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…
Visions… Once in a while something very like a vision comes along. Those, as we all know, are not scheduled in advance. They happen in subways, tangled woods, high plains, classrooms, prisons, battlefields. There are many recipes, special behaviors,…
Could a water-vapor runaway greenhouse effect happen here on Earth? The physics says no, the orbit is too far from the sun, but the physics can’t model clouds either. Score: physics 0, James Hansen 0. Here we are, three years…
What do oil companies & environmentalists have in common? Sometimes their money comes from the same ‘donor.’ A few years ago, High Country News and Writers on the Range published an essay by Gary Wockner called, “Can Billionaire Philanthropy Save…
“In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.” — Derrick Jensen, Endgame: Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization Formed in the mid 1980s in order to dispel the…
Many Moabites were not quick to embrace the Mountain Bike Phenomenon. Local businesses geared to tourism were the first to see the benefit and tolerated the invasion, if not fully embracing it. Old Moab was not so generous. These guys…
I was going to write about population, water and the Southwest, largely where I’m still headed. But then came headlines about the Occupy Movement; an essay on the Cassandra dilemma, and my ongoing frustration that a nation founded on the…
BACK TO JACKSON HOLE… Approaching my old home grounds, Jackson’s Hole, I start gearing down. Deep breathing, concentrating on traffic, letting all else blur by. But a parking place has to be found and by then I’ve remembered the sagebrush…
Bonfire of the Vanities by Doug Meyer Quotations from “Inferno” by Charles Bowden “It is not simply that I do not have clean hands. It is worse: I refuse to wash them…” In case you hadn’t noticed, the…
In the summer of 1987, the economy of Moab and Grand County hit rock bottom. A few years earlier, as uranium prices plummeted, the Atlas Vanadium Processing Mill north of town closed its doors for good. The mill, which had…