Sometimes climate change seems like a downright good idea. The global re-boot of conditions on Earth is a take-all-prisoners phenomenon. Confronting its challenges requires absolutely everybody into the pool. I wondered, for example, at the sheer marvelous variety of the speakers lined up at the Bay Area Open Space Council‘s annual conference last week. Other than perhaps the funeral for a head of state, what other subject brings a two-star Marine general and an Episcopal priest onto the dais?Retired Major General Anthony Jackson spoke about “why nations fight and fail.” The Reverend Canon Sally Bingham spoke about “choosing life over death and destruction.” The God of War and the God of L
We tend to think of the things of man and the things of nature as separate. The way we categorize say waterfalls, mountains, and birds as existing in a realm apart from furniture, paintings, and clothing could supply a generation’s worth of doctoral dissertations. One place where “natural” and “cultural” come together in an institutional embrace is the National Park System (NPS). The NPS has intertwined duties to steward both the natural and the cultural resources in our protected areas. Salmon are nature but have a central cultural role for indigenous peoples. The remnants of ancient settlements were built by humans but have become features of landscape. I was thinking about the beaut
