In Torrey, we are blessed with an industrious neighbor, Mary B., who is working on getting the Torrey Town public lights, including street lights, modified to improve lighting and reduce light pollution. Mary is also working to make Torrey the first International Dark-Sky Association community in Utah. She asked us for a letter of support and we penned the following: Continue reading
Salt Lake City | Torrey, February 2017
Last August I received a call from my 83 year old mother. “Your father wants to speak with you,” she told me. It is like that with Dad and me, not a lot of direct communication. I told Mom I would come over the next day after dinner. When the time came I was surprised to see my wife, Kirsten, grab her purse and head for the door with me. My father has a reputation for being difficult and there are rarely volunteers to join me in seeing him. Dad is in his mid-eighties and as his oldest offspring I am to be the executor of his will. I thought he might want to talk about some details or arrangements, but when we all sat down around the table together, including Kirsten and Mom, he asked me if I wanted his observatory. I thought he was asking if I coveted his belongings, which I surely do not. But in my own advancing years I may have gained adequate wisdom so that when Kirsten kicked me under the table I ceased my objections and turned to see her silently mouth, eyebrows raised, “This is an honor.”
Dad at his Alpenglow Observatory in Salt Lake City, August 2016
In the economy, as in ecology, diversity is critical. And just as in the environment, our economy is losing diversity. Particularly in the press and newspapers. From a recent article in The Atlantic Magazine, “One analyst told The New York Times last year that 85 percent of all online advertising revenue is funneled to either Facebook or Google—leaving a paltry 15 percent for news organizations to fight over.” How do the journalists get paid who provide the news–for free–that Facebook and Google feed on?
No pay, no journalists. Big problem.
I have been promoted.
The other day I was compared to and quoted on the same page as Yvon Chouinard and Peter Metcalf. Chouinard has never heard of me and Metcalf might have to be reminded, but I will take it as my moment of greatness anyway. I guy now from Monticello, from Moab before that, and perhaps New Jersey originally, got worked up about a comment I made about not wanting a gravel pit in Torrey-Teasdale on a Facebook post of his and he dedicated an article on me (and Yvon and Peter) in a faux objective, compulsively contrarian piece. The unhappy guy refers to himself as a journalist and considered reporting about me his duty. So as not to seem too flattered by the attention, I admit he comes across more as a committed victim than he does as an objective journalist.
The worst place in the world for a cow.
12/30/2016. The country is in a deep kind of trouble that requires a response from every thinking citizen. For the sake of my posterity I am jotting down my personal plan.
We have a Republican president-elect who is unfit to serve. I don’t say this just because my candidate lost in a normal election. I do not feel about Trump like I felt about George W. Bush. Certainly I do not feel about Trump like I felt about Romney. In fact, I have thought that it would have been better if Romney had won in 2012 so that white backlash would not have produced Trump. I proudly voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, the most qualified person to ever run for the office. That we would be electing a woman after electing a black man amazed me, and I was thrilled at my country’s ability to continue to mature and progress socially. But instead of electing the most qualified person possible, we elected the least. Misogyny, bigotry, and racism are constantly espoused by Trump, ripped out from our darkest closets and made to seem as acceptable. Ignorance and intolerance are praised. An anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-environment cabinet is being put in place. The GOP, drunk on the prospects of unlimited power, continues to put party before country and will not provide check and balance.
The country is in deep shit. Continue reading
Environmentalists: An Eyewitness Account from the Heart of America by Steven D. Paulson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Round about 2007-2008 my son had graduated from Prescott College with a degree in environmental studies and was searching for his place in the workforce. Judging by the magazine covers on my coffee table at the time, I thought Nick might be catching a wave. Going “green” was all the rage. Then the Great Recession hit, the smartphone came out, and the culture wars erupted, knocking the nascent environmental movement off the front page and on to the back of the bus, perhaps under the bus. “Environmentalist” weirdly even became a negative, dismissive epithet.
Which is absurd. Continue reading
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was given this book by Kirtly Parker Jones, the chair of our board at Torrey House Press. I tell my kids they can put “Better Lucky Than Smart” on my tombstone and Kirtly is an example of why. She is as wise, gentle and insightful as they come and I know her simply because I built a house prominently in her viewshed in Torrey. Continue reading
Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness by Michael Branch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Michael Branch completely had me at “Bug.” I too have a vivacious, curious, energetic daughter I raised in the Great Basin and that I nicknamed “Bug.” Although mine was raised not in the wild but in the suburbs of Salt Lake City on the east edge of the Basin with only frequent trips to the Wasatch Mountains and to a remote second home high in the center of the Colorado Plateau. That and she is 32 years old already. Continue reading
I was so smitten by the red rock canyons and high country of the central Colorado Plateau that in the late 1990’s I built a home there near Torrey, Utah. With the house underway and drawn to the landscape around it, I went for day hike on nearby Boulder Mountain. I hoped to spend a little time writing near Meeks Lake which I anticipated would be a pristine natural alpine lake perched on 11,000 foot high Boulder top. On the way up the mountain I noticed there were a lot of cows and that the grass was hammered everywhere. I hiked around barbed wire fences and cattle guards, all on U.S. National Forest lands. I was surprised that there were always cows on both sides of the cattle guards and that livestock gates were always open. When I arrived at the lake I found it inundated by cows. It looked and smelled like a stockyard. Continue reading
I added four new shots to my astrophoto gallery this week. Continue reading