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The Age of Human Arrogance, Part II
What on Earth Are We Doing? The Madness of Mining the Cosmos While Poisoning Our Only Home Humanity stands at a strange and tragic crossroads. We boast of our intelligence, our innovation, our “progress,” yet we behave like a species determined to sabotage its own future. We tear open the earth for minerals, metals, and […]
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Climate Crisis Threatens Everything
It was the summer of 2003. I was employed at the time as the national coordinator of the Independent Progressive Politics Network, working towards, we hoped, a progressive, broad-based alternative to the Dems and Reps. But something happened that summer in Europe which changed my life, leading me to leave that IPPN job a year […]
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The Age of Human Arrogance
For most of human history, we lived as one species among many. We shared forests with elephants, rivers with hippos, skies with vultures, and coastlines with turtles whose migrations predate our earliest civilizations. The natural world was not a backdrop to human life; it was the condition that made human life possible. For millennia, animals […]
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40-Year Taklamakan Greening Project Bears Fruit

An experiment in western China over the past four decades shows that it is possible to tame the expansion of desert lands with greenery, and, in the process, pull excess carbon dioxide out of the sky. Taklamakan Desert location. (PeterHermesFurian/iStock/Getty) The sprawling greening project along the edges of China’s Taklamakan Desert is creating a visible […]
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Who’s to Blame? Political Action, Personal Accountability, and Human Nature
[A version of this essay was presented at the Taos Community of Love service on October 19, 2025.] I know this isn’t a conventional church service, but I would like to start with scripture: “The moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted.” That’s not really scripture but rather a sentence […]
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Clean Solar Outshines Filthy Oil

We can have a world that runs on a resource that’s available to everyone everywhere. — Bill McKibben There’s a renaissance of nature powering the world, and it’s happening throughout the planet hidden from public view because it’s everywhere all at once and not in one isolated location easily identified. It’s solar panel installations experiencing […]

