Sustainable Living

Plastiscenes

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

To show the impact of litter on what should be pristine beaches, I’ve been exploring a new way of processing my photographs: First, I take a traditional seascape. Then, using a transfer lift, I print it onto marine litter collected at the same location, usually on the same day.

Sunbeams

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

Slight was the thing I bought, / Small was the debt I thought, / Poor was the loan at best— / God! but the interest!

Paul Laurence Dunbar, “The Debt”

Sunbeams

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Glass Overfull

leathtonino@gmail.com — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

There has been a boom, and soon there will be a bust, in global human population. And no advanced civilization will be able to reemerge because we will have used everything up. There will be no oil and gas and other supplies of that nature to maintain any civilization that might emerge from the ashes of this one.

Records

Fri, 30 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

A favorite album, a fastest time, a handwritten note about an adoption

Wattle

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Abner read somewhere that it’s a resonant gesture to clone an old apple tree. You plant the clone near the original tree, and there they are, old and new, same and different, together.

Sunbeams

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

To those devoid of imagination, a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

Aldo Leopold

Thoreau and Me

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0400

Thoreau was the same sort of hippie I am. The main difference between us is that I do not want my writing to be as absolutely sexless as his. I want to be a Thoreauvian capable of lust.

Fuel

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0400

Feeding the woodstove, siphoning gas with a hose, drinking endless cups of coffee

A Seat at the Table

wyattww@gmail.com — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0400

The terrible emotions I was filled with are the truth of what it means to be alive. When you live, something else dies. Even if you only eat plants, animals die for you to be able to eat. We do not talk about that often enough.

Estate Sale

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:05:00 -0400

On the first day of the estate sale I strung a backdrop from a tree in the front yard and did what any photographer trying to deal with a difficult personal situation would do: I took pictures.

Yard Sales

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Hunting for bargains, letting go of possessions, emptying out a home

Tangled Avenues

dgmlewis@gmail.com — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 05:00:00 -0500

Cities are social, so they have the same problems we do. The mistake we always make in our culture is thinking that cities are somehow separate from us and that if we conceive of the right design for them, they will magically relieve us of our problems. By investing this theoretical power in cities, we can avoid confronting the flaws in the way we have built the world: with inequality and oppression and systems that make some people’s lives miserable while other people’s lives are good.

The Salmonella Special

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 04:10:00 -0400

In twelve months I hadn’t set foot in a supermarket, hadn’t compared the prices of two brands of bread, hadn’t stood in a checkout line to buy anything, not even a pack of Tic Tacs. Everything I ate had been thrown away. Everything I ate, I’d found first.

Don’t Panic

dgmlewis@gmail.com — Wed, 31 May 2023 04:00:00 -0400

I’m not talking about burning the system down. . . . I simply think that the things we can do to respond to climate change will also make the world a better place for most people.

Sunbeams

Wed, 31 May 2023 04:00:00 -0400

I’m still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake.

Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Things To Do In Buffalo, Wyoming, While Waiting Out The Coronavirus

Thu, 29 Apr 2021 04:00:00 -0400

Chop wood, shovel snow, bake bread, / make dinner, and after take the compost / to the bin, nearly full though only half / decomposed.

Our Great Reckoning

leathtonino@gmail.com — Sat, 07 Nov 2020 17:00:00 -0500

In this current pandemic the fear and upheaval drove Americans to hoard toilet paper and guns and ammo. Try to imagine a food shortage instead of a scarcity of toilet paper.

Sunbeams

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

Rachel Carson

October 2019

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Featuring Kathleen Dean Moore, Greg Palast, Shozan Jack Haubner, and more.

Sunbeams

Sun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 -0400

She loved the serene brutality of the ocean, loved the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air.

Holly Black, Tithe

The Backyard

Sun, 01 May 2016 12:19:00 -0400

A mountain of sand, a game of cops and robbers, a pod of humpback whales

Sunbeams

Tue, 17 Nov 2015 16:48:34 -0500

The two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food, and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it.

Andy Rooney

That Terrible Thoreau

Tue, 01 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0400

As the class winds down, I go over the answers to the quiz: Thoreau moved into his ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin on July 4, Independence Day, 1845. He chose that day to make the point that political independence is just the beginning. We’re not completely free until we also throw off our inner masters: greed, laziness, ignorance.

The End Of A Sixties Dream?

Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0400

We’re becoming so bland now, and I really pray that we get to see another burst of energy. When the sixties happened, it lifted me up and blew my mind and informed my consciousness in a way that was a million times heavier and more interesting than anything I’d experienced before. I think it did that for many people. And now, knowing that such a thing can happen, I can just sit here and wait for it — like “Yeah, here it comes again!”

The Word Gets Around

Thu, 01 May 2014 00:00:00 -0400

We know that the big job is to save the world, but where do you start? I’m convinced that if we are unable to work in our home communities, the job is not going to be done. The world is going to be saved by people who fight for their homes, whether they’re fighting for the block where they live in the city or a stretch of mountain or river. But unless they can fight within their own communities, I think they’re kidding themselves.

The Undiscovered Country

leathtonino@gmail.com — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0400

But to find the sacred only in the wilderness would be like finding it only in a beautiful church on Easter. Unless the sacred is imbued in your day-to-day life, in your work, in the food on your table, in the attitude you take toward the health of your own community, its value is limited.

We Are Not Worth More, They Are Not Worth Less

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I think of myself as a recovering white male, recovering from my early conditioning about how to be successful. The value system I was raised with dehumanized me to the point that I followed an order to travel nine thousand miles to participate in destroying another people. It’s incredible that I could do that, and without really thinking much about it. That’s why I wrote the book — to understand how it was so easy for me to do that.

Sowing Dissent

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

A farm should be aesthetically, aromatically, and sensuously appealing. It should be a place that is attractive, not repugnant, to the senses. This is food production. A farm shouldn’t be producing ugly things. It should be producing beautiful things. We’re going to eat them.

Against The Grain

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Politicians are not leaders; they are followers. They think that, because they can plunder the public treasury, they are leading. In fact they are terrified of the people. The people are a problem for them to manage, and when they can no longer manage them, they must follow them, or oppress them.