Cheeseburger!

Earlier today I walked through the Key Bank parking lot right next door to my house, and I noticed a small stone memorial historical marker with some words etched into the top. Turns out the cheeseburger was invented...AT MY HOUSE!

This Little Piggy Ran Barefoot Hundreds of Miles to Market

Just read a fascinating New York Times article about how humans evolved as excellent barefoot distance runners.

The conventional logic is that humans are physically inferior to most wild animals and that it's our advanced brains and community organization that helped us thrive. That never felt like the whole picture to me, especially given how harshly competitive survival can be in nature.

The Most Important Letter I've Ever Written

"I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs."
-Frederick Douglass

Dear friends, family, and readers of my blog,

I recently read a fantastic but terrifying Grist.org article (and subsequent letter found near the bottom of the comment section) by Adam D. Sacks. Here is the link: The Absent Heart of the Great Climate Affair.

Damage Control

In the interest of unwinding any of the depression or despair my previous post may have caused, here's a quote from my hero:

We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it. I still believe we can act even when it's hard. I still believe--I still believe that we can act when it's hard. I still believe we can replace acrimony with civility, and gridlock with progress. I still believe we can do great things, and that here and now we will meet history's test.
Because that's who we are. That is our calling. That is our character.

-Barack Obama, Health Care Reform Speech to Congress, 9/9/09

Hold onto Your Hats and Glasses Folks...

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything." -Tyler Durden

So this is what climate change looks like. Orange and eerie. Ash from California wildfires, greatly exacerbated due to longer, hotter dry seasons and unprecedented droughts, has drifted into Colorado's atmosphere. The sky is yellowish-orange; the sun, hazy orange; the sunset, spectacular and orange; the moon, an uncanny, big orange pumpkin, all night long.

Walden Lives

I just read a fantastic Jonathan Hiskes article in Grist.com on Henry David Thoreau and climate change and felt compelled to respond.

Like Hiskes, I too am just about to finish rereading Walden at the moment, first time in years. I noticed Thoreau's stunt aspect as well, but I'm reminded also of a bigger philosophy to his experiment that has less to do with environmentalism, economics, and book deals, and more to do with a personal philosophy on living.

Universal Mind at Work?

Seems as though the great (and I don't mean that sarcastically, he's one of my heroes) Thomas Friedman has been thinking along the same lines as my previous post. His most recent New York Times column discusses The Great Disruption of 2008 in both the economy and the environment, and how we (as in, the human race) have begun to move from basing global economic growth on the one-time-use of one-time-mining of resources to creating renewable resource flows for cradle-to-cradle closed-loop products.

In other words, we're knocking down the blocks that comprised the old ideas and economic structures so we can rebuild our society and economy in more sustainable ways. He's even optimistic about our ability to rebuild before the environment and economy are too far gone. If he's got hope, and if Obama's got hope, then I can have hope.

Here's the link to his article: The Inflection Is Near?

Forget the Phoenix and Butterfly, I've Got a New Metaphor

Last night, I had a conversation with a really wise old woman named Carol. The discussion eventually turned to the economy. Carol told me a story of how she used to teach young children. The little boys in her class would inevitably end up at the back of the room playing with the building blocks. They'd build elaborate structures (or not, depending on the creative faculties of the child), and then knock them down in a loud clatter. Sometimes a flying block would hit a child in the face, maybe even hurting him, and he'd cry for a bit, but ultimately, the hurt would stop. More importantly though, they needed to knock down their creations in order to build something new and better and keep learning. Carol made the analogy that that's what's happening in our economy right now. I hope she's right.