As someone preoccupied with odd, mysterious places, I have a longstanding appreciation for an odd, mysterious organization called The Center for Land Use Interpretation. Equal parts arts organization, archive, and amateur detective agency, the Los Angeles-based CLUI (rhymes with gooey) runs bus tours of the Nevada Test Site, mounts exhibitions of hurricane-racked vacation properties on Gulf […]
Earth
My mother is spunky and smart and I love her very much. But she’s got this one trait that drives me crazy: she believes everything she sees on The History Channel. I visited her in Michigan a few weeks ago. One night at a local brewery, with my sister, Charlotte, and her boyfriend, Greg, in […]
At 1:52pm on August 23, my office began to shake. I saw the photos on the walls gently swaying right and left. Since my walls typically remain motionless, my brain had trouble making sense of what I was seeing. Construction, I thought? No, too much shaking. To cause that much motion, a machine would have […]
I’d just sat down when the first carver approached me. It was my second evening in Iqaluit on southern Baffin Island, 2000 kilometers north of Ottawa, and all around me well-heeled bureaucrats were tucking into Arctic char and steak. But the carver, a small weathered-looking Inuk, skirted them and made a beeline toward me. In […]
As an undergraduate biology student, I loathed taxonomy. Plant systematics was the only college course I remember absolutely hating. It seemed like nothing more than rote memorization. I studied with flash cards I’d made on little index cards. Bracts instead of sepals, colored glands that take the place of petals? Probably a Euphorbiaceae. I spent […]
It’s a sunny evening in Fairbourne, a coastal village in rural Wales. Inside a small food shop, I’m listening to the owner and his wife discussing the true nature of the holy spirit. I reach for a packet of breakfast cereal. “The woman just didn’t understand,” says the shopkeeper. I place a tin of tomatoes […]
When I first moved to New Mexico from the east coast I asked somebody how to tell the difference between a juniper and a piñon pine. Easy, they said: most of the junipers are alive and the piñons are all dead. Across the Southwest, piñon pines have been dying off over the past twenty years […]
A few years ago, I interviewed author and social critic James Kunstler about his novel World Made By Hand, his latest portrayal of a post-peak-oil future. Kunstler, as one might expect, had plenty of complaints — about suburbs, cheese doodles, Wal-Mart, the American road trip. But when I mentioned that I’d grown up in the […]
