Links / Nature
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Produced by a clothing brand (apologies), this video follows Matt Somerville, a bee conservationist. For the last fourteen years, Matt has created log hives in winter, placing them throughout the landscape in summer to provide shelter for wild honey bees. They’re beautiful structures—sculptures of sorts—and I very much appreciate the work. Judging by this short documentary, creating just a single log hive is no easy feat, and the man has created thousands.
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A scene from The Brutalist, perhaps:
When we eventually reached a quarry and I got out the car, I felt as if I had walked into an overexposed photograph. The heat and light were obliterating. The quarry looked more like a modern metropolis than a natural landscape: soaring towers, symmetrical grids, improbably clean lines. Heavy machines lurked; giant blocks of freshly quarried stone, stacked like slabs of butter, awaited their ride down the mountain. Small broken bits of marble were everywhere.
It’s a little jarring to read about the Massa-Carrara region in Italy—known for the beautiful marble that decorates our kitchens and buildings—and find that it is among the poorest regions in Tuscany. The profits of the industry bypass the region they mine from, and the ecological effects are devastating, as reported by The Dial.
According to those who have worked in the local quarries for decades, the finest white variety has been entirely depleted; the rest of the quarries could be emptied within 50 years.
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An essay I wrote recently led me down a rabbit hole on stone skipping, culminating in this read on Kurt Steiner, a man who "has dedicated his entire adult life to stone skipping, sacrificing everything to produce world-record throws that defy the laws of physics."
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Life At The Cabin
№ 17A Dutch man named Martijn purchased two historic cabins on top of a hill in Italy with the goal to renovate them and create a homestead. He’s a photographer, so the process of him doing so is incredibly well documented. I’ve seen folks get put off a bit by the idea of him "being alone in nature, yet followed persistently by a drone", but I’ve really enjoyed watching these videos.
They’re very soothing, and you can watch them actively or have them on in the background. It’s fascinating to see him go about everything from shielding himself from the cold, to setting up solar panels, or driving wood up the hill to build a temporary cabin. Lovely stuff. Thanks for sharing, Marius!