Browse Topics

Plastiscenes

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

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

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

William Rees on Humanity’s Ecological Overshoot

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

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

Wattle

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

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

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

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

A Seat at the Table

Aviaja Lyberth Hauptmann on Indigenous Arctic Foodways in an Industrialized World

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.