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Posts published in “Essays”

Green, Cheap, Now

Paul Fenn, founder of Local Power Inc., talks about the campaign to bring low-carbon energy to Sonoma County.

Superhumans & Populists In Mt. Shasta: Who Has The Rights?

It may not only be greatly symbolic, but critically fundamental that the gathering movement for local communities to assert their rights to self determine what goes on in the environment has begun at the foot…

Quo Vadis, OWS?

The question confronting the Occupy Wall Street encampments and their offshoots in scores of cities and towns around the country is quo vadis? Where is it going? This decentralized, leaderless civic initiative has attracted the…

Early Valley Days

Many events of the earlier days of Anderson Valley and its stories are fast becoming only memories and faint ones at that. One story that was recently revived was that of the Mason and Dixon…

The Greatest Poetry Reading Ever?

I don’t “do” many poetry readings — as some wag once quipped, riffing off Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem Howl, “I saw the best minds of my time bored at poetry readings…” But this one, held…

Occupy Yourself

In 1972, when I was in my early twenties, I founded a commune in Santa Cruz, California, a collective of eight people (with numerous and frequent overnight guests). We were disenchanted with American society, with America’s wars of aggression, with America’s pyramidal scheme of things, and with America’s environmentally disastrous use of the land, so we decided to explore new (to us) and regenerative ways to interface with the world rather than follow in the destructive footsteps of our parents and forefathers.

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