Digital Maps to Nature Literacy
TOOLS TO MEET OUR NEEDS We create tools to work for us: to dig foundations, to hoist steel girders for bridges, to record our words and thoughts for others or capture a likeness of another in a silver emulsion of…
Category Culture
So Where’s The Church?
Rock Hill Church Road was once a state-maintained road with a county road number (714 I think) that is now in VDOT limbo status of not abandoned but not maintained. There are three full time residences on a half mile…
The Conversation: Feeding your Genius and Putting it to Good Work
How do we cultivate our passionate interests to grow genius to do good things?
Tools for Thought
It’s a niche interest, maybe; geeky, if you will. But I continue to explore ways that the computer keyboard and monitor that most of us have in our homes these days can do a better job of gathering information and…
Landscape, Place and Memory
This topic of recent interest holds the potential for a vastly expanded ramble, with a point and even a conclusion perhaps, in another life time. But for now… Suffice it to say that I have been revisiting the mysteries of…
Music, Mountains and Big Trees
Back in December, I was offered the opportunity to contribute a “500-700 word article on Southwest Virginia’s outdoors or nature” by the Crooked Road folks. It now appears (on page 23) in the program guide for next week’s Mountains of…
New Book: Fifth Risk
We are lurching forward into an unknown and unchartable future where there are no rules or precedents in the halls of government. Where might we end up when uninformed democracy breaks down and unconstrained capitalism drives us to the brink?…
No Man–or Other Animal–Is An Island
No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory…
There is NO Free Shipping
Because I my interest in the topic had been ramped way up by a SustainFloyd Movie Night last year, I stopped my morning browse-fest to read an article from Ensia (highly recommended environmental journalism and news source!) The piece is…
Leaf-Peepers Are Readers
Every autumn, I tend to get a little bump in book sales. This autumn, I’m pleased to let visiting leaf-peepers know that my books can be found in an additional location: the new Maggie Gallery at the corner of Route 8…
Humankind: Finding Our Place in the Natural World
Where are we headed in the love-hate relationship of HumanKind with Nature (that is: the biotic and abiotic parts of the only planet we have from which all our resources are drawn)? Â It can’t be much farther in the…
The Lenses That Filter Our Facts
Like many Americans who lament the divide that separates our public into to blacker-and-whiter camps, I struggle to understand how we got here. In particular, as a Christian, I have been shocked and saddened by the “conservative southern white evangelicals”…
It’s a Wonder-Full Life
I am happy to be often stopped in my tracks by wonder, but I wonder what exactly that is. I know it when I feel it (or mostly when I have felt it, too immersed in the object of that…
Big-Data Big-Brother NewSpeak
There are, of course, those who say that this big-data psychometric neurosociological element had nothing to do with the Trump win. What do you think? Twig from this quote from Cambridge Analytica’s own boast on their website on November 9…