Reading in progress
Monday 26 October 2026
What is working, where, and who made it work. Read the whole turn of the earth in two minutes, then go as deep as you like.
Turn the thermostat down by one degree tonight and put on the jumper you were saving for November. By the weekend you will not notice the difference.
299 of 365Over the course of 2025, the restoration team at Beaver Trust put beavers into British water 22 times. One of those releases was the first in England to be carried out as an authorised wild release, meaning it went ahead with official permission. Others brought beavers into Scottish river catchments new to the programme. The species had been missing from Britain for roughly four centuries.
Elsewhere in Europe, some of the same work is happening without anyone moving animals at all. Beavers are spreading into northern Italy from across the Alps under their own power, and Beaver Trust contributes to the surveys and research tracking them there. In Portugal, the Rewilding Portugal team confirmed in 2025 that a wild beaver had been seen. It was the first in the country for about 500 years.
Back in Scotland, the charity spent part of the same year counting beavers across the catchment of the River Tay. It was a large survey, done so that the population there can be followed more closely. The charity also helps landowners and communities find workable arrangements for living with beavers. Its Making Space for Water campaign argues, among other things, for paying landowners who leave room for the animals.
Beaver Trust has now joined Rewilding Europe's European Rewilding Network. Richard Young, its chief executive, describes the move as a way to "connect our work in Britain with a growing movement". In practice the charity will share what it has learned about catching and moving beavers, keeping them well, monitoring them afterwards, and helping them and their human neighbours live alongside each other.
Rewilding Europe · Read the source
The Restart Project has published the Open Repair Alliance's latest dataset: records of more than half a million attempted repairs, gathered at community repair events across many countries. Each record is short. There is a device type, a brand where someone wrote one down, an outcome of fixed, repairable or end of life, and often a line of free text typed by a volunteer at the end of a long Saturday. 'Hinge snapped, no part available.' 'Battery swollen, advised recycling.' The free text holds the useful part: why things fail and what stops them being mended.
Free text is hard to count. Restart has handled this before by asking people to do it. Its online 'quests' had volunteers read fault notes one at a time and sort them into categories. That is slow, and it is also a check: a person who reads 'screen' in a laptop note can tell a cracked panel from a dead backlight. A text classifier could make a first pass over half a million rows in an afternoon. It would also produce confident labels for notes written in shorthand, in several languages, by tired people, and someone would still have to sample its output and correct it. Whether that saves time depends on how much correcting there turns out to be. Nobody should claim a figure before trying it.
The cost matters at this size of job. Sorting a spreadsheet does not need a large hosted model drawing power and cooling water in a data centre. A small model run on an ordinary laptop, checked against the categories volunteers have already agreed, would do. Anything bigger would be machinery out of proportion to the work.
For the record, the readings above this column, including today's piece on beaver releases, were drafted by a language model and then edited. They involved the same trade: speed bought, accuracy to be checked by a person.
The Restart Project, 'We've released data on half a million attempted repairs' · source
Potatoes and onions stewed in one pot until they catch, for the first week the clocks have gone back.
Melt the butter in your widest heavy pan with a lid, slice the onions into half-moons and let them cook slowly for fifteen minutes or so, until they are soft and just browning at the edges. Scrub the potatoes and carrots without peeling them, cut the carrots into thick coins and the potatoes into rough, uneven chunks, some big and some small, so that the small ones collapse into sauce while the big ones hold. Add them to the pan with the bay, a good pinch of salt and the liquid from the beans topped up with water to about 300ml (½ pint), then put the lid on, turn the heat as low as it will go and leave it for forty minutes, shaking the pan now and then rather than stirring. The bottom should catch and stick a little; that crust is the point, and you will know it is there when the smell turns from boiled potato to something nearer toast. Tip in the beans for the last ten minutes, then scrape the crust up from the base with a wooden spoon, break everything roughly together, and finish with a great deal of pepper and the carrot tops or parsley, chopped fine.
Nothing drops off. Today's readings move here tomorrow morning and stay, filed under the entrypoint they came in on. Below is the back-spool already gathered from the network.
The institutions whose public output feeds this reading. Each is watched every morning for what it publishes openly. Individuals are not listed here.
Permaculture Association · Permaculture Magazine · Regeneration International · Seed Savers Exchange · Garden Organic · Navdanya · Biodynamic Association UK · Biodynamic Demeter Alliance · Rodale Institute · Kiss the Ground · Savory Institute · Landworkers Alliance · Sustainable Food Trust · Real Farming Trust · Agroforestry Research Trust · Soil Association · A Growing Culture · Pasture for Life · Farmerama Radio
Ecosystem Restoration Communities · Rewilding Britain · Rewilding Europe · Trees for Life · Knepp Estate · Beaver Trust
The Restart Project · Low-tech Magazine · Makery · Repair Cafe International · Precious Plastic · Library of Things · Wuyong (Ma Ke)
Centre for Alternative Technology · AECB · Passivhaus Trust · Community Energy England
Julie's Bicycle · Dark Mountain Project · Emergence Magazine · Orion Magazine · Resurgence & Ecologist
Shareable · Transition Network · Global Ecovillage Network · Capital Institute
Bioneers · Gaia Education · Schumacher College · Center for Humans and Nature · Findhorn Foundation