Blog

The right wing wants to stop adults from being trans
Knowles: ‘You have to ban transgenderism entirely’. Michael Knowles wants to ban people from being transgender. His ‘love’ for the Kansas bathroom bill is because it ‘aggressive[ly]’ excludes trans people.

Anti-trans bills encourage far-right violence
That may be the intent. It sure looks like the outcome. The far-right wants the support of the center. The center has anti-transgender legislative campaigns. The far-right perpetrates anti-transgender violence.

Why is the far-right ever more intensely anti-trans?
Because they’re bored by finally winning against abortion rights. Fascists oppose trans people because they find difference threatening. Being anti-trans is fundamental to their politics, and it predicts what comes next.

What we can’t conquer, we destroy and deny
A mindset that rejects wilderness will also reject people. Wilderness is the unknown. Much in the human is unknown too. A mindset that rejects wilderness will also reject humans who don’t fit social norms.

Talking to climate skeptics
Reflecting on ‘How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate’ (2015). Most USAmericans are scientifically illiterate. It’s not that they don’t memorize scientific facts; they don’t even know how scientific reasoning works.

Climate change, predicted (three decades ago)
Returning to an environmental classic: ‘The Ages of Gaia’ by James Lovelock. We don’t yet know what it will be like when the forests are gone. But we should live in a way that prevents this outcome. We must support our own survival.

The Industrial Revolution: All of it has to change again
Trains represent where we’ve been & where we‘ll go next. Steel, aluminum, concrete; fossil fuels; electric light; transportation, communication, refrigeration, medicine. Do we know what we have to change?

Tadpoles teach us in Kern’s ‘Real Sugar’
Stories for those who feel ‘fragile about frogs’. We can grieve “all the frogs that aren’t.” Some of our stories going forward, though, have to be about the frogs that are. Which will those be?

How we’re here now: Poems of California
Poems in ‘Rift Zone’ and ‘Last West’. We know in our bones what being is. Because we are. ‘To be’ is to exist in a place, to grow, to break off, to feel how this ties us to past and future.