Saving Evolution
Medicine

It’s Down to You and Me and Everyone We Know What would you do to save life on earth? Are you more angel, or more demon? Are you more selfish, or more altruistic? Do you know your own character, abilities, and possibilities well enough to craft a personal solution to a species-wide problem to which […]

Emergence “On the whole, the ‘subduing of the wilderness,’ most agreed, was the foundation for future profit.” – Andrea Wulf in The Invention of Nature Countering the super-specialization and reductio ad absurdum of the end of the modern era is emergence. Like the thesis and antithesis construct created by Hegel and extolled by Walt Whitman, […]

Chemical Fantasies “The US agriculture giant Monsanto and the German chemical giant BASF were aware for years that their plan to introduce a new agricultural seed and chemical system would probably lead to damage on many US farms.” – Carey Gillam in The Guardian I make it a point to avoid thinking about Monsanto and […]

The Untapped Power of Narratives for Living Futures “This, it seemed to me, was not merely premonitory but a dream that actually did something… a dream, in short, that was an act of learning.” – Oliver Sacks Many human tools for thriving have been neglected as the old, dark enchantments that brought us to the […]

Molecularism Misleads: Data and Theory Blindness “If one wishes to understand the behavior of animals, one must take account of their individuality, annoying as this may be to those who prefer the tidiness of physics, chemistry, and mathematical formulations.” – Donald Griffin via Jennifer Ackerman in The Bird Way In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel […]

While the US Flounders, the Globe Steps Up “Even now, as we dream of embedding artificial intelligence into every surface of our lives… we’re making a bad copy of the Earth… and destroying the original.” – Claire Evans in “Beyond Smart Rocks” in Grow In the 80s, “appropriate technology” was a buzzword. In Africa, I […]

Fear of Life “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.” – Maya Angelou Though the dodo bird is long extinct, its name lives on as a reminder that sapiens took their lack of fear—and ease of killing—as a sign of stupidity. […]

The UN and the Grassroots Step Up “Only very recently in human did people realize that Homo sapiens, and everything it finds meaningful, might permanently disappear. [This discovery] is perhaps one of our crowning achievements. Why? Because we can only become truly responsible for ourselves when we fully realize what is at stake.” – Thomas […]

Screens for Dark Enchantment “The world has failed to meet a single target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems in the last decade… it is the second consecutive decade that governments have failed to meet targets.” – Patrick Greenfield in The Guardian Is your television using you, or are you using it? […]

Travel to the Living Earth—Without Leaving It “Deep in the forests of Ecuador, preservationists have created the first ‘quiet park’… the Taiwanese forest bureau recognized a ‘National Silence Trail’… [New Zealand’s] MacKenzie River Basin received their Dark Sky Reserve designation in 2012.” – Sam Goldman in “Building a movement to preserve silence as a natural […]

Devolution “Lemmings… come charging down… to burst into the sea… and drown. Man… break[s]… into groups which destroy one another. We do not know the reasons for…the sudden mutation in the group psyche which makes lemmings men react in such an interesting way.” – John Steinbeck to Wilbur Needham, 1940 You may have seen the […]

Thinking Fast “Perhaps we will have to inspect mankind as a species, not with our usual awe at how wonderful we are, but with the cool and neutral attitude we reserve for all things save ourselves.” – John Steinbeck in America and Americans For people who don’t think in money in modified forms such as […]

Dogma “I meet people who apologize because they work for salmon farms, on the Alberta tar sand, or for a pharmaceutical corporation or logging company. They say they don’t agree with their employers but they have to make a living. I hope none of you finds yourself in a situation where your job clashes with […]

Small is Beautiful “It’s with no irony that the world’s foremost scientific institutions are now recommending that to save nature, what needs to be done is, well, save nature.” – Jimmy Thomson in “One key solution to the world’s climate woes? Canada’s natural landscapes” The Narwhal In a previous posting, I pointed out that The […]

The Last Shade is Burning “Leiberg began his piece by stating that ‘a steadily progressing aridity is slowly replacing former, more humid climactic conditions from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific.” – Fifth issue of National Geographic, via Jack Nesbitt As Robin Wall Kimmerer has pointed out in Braiding Sweetgrass, late modern logic has taken […]

“If there is going to be a new green economy in Appalachia, this is how it will happen: one relationship at a time – between people, between people and land. [It] won’t make headlines. But it just might help put eastern Kentucky back together again.” – Gabriel Popkin in “The Green Miles” via The Washington […]

“One of Crutzen’s fellow Nobelists reportedly came home from his lab one night and told his wife, ‘The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.’” – Elizabeth Kolbert in The Sixth Extinction To make sense of our lives and the life of our species, we humans […]