I often wonder what prehistorical event or sequences of events drove early humans to morph from adapting to the myriad vagaries of dynamic nature into humans doing everything in their power to force nature to adapt to human proclivities, proclivities that are frequently detrimental to our survival. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle required a degree of social nimbleness and activity as they followed seasonal growth and migration patterns to keep themselves fed. It also required difficult decisions...

Aside from declaring the US is not the greatest country in the world, the two most blasphemous utterances one can make in the USA are, in no particular order, that humanity is an evolutionary mistake and that God was made in man's image. A close third for half the population would be any assertion that Dumb Donald is not the second coming of Christ despite his being identifiable in multiple scriptural references pointing to his anti-Christ tendencies. Thankfully, the Dumb Donald fanatics...

When I think of the SNAFU that has become the US government and the SNAFU society embraces thinking the US is a freedom paradise, which is a matrixed simulation, it is a wonder each and every one of us has not run afoul of some government agency and has been elevated to an enemy of the state status.

I've been tempted more times than I can count to pull an Everett Ruess and disappear into the backcountry somewhere bounded by the Colorado Plateau. To date, the nearest I have come to following the leader was a two-week camping excursion ranging from Bear's Lodge in Northeast Wyoming down to Chaco Canyon in Northwest New Mexico via Capitol Reef and Canyonlands National Parks. It was while camping in Needles that I was attacked...

What has the shift from community to commodity, from partner to slave wrought on us? Separation, loss, anxiety, ignorance. Isolation from the Mother that bore and provides for us. Loss of intimacy with plants and animals transitioning companionship to segregation. Anxiety as to how we will survive disconnected from the source of all known life. Ignorance of the Garden of Eden...

In the context of the late 1800s and early 1900s when Muir was alive, an era when Christianity had venomous claws deeply impaled in human consciousness, this was a radical, if not blasphemous, utterance. It was probably the most sacrilegious, with respect to Christianity, utterance until Edward Abbey burst onto the literary scene with the highly influential books, "Desert Solitaire" and "The Monkey Wrench Gang." Ed's works pretty much claimed nature is itself a deity worthy of human worship...

I will harken back to the beginning, to the purest, holiest, healthiest time in a human's life, a timeframe that starts with the onset of curiosity and ends when we become judgmental, defined as quickly forming critical or harsh opinions in lieu of understanding the individual. It is one of the most impoverished forms of humanity, one that eschews curiosity. It is particularly vile when manifesting as prejudice, the ultimate Fuck You to curiosity...

With the return of the wolves, the Park experienced a trophic cascade leading to significantly healthier environs. Wolf predation on Elk led to a series of connected ecological changes. Fewer Elk resulted in healthier vegetation communities which drew in pond-making beavers, aquatic birds, better fish habitat, and more diversity in the songbird populations. Soil erosion was reduced...

Just Say No To Empathy?

The roots of tyranny are nourished with the blood of the innocents by random acts of unkindness that grow into rampaging rivers of destruction fueled by the raging flames of fiery hate frequently unleashed in the pitch of night to gain plausible deniability made possible by the absences of witnesses...the absences of living witnesses...for the dead see all...