Thirty years I ago, while I was an undergraduate at Boston University, the USA was engaged in an illicit war in Nicaragua, an effort headed by a man who was recently ousted as head of the NRA (Oliver North). Working as a paralegal at Equal Justice Institute, a pro-bono political asylum firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, […]

I. Mendocino headlands, 6:20 a.m.  Muffled grey skies, finger-chilling breeze, salinity infusing nostrils and eyes. The rhythmic whoosh and sigh of waves engulfing, abandoning, then reclaiming landfall with the fervency of ambivalent lovers. We have one hour before the minus tide recovers a sister-world of beings left gasping in dry oxygen. My girlfriend Terry leads the […]

Climate change is anthropogenic (human-caused). This is scientific fact. We have created novel climatological disturbances that have not existed for the past 800,000 years. I’m beginning this blog post with a graphic that everyone should be familiar with. On this graph, above, “normal” lies between the dashed lines. The dashes show the maximum levels that carbon dioxide […]

Sometimes we Creative Types need to mix it up! This spring I was inspired by the Gualala Arts Center 2019 Chowder Challenge where I joined two dozen other professional chefs from restaurants up and down the southern Mendocino county coastline. Friday morning I began in the East Bay by BARTing to Oakland’s Chinatown and buying […]

During the last months of my Fulbright-sponsored PhD research with the Tado community on Flores island (eastern Indonesia), my then-spouse was a passenger on a Singapore Airlines flight that crashed upon takeoff from Taipei. He survived. Ultimately, our marriage didn’t. “Class Divisions,” my recently published essay recounting what happened, emerged after almost two decades of […]

  “My mouth does not know how to pronounce these names, and my fingers only recently learned how to type them. This is a purely scientific form of ignorance.” In my most recently published essay (Camas, Winter 2018: Fragility), I tell the parallel stories of centuries of ecocide and genocide surrounding California’s largest lake, Clear […]

The New York Times recently featured an article written by Brooke Jarvis, ”The Insect Apocalypse Is Here” detailing citizen science research by German naturalists who compiled long-term quantitative data on the presence/absence of insects in nature reserves. Their conclusions, based on twenty-seven years of data collection, were stunning: flying insect abundance in the reserves had […]