What To Do?
Today it seems like we are living in a fantasy world where the ruling forces don’t have any grounding or relation to a commonly accepted reality. W.B. Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming,” written a...
View ArticleEarth Day
If you are a believer in climate change, you really don’t need to know who is in charge of the various federal agencies that deal with it. You can pretty much assume that the person in charge of the...
View ArticleOwning
Last issue, I was talking about the various dichotomies that define each of us, conservative/liberal, authoritarian/libertarian, naturist (my version)/ humanist. There is another that we mostly don’t...
View ArticleAusterity Is A Sham
Suppose the federal government could make money out of nothing and spend it freely. Suppose they could do it not only without raising taxes, but possibly lowering them, and that the country would...
View ArticleThe Road to Resilience
Most of us remember, however vaguely, being taught in grade school that our government has an ingenious system of checks and balances between the three branches of government that insures that no...
View ArticleUltimate Civics!
It was about eight years ago that we formed Transition Vashon, and about six years ago that I started writing this column as a means of getting transition ideas out into the community. Our goal was to...
View ArticleCivility
Many of us like to think that Trump is the ogre that crashed our party. He is but the fruit of a long period of division and bitter strife in our country. Just the same, Trump’s behavior is aiding...
View ArticleSmall Is Beautiful*
(*Thanks, E.F. Schumacher, for a 40 year old idea that is still good as gold.) Most futurist visions I have seen are of shining high-tech cities with high rises covered in solar panels and rooftop...
View ArticleInvesting In People
While reading a book by a Finnish woman who had become a US citizen, I was reminded that this country really is an historically and culturally significant place. It is the combination of cultures that...
View ArticleSingle Payer
A single payer health care system makes so much sense, it’s hard to imagine how we got stuck with the system we have. We all have to take responsibility for our own health, but if somebody is sick or...
View ArticleBread for Circuses
I get about a hundred emails every day. I screen them for communications from people I know, but I end up deleting about 95 percent of them. I have learned to screen quickly, so I don’t waste half my...
View ArticlePSE
Harvey and Irma have reminded us that we need to step up the pace in transforming our energy system to carbon-free renewables. We in the Pacific Northwest have been the fortunate recipients of cheap...
View ArticleThe Sorcerer’s Apprentice
I’ve referred before to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice to characterize our unrelenting belief that we understand how the world works and we can alter portions of it without any adverse consequences. The...
View ArticlePlastics Are Us
When I was growing up in the 1950’s, plastic was one of the most exciting new materials. Everything from dinner plates to furniture were being made from plastic. It was lightweight, strong, and would...
View ArticleAffordable Housing?
Back in 1988, Joy Goldstein strong-armed me into working with her and a handful of others on the Community Council Affordable Housing Committee. We went on to form Vashon Household (Joy’s name).read more
View ArticleMore About Plastic
My column on affordable housing in the last issue was one that was first published several months ago. I was delirious with fever at the time last week’s column needed to be in and didn’t even get it...
View ArticleRe-examining The Season
The winter solstice has always seemed to me to be more meaningful than the summer solstice. The promise of longer days at the darkest and coldest time of year is more heartening than the beginning of...
View ArticleCredit Where Due
In the article in The Beachcomber about housing prices on Vashon, several things seemed clear to me: 1) demand far exceeds supply, 2) properties always go to the highest bidder, 3) low and moderate...
View ArticleGood News About Food
With warmer weather and the sounds of Spring birds, my mind goes to growing food. I recently read a great article in the Jan 12 addition of Common Dreams (online news service) by Frances Moore Lappé...
View ArticleReality Check
At the recent town hall, Congresswoman Jayapal said that, among her constituents, Vashonites were probably way ahead in addressing climate change. It seemed to me at that point that, if that is true,...
View ArticleWhy I’m Going to the PSE Hearing
Like many of you, I’ve tended to be fairly satisfied with our sources of electric power here in the Northwest. After all, we live in the land of cheap and abundant renewable hydropower. Our utility,...
View ArticleVoting As If It Mattered
When we talk about the scourge of money in politics, we are generally talking about large contributions that drown out the importance and influence of small donations. The disproportionate share of...
View ArticleThe Art of The Imaginable
“… Her enthusiastic two-hour presentation, punctuated with dramatic readings, wry humor, and songs, traces the evolution of the love story across the centuries. The emphasis is on the evolving role of...
View ArticleThe Makerspace
About eight years ago, Steve Graham handed me, and a few others, copies of the Transition Town Handbook in hopes that we might do something with it while he was off on a trip of many months. read more
View ArticleEarth Day!
The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970. It came about largely as a result of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which made us all realize that we were poisoning our land, air, and water...
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