Blog

‘This is the team’: Collective change on climate
‘Under The Sky We Make’ by Kimberly Nicholas. The ecological tipping points are upon us, and all is lost, unless we have a mindset change. “Look around you,” she writes. “This is the team. We are it.”

Animals want to live. Will they save us?
We are part of the world, but we don’t take it seriously. The Prophecy: They’ll renew time and heal the planet. The forest creatures find a way to show them the light. The oppressors can’t do it for themselves.

Everything around us? It’s ‘the surround.’
The word ‘environment’ puts the world in a cognitive box. ‘The environment,’ the entirety of Planet Earth, the world and its nature — so large, yet we manage to trap it in the box of our own minds.

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.

We know who’s responsible for orange sky
We need to hold them accountable. It’s Exx-smog and Shell-smoke. The big orange cats must be held accountable, and there’s more than one. Each of us has a role to play.

Designing a town people can get around? Repeat this exercise.
Anna Zivarts reminds us how we can take an hour to try harder. Sometimes we lack empathy for each other’s transportation needs and preferences. We have no idea because we haven’t stopped to try.