The Mechanical Jacobin

Mr. Henry Ford II recently remarked that as other countries obtain automobiles on the scale of ownership in the United States, their culture will approximate to ours. This is too true. And other lands lack the space and adaptability of America, so that the popular...

Planting Trees

This spring my man George and I planted more than two thousand saplings upon my infertile ancestral acres. To plant a tree nowadays—particularly an oak or an elm, on badly watered land—is an act of hope and faith. Edmund Burke, writing at the inception of the...

Planting

Only a man who remembers his debt to his ancestors is likely to plant for posterity. —Russell Kirk

Ruminations of a Small-Scale Forester

As I hope nearly everybody knows already, our American woodlands continue to diminish alarmingly. It is not only the big forests of the Pacific slopes, harvested by the great lumbering companies, that dwindle, or the swamp forests of the Gulf states and lower South:...

Turn Down Your Thermostat and Throw Away Your Gadgets

Strict rationing of fuel oil and perhaps of gasoline is an immediate prospect. Even were not America’s supplies of petroleum threatened by the war in the Levant, we still would be short of oil for this winter—and short of natural gas, too, and of electrical current....