“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.” – Robert Oppenheimer In any given week, any given month…
“The General Assembly has widely acknowledged that the world’s depletion of natural resources and rapid environmental degradation are the result of unsustainable consumption and production patterns which have led to adverse consequences for both the Earth and the health and…
What is the story we can tell about ourselves, to ourselves? Lewis Mumford, the 20th century historian and philosopher, said, “Every culture lives within its dream.” Like dreamers, we can’t know how–or especially why–we came to be here. Like dreamers,…
I appreciate the names of certain places. There are certain place names that to speak them aloud is to mimic the effort of a conjurer who would call up lost worlds or the dead. Arcadia comes to mind. Yorkshire is…
Consider, for a moment, the horse. Your average horse is still a romantic figure, evoking a rich historical relationship of labor, war, and transport. Horses made the journey across the Oregon Trail. Horses marched into battle, and lay among the…
I’ll sing about an emptiness the East has never known, Where coyotes don’t pay taxes and a man can live alone… And you’ve gotta walk forever, just to find a telephone. It’s sad, but the tellin’ takes me home. -Utah…
Note: This article first appeared in the June/July 2010 Zephyr. It’s almost looking like Spring at Pack Creek Ranch. The lawns are greening up. The horses are looking like they’re feeling their oats after a long hard winter. Splashes of…
Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground. That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the…
Can there be any doubt that we live in an age quantified, represented and defined by the cell phone? I came to this conclusion a few years back when visiting San Francisco at the Thanksgiving Holiday. I had given two…
One of my favorite poet/songwriters, Utah Phillips, once wrote: “I’ll sing about an emptiness the East has never known, Where coyotes don’t pay taxes and a man can live alone. And you’ve got to walk forever just to find a…