Browse Topics
Sustainable Living
How To Kiss The American Dream Goodbye
Here’s one small metaphorical leap from travel literature: the journey of life can be enjoyed even in cheap hotels. This idea is standard in any folk philosophy — better to have modest means and do what you enjoy. Even in the carpeted corridors of yuppiedom, people are considering “downsizing” their frenetic careers, although this is more a search for sanity than the pursuit of an ideal. What I advocate is more radical than winching down from six digits of income to five.
January 1993Living Simply
At fifty-five, I look back on a life so complicated that had I set out to make things hard for myself, I couldn’t have done a better job.
June 1992The Way Of The Hunter
An Interview With Richard Nelson
A Koyukon hunter once told me with great pride, “I’ve trapped this country for fifty years, and it’s as rich today as it was when I first started hunting here.” If you overuse or disrespect the environment, you’ll get a message back. Isn’t that exactly what’s happening to us now, on a much larger scale? The message comes to us in the form of cancers that invade our bodies, in the changing climate, in the erosion of soil, in the diminishing capacity of the earth to sustain us. The message is that we can’t go on living like this.
May 1992The Sky’s The Limit
The same day I get the bad news about my gums, I find out the hole in the ozone layer is worse than anyone thought.
January 1992Bad Magic: The Failure Of Technology
An Interview With Jerry Mander
In this culture, we have science and technology as religion. We no longer have a religious or philosophical basis for making choices regarding the evolution of technology. All those decisions are made in the corporate world.
November 1991Defending What You Love
An Interview With Edward Abbey
But still, when all other means fail, we are morally justified — not merely justified, but morally obligated — to defend that which we love by whatever means are available. If my family, my life, my children were attacked, I wouldn’t hesitate to use violence to defend them. By the same principle, if land I love is being violated, raped, plundered, murdered, and all political means to save it have failed, I feel that sabotage is morally justifiable.
August 1990Progress And Other Lies
An Interview With Thomas Berry
The root of our contemporary industrial pathology is what I call a deep, hidden rage in the Western world against the human condition. We are devastating the planet in an orgy of destructiveness. We refuse to accept anything in its natural state.
July 1990Plain And Simple: A Journey To The Amish
I had always devalued Hestia, the peaceful goddess of the hearth. I thought poor, dull Hestia, the ugly duckling goddess, was stuck by the hearth, while my favorites, Athena and Artemis, were out there in the world, slaying dragons. But when I learned that the Latin word for hearth is focus, something clicked.
December 1989Questions Of Lifestyle
Voluntary simplicity has gained popularity since the late Sixties. Of course the idea is at least as old as the first religions, but nowadays voluntary simplicity is not practiced for overtly religious reasons. A cynic might say that a sense of reparation for damages done is driving some to practice a new spirit of self-denial. It touches most strongly, after all, the descendants of the adventurous, progressive pioneers from Western Europe who invaded this country a few centuries ago. In any case, exploitation is a touchstone by which many of us gauge our use of toilet paper, gasoline, rubber, washing machines, nylon, coffee, newspaper and on and on.
November 1986Learning To Walk
For half a year now, summer to winter, I have been walking-in-place. I do not use any form of motorized transportation. I walk or bicycle everywhere.
March 1986
