King, Secrets of the Soil by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, Grass, The Forgiveness of Nature by Charles Walters, The Real Crash by Peter D. Schiff, The Farm as Ecosystem by Jerry Brunetti, Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver, earth works by Scott Russell Sanders, An Epidemic of Absence by Moises Velasquez-Manoff. I have been thoroughly captivated by them all.

On Pinterest, I have developed several boards of interest - Magical Places, Magical Foods, Magical Plants, Health Naturally, Art & Sculpture, Home is Where the Heart is, Green Heroes. I like the format of Pinterest; it draws the viewer in via the image, following up by opening worlds of words, detailed analysis and so deeper meaning through web links.

You can find boards from my Pinterest page that are pertinent to this blog here:

Monday 6 January 2014

Brady, the frog

Brady & a frog

I woke up this morning from a vivid dream:

Gundi and I wanted to take our grandson Brady for a walk. We left the house, which was like our home on Fallsview in Dundas and went outside, which was like the waterfront at Port Alberni. As Brady was walking ahead of us, he suddenly turned into a frog. We couldn’t believe it. Before we knew it, he hopped off and disappeared. As we were scratching our heads, wondering what to do, Andrea, Brady’s mother, came out and said: “We’ve been looking out of the window and we’re worried about Brady. Where is he?”
“You won’t believe it, but he turned into a frog!”, I blurted.

We finally found a smaller frog, and wondered if this was Brady. We weren’t sure. We coaxed him back to the house. As he hopped up the step, we asked hopefully: “You ARE Brady, aren’t you?”, at which point Brady re-appeared, disappointed to be called back from play so soon. “You shouldn’t have called my name”, he said. Les, Brady’s Dad, came out and asked what was going on. “You won’t believe it, but…”

The morals of the story are: Kids will be kids, or frogs. But all is well that ends well.

I hope Andrea is not still mad at us.

Friday 3 January 2014

Pondering peaks

Photo of two caribou bulls with locked horns, from http://trondekheritage.com/our-places/

As another year slides into the past and a new one challenges me in my winter cocoon to shape up and be more energetic, efficient and productive than ever, the world we inhabit remains challenged on many fronts. I am reminded on a passage from my book, High Up in the Rolling Hills:

“I ponder whether I have reached the maximum rate of return after which returns enter a terminal decline—peak life? Have living standards for many of us reached peak abundance? Is the big bubble about to burst? My generation has certainly borrowed much from the future and from the planet. The debts to be repaid are astronomical, and it is certain that they cannot be fully retired, at least at current punitive interest rates and current accelerated rates of destruction. Governments and mega-corporations—now in the developing world as well as the developed—plough through finite natural resources like there is no tomorrow.

Intensified industrial technologies have been aggravating unintended consequences for the ecosystem: air pollution, nuclear waste, radiation contamination, extreme weather events, desertification, acidification of the oceans, ravaging of fossil-fuel reserves, poisoning and depletion of soils and farmland, loss of flora and fauna habitat (and biodiversity). With these upheavals and losses go peak food, peak soils, peak health. It is simply not feasible for us to maintain our general well-being by turning our backs on the natural world. The truly wondrous biodiversity and plenty that recent generations inherited in short order by feverish greed in the quest for short-term gain. Long gone are those vast herds of bison roaming the wide-open North American grasslands, great auks patrolling the seas and passenger pigeons swarming in the skies. Wild salmon, cod, whales, sharks and turtles are disappearing from the oceans. Domesticated and farmed surrogates of wild creatures are no real substitute. With the animals and plants goes the heritage of ancient cultures, languages and whole ways of life that had been passed down over millennia. Which species is next to be rendered extinct by this orgy of wastefulness? The caribou? The hippopotamus? The rhinoceros? The elephant? The panda? The gorilla? The tiger? The polar bear? The penguin? The whale? The tuna? The butterflies? The bees? The frogs? All of the above?

"Humans have been killing other animals and slaughtering our own kind for as long as we have stood upright. But only in the last half century or so have we developed the capacity to extinguish not merely a species or a tribe, but whole floras and faunas. With the burning of fossil fuels, the splitting of atoms, the synthesizing of chemicals unknown in nature, the genetic engineering of organisms, and the headlong growth of our own population, we are disrupting all the life-sustaining processes on Earth. As our actions throw into disarray the conditions that have nurtured humankind for hundreds of thousands of years, what conditions will replace them?" (Scott Russell Sanders, Buffalo Eddy)

What are we learning from the tsunamis, the earthquakes, the volcanoes, the floods, the droughts, the tornadoes, the typhoons, the hurricanes? They We should react to these extreme workings of nature with some humility and a determination to rebuild and adapt. When we witness melting glaciers, ice sheets and polar caps; massive oil spills; radiation leaks from damaged nuclear plants; and extreme weather volatility across the planet, we would be wise to take a hard look at our world, size up the gravity of the situation and set out systems to mitigate the severity of the threats. As we witness the poisoning of our bodies and the poisoning of our planet’s lands and oceans, it only makes sense to make substantive changes to the way we live our lives. Our governments, drowning in debt and consistently sucked in by unrestrained multinational corporations, are driving us not away from but into the storm dragging us in a downward spiral. In tandem, governments and corporations lead us toward the brink, just as the herders led the buffaloes to the cliff to jump to their fate.”