For My Father — Context It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced. - Tom Brokaw, “The Greatest Generation” The Second World War was the culmination of a global disruption that still echoes through our world’s economic, social, and environmental fabric some 70 years on. The world in which you grew…

A moment of sanity on Christmas Eve “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field, I will meet you there.” — Rumi In 1914, in the trenches of World War 1 in the fading light of winter, the spirit of Christmas rose from the muddy, blood-soaked earth…

I wrote the following short essay on July 3rd. On July 4th, a disturbed, angry young man used a high-powered rifle to shoot up a sunny Independence Day parade just getting underway. Six people are dead and two dozen wounded. …

Think back one year, when wearing masks, not eating out, not going anywhere, not shaking hands, not giving hugs was unfamiliar. Now it’s just another day in paradise. By April of last year, a global pandemic had shocked our sense of reality and isolated us in our homes and remote…

An act of kindness for its own sake… — I try to keep a chipper disposition, get plenty of rest, meditate, practice gratitude, all the things suggested to keep your head on straight. But lately, I’m annoyed. Annoyed with the world and its foolishness. Annoyed at being annoyed. Imagine how annoyed I’d be if I didn’t rest, meditate, and…

Sea of Shadows — The other night I attended a screening of the film Sea of Shadows. It is a true story, well told, of a brutal criminal cartel operating off the Mexican coast along the Sea of Cortez.

Energy, capital, and human well-being The growing climate activism among the world’s youth opens a fresh debate on the moral character of a civilization that would foreclose the future in a last gasp effort to preserve, as Donald Trump sees it, the “ wealth underneath our feet.” …

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead The movement Greta Thunberg started one year ago makes many of the “adults” in the room nervous. The initial go-to reaction is to look…

In his New Yorker article “ What If We Stopped Pretending the Apocalypse Can be Stopped,” Jonathan Franzen argues that it does us little good to hang our hope for the future on some wildly optimistic scenario for which there is little evidence of achieving before climate change becomes a…