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Posts published in “Essays”

Why Bother?

Dave Smith’s invaluable Ukiah Blog Live pointed me to a sobering presentation by Guy MacPherson on YouTube entitled Twin Sides of the Fossil Fuel Coin. MacPherson is a prominent conservation biologist who argues clearly and concisely that the only hope for the survival of humans beyond another couple of decades is the complete collapse of our global industrial society right now, today, and even that probably won’t be soon enough to stave off fast-approaching human extinction and the extinction of virtually all living things due to increasingly rapid global warming.

River Views

It’s Boxing Day, the day for servants and the working class to receive presents from their employers. That centuries-old tradition sounds a lot like the 1% vs. 99% divide we face in the present. Boxing…

Christmas’s Greatest Anti-Carol

An armchair psychologist might say it could only be a December baby born in the Great Depression who could have devised a song so devastatingly critical of the contradictions between consumerist Christmas and Christian charity…

A Bachian Christmas

Last year during the crux of pre-Christmas consumption, I ventured into the greatest musical basement east of the Village Vanguard: the classical CD section of Dussman’s Cultural Department Store in the heart of Berlin. One…

Why Young Folks Aren’t Farming

At the Redding listening session in 2008, several board members wondered aloud how to “get young people interested in farming.” Since I am a bona fide young farmer, fresh out of ag university, I am…

My Beautiful America, Part 2

The Battlefield Park at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, claims to be the most intact battlefield of the Civil War. Maybe so, maybe so, bare of monuments except for a few that acknowledge the reunions of those…

‘Paranoia Strikes Deep’

Headline: A lone gunman opened fire today in (San Francisco, Aurora, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Oak Creek...) and shot _____ innocent people, killing _____ people and wounding ____ more. Politicians offered sympathy, but no solutions.…

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