Kevin Anderson, a climate scientist at the University of Manchester in the U.K., is one of those humans who somehow never learned to be a proper, timid professional, and is therefore honest to a fault. One of our species’ success…
“It ain’t wilderness unless there’s a critter out there that can kill you and eat you.” – Doug Peacock At 9:30 p.m. on June 12, 2000, our Alaska Airlines jet lifted off in the black, rainy gloom of Seattle, Washington,…
Every March I’d drive west from the Roaring Fork Valley in Colorado, up to the massive Island in the Sky in Canyonlands National Park. Driving up there on Utah 313 I felt like a fly climbing a whale’s back. Standing…
The first time I went to Big Bend I drove all night. West of San Antonio on US 90 the land emptied into flat black space and one or two distant lights. After two hundred miles I crossed the wild…
You’re damn right there’s an immigration problem in Arizona: far too many white people have been emigrating there. If you doubt that, here are the numbers: while the Hispanic population in Arizona increased by 856,000 between 1980 and 2006, the…
“Evidence of the power and effect of jokes can be seen in the fact that dictators and totalitarian regimes – and occasionally also thin-skinned politicians in democracies – fear them like the plague.” – Paul Watzlawick As is so often…
“After several centuries of experiments and false starts, the foundations of modern Puebloan society emerged from the crucible of post-Chaco chaos: egalitarian, ritually based, anti-hierarchical.” – Archaeologist Stephen Lekson, 2008 It was one of those old motels, shaped like an…
“I’d hoped that my intuitions were wrong, but they weren’t.” – Jim Stiles, 2007 It’s late Monday morning at Starbucks, on the day after New Year’s. The snow outside is beginning to whip up; several inches are forecast for later…
“The whole society is going someplace else.” – Gary Snyder Five years ago, the November sun baking my face, I hiked into the Chihuahuan Desert eight miles north of Las Cruces, New Mexico, into all the space and light. Sipping…
On the Consistency of Bullshit: an Ever-Swirling Tale By Scott Thompson I think that at least 90% of what the public sees about climate change on television or reads in right-leaning books and publications is bullshit. And by that…