Thoreau’s Walden is a masterpiece of transcendentalist philosophy that has inspired many generations of Americans. It’s also a text ripe for revival. My generation is trying to balance our dependence on modern technology with our love of the quickly-vanishing natural world. Too often it feels like we are caught in a zero-sum game pitting modernity [...]
“We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all [...]
“One night somebody asked, when is the best time in a man’s life? Some said, it’s when you are a kid and can fool around all the time and go down to the river in the summer and play hockey on the road in the winter and that’s all you think about, fooling around and [...]
When I decided to move back to Humboldt after returning from Japan in summer 2013, I was motivated by several different factors. One of the most influential was my growing trepidation about the problem of climate change, which birthed in me a desire to settle myself in a strong community and start learning about sustainable [...]
It’s been ten years since I first read The Grapes of Wrath, and I now realize that my seventeen-year-old self was incapable of internalizing even a fraction of the tragedy and grace contained in this overwhelming story. A decade on, what was once fodder for my sophomoric literary intellect has recast itself as a narrative [...]
We are living through the most overpopulated, wasteful, and polluted moment in human history. In response to the increasing data and alarm regarding the problem of climate change, many people have begun searching for philosophical and practical frameworks to illuminate how we can reduce our participation in environmental destruction and start healing Earth’s depleted ecosystems. Moral [...]
Every human struggle needs an image of a better future for supporters to rally around, but it’s never enough to simply know where we want to end up. The accomplishment of profound societal change, if sought peacefully, also demands a set of linguistic and psychological frames revolutionaries can use to inform, impassion, and ultimately persuade [...]
I think it’s a fair assertion that anyone willing to eat the meat of another animal ought to also be willing to participate in that animal’s death. The experience of killing animals for sustenance, which has been commonplace for most humans throughout our history, is now just one item on the long list of productive [...]
Last week, I experienced something that could only be considered “special” by someone from a generation out of touch with food production. It all began with Polly the goat. Polly is a beautiful and affable nanny from Tule Fog Farm; I milk her first thing when I arrive every Wednesday morning. When I first learned [...]