Recently I posed a question on social media that went something like this:
If you commute to a full-time job, do you expect your employer to provide you free parking? What about free lunch? Why one, and not the other?
Most of my fellow Americans (and especially Mainers) might consider the question facetious. But is it, really? Or does it point to a set of cultural assumptions that ought to be challenged?
Continue reading “There’s No Free Lunch”
I came across an old photograph, from the days before cell phones, when you had to drop off the film and pick up the prints later. The photo was taken in the summer of 1992 from the window of an Amtrak train on the outskirts of Albuquerque. I had never seen a backyard full of bathtubs before, and I managed just one shot before the train rolled on by.
You see things from the train that you see nowhere else, parts of America away from the vast network of roads and the endless chain of gas stations, stores and eateries, identical from coast to coast. On a train you see wild estuaries and flooding rivers. You see quaint midwestern towns and the worst parts of a few large cities. Surfers flash you from the shore on the elbow of California. Sometimes you can literally look into someone’s back yard – and it might be full of bathtubs.
Continue reading “A Backyard full of Bathtubs”
In June 1989, five months after running aground and spilling its cargo in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, the Exxon Valdez limped home to San Diego, still leaking a trail of oil.
I went down to the shipyard where it was docked, but the public wasn’t allowed in close and there wasn’t much to see. The true costs of the American car culture are often hidden from view.
Earth Day is now observed in more than 180 countries. Which makes sense when you think about it. Humanity has many religions and nations, but so far only one planet.
The first Earth Day was a response to a massive oil spill near Santa Barbara, twenty years before the Exxon Valdez disaster. Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, an early opponent of the Vietnam War, toured the California coastline in the aftermath of the spill, and thought that the energy of the anti-war protests could be brought to bear on environmental issues.
Continue reading “It’s Earth Day all over the World”