To start with a few words about myself, I am a conservationist serving the rainforests of the Western Ghats in India. It has been my lifelong inquiry to look at how a biome can recover from assault – from colonial-neocolonial-capitalistic-civilizational […]
The Gospel of Progress
Ever since the archaic divergence of humanity from other hominids, our systems of tools and symbols have developed at an accelerating pace. We depend less and less on the physical capacities of our bodies. We operate more and more in […]
The dirty truth about clean energy
Everyone knows what needs to be done to bring down CO2 levels; pump less of it into the atmosphere. But instead of reducing overall energy consumption, the focus is on increasing ‘green’ energy consumption: electric vehicles, massive electric storage installations, […]
Pandemic Blues
The Covid-19 pandemic, lethal as it is, is instrumental to capital’s assault on the living world. Looming through the terrors unleashed by free-flying strands of DNA are gargantuan infrastructural projects, including medical, green and digital. These are intent on destroying […]
Attending to the world
“Attention discourse” is my term for the proliferation of articles, essays, books, and op-eds about attention and distraction in the age of digital media. I don’t mean the label pejoratively. I’ve made my own contributions to the genre, in my […]
Collecting seeds to restore prairie grasslands
Laughter and the chirping of grasshoppers mingled on a mild August morning as several young women, members of the Aaniiih and Nakoda tribes, searched for sweetgrass, running vegetation through their fingers as they tried to determine whether they held satiny sweetgrass or […]
Birdsong as a Compass
The booming call of the Pheasant Coucal is soft and rhythmic on a calm, springtime afternoon. I first noticed it in 2004, when I was eight years old. From the window of our old weatherboard house, I spotted the bird […]
