And Irma, we don't really give a crap about you, either. Water, Water, Everywhere Twenty-seven TRILLION gallons of water dumped on Southeast Texas in six days? That's what the various reports say. And we say, "Big whoop!" Wild-Westy, pavement-obsessedy Houston essentially destroyed, molded, and steeped in a toxic stew from chemical plants gone kablooey while the … [Read more...]
Jill Stein’s Ridiculous Run
I share many of Green Party Presidential Nominee Jill Stein's values. On climate and energy, I absolutely agree that our world is in crisis and that we need some form of a "Green New Deal," though whether that would be her plan, or some other approach, is, for me, still a point of debate. On her view that an energy transition would have multiple cost-saving and health … [Read more...]
A Lesson from the Holocaust for the Era of the Sixth Extinction
This article is the first in a two-part series. My mother didn’t die when so many others did – and that means she lived to give birth to me. I write about this now, because it has everything to do with today, even though the cataclysm in which so many perished happened more than 75 years ago. I owe my life, in part, to people who were willing to risk theirs, whose names I … [Read more...]
Presuming to Care about the Earth
There are times that I find myself wandering pensively in the woods, asking aloud, “so how should I presume?” I just read about the land sinking -- up to thirteen inches a year in some places -- in the Central Valley of California. I also just read about there being no mountaintops left in certain areas of West Virginia anymore. None. And, the coal companies are pulling … [Read more...]
How Pope Francis’s climate encyclical is liberating the world
In my life there are two things that have the effect of at least somewhat isolating me from others. The first is being a writer on climate change, peak oil, and the economic crises bound up with those modern predicaments. The other is being a Christian environmentalist. In the first case, my essays, as well as my social media presence, fairly well run counter to the whole … [Read more...]