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Did I Fall Down The Rabbit Hole Into A Dystopian World Or Is This Really Real?

 Greed and the real estate boom in Boothbay Maine  tolu-olubode-unsplash I was recently in an online dialogue in my local community where I encountered a developer willfully oblivious to the warnings from the state and the town water department concerning the danger posed by further development to Boothbay’s two water supplies. The warnings came in five years ago when the development on the peninsula was already occurring at a faster than average pace and before the Botanical Gardens built a parking lot in the watershed and the Country Club developer finagled a dysfunctional rearrangement of roads in the center of town to his advantage. The developer whom I shall call Howard, though it is not his name, expressed his vision for quadrupling the density of the village of East Boothbay, where Andersen Design’s production and home were located from 1958 to 2017.  Said by “Howard”: Low income housing should focus on rental units and cluster units like townhouses. Another approach would be

What Ceramic Casting Slip Can Tell About The Effects of Development On The Water Supply, That Our Political Leaders Won’t Say

jelleke-vanooteghem-unsplash Today there is a cloud of topics floating around in my head and I am wondering which is the starting point of this story and so I begin in the present where I am pondering how to begin.   I started writing on Medium because I have a mission to preser v e  my family's historical hand-crafted ceramic art and design business  into the future. My motivation for doing so is simple, or at least it was in the beginning. My mission began with a love for the work process for which I am very grateful for having been given such a life but such a life also makes me an outsider and so I understand the need for places in society where the outsider finds a home. Our business has provided that to more than a few outsiders throughout its history which began in 1952. Right now the business does not have a physical form and so it has receded into its primordial beginnings where its philosophical content and meaning are its form.  The material forms that the business produ

What Do Lessons from the Industrial Revolution Have to Tell Us Today?

 A historical reversal of direction underway? k-b-W-unsplash T he nineteenth-century influenced the social-political and economic development of human life on earth in vibrant living color. Not! The nineteenth-century industrial revolution produced dreary over-crowded unsanitary conditions for human life, at its best. While eleventh-century walls raised humanity out of fighting for survival to living for prosperity, the nineteenth-century steam power saved hours in production labor and sank humanity into a dank swamp of pollution and over-population. Even the baroque city, which Lewis Mumford detested for its hollow core, had its saving graces. If most of the population in a baroque city lived in squalor, the wealthy still created a healthy balanced living style for themselves, not so in the industrial revolution. The idea of a healthy relationship between humanity and nature was erased in the cities during the industrial revolution. There is no more horrifying depiction of living cond