knee deep in the salt marsh

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"There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people."

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Vincent van Gogh (via thewastedgeneration)

(Source: aquaticwonder, via tribal--child)

animalgazing:

Red Deer Reflection by Old-Man-George

fairy-wren:

Steller’s Jay. Photo by schochin

anhtm:

Dawn in the road by Nachett http://flic.kr/p/ehQm1j

animalgazing:

baby peacock (asain peafowl) by thomas motyka

utnereader:

Our Hidden Wealth
My wife grew up in what Western experts, not without condescension, call a “developing” country. The social life of her village revolved largely around a tree. People gathered there in the evening to visit, tell stories, just pass the time. Some of my wife’s warmest childhood memories are of playing hide-and-seek late into the evening while the parents chatted under the tree—or on a neighbor’s porch, which was another version of the same thing.
The tree was more than a quaint meeting place; it was an economic asset in the root sense of that word. It produced a bonding of neighbors, an information network, an activity center for kids, and a bridge between generations. Older people could be part of the flow of daily life, and children got to experience something scarce in the United States today—an unstructured and noncompetitive setting in which their parents were close at hand.
In the United States we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on everything from community centers to kiddie videos to try to achieve those results, with great inefficiency and often much less positive effect. Yet most Western economists would regard the tree as a pathetic state of underdevelopment. They would urge “modernization,” by which they would mean cutting down the tree and making people pay money for what it provided. In their preferred vision, corporate-produced entertainment would displace local culture. Something free and available to all would become commodities sold for a price. The result would be “growth” as economists understand that term. Keep reading.