Until going to the Amazon, I had never seen a black swan in my life. In fact, I didn’t actually realize they were real: I just thought they were something popularized by the hit Natalie Portman film of the same name and more a metaphor for the rare and unexpected. It turns out they’re very […]
What the Left Doesn’t Get
A few days after the presidential election, I attended a conference where I heard Rev. Lennox Yearwood speak about what he thought lay ahead. He noted that the left still thinks it’s fighting Jim Crow. “But we’re actually fighting his grandson, James R. Crow III,” he told the room. He went on to make the […]
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Earth
Growing up in a Southern, progressive Christian church and going to seminary, we often made fun of the Jonathan Edwards’ style ‘fire and brimstone’ preachers throughout West Tennessee. Their vision of the future and the afterlife was dark and ominous. In hindsight, we should have taken their fiery spirit more seriously. We’re facing a future […]
Climate activists, modern Renaissance artists
A little over fifteen years ago, my parents were driving home to West Tennessee after visiting me in Nashville when they had to pull their car over due to flooding. Mom called me panicked, unsure if it would be the last time we spoke, as the water was rising around them. Once they were safe […]
Falling in Love with the Earth
Emails and doomscrolling make up too much of my life these days, and if I’m not grieving what I know is coming for our planet in the next twenty-odd years, I’m grieving what’s happening to our country and what feels like an inevitable collapse into entrenched authoritarianism. To be honest, I’ve found this reality really […]
Firefly
I watched your light flickeron and off all day, there on the stairwell, uncertain if my cat had collected youor if you were victim to the crueltyof this human world – perhaps my own,and knowing there was nothing I could do, I stepped over you, again and again, each time reminded of the news,“This is […]
Death in the Face of Death
Watching the country’s long-expected rapid descent into fascism is numbing. The images out of L.A. aren’t just reminiscent of 2020; they evoke a foreboding of something somehow worse. The scenes of tanks on train tracks into DC for a military parade are the hallmark of a dictatorship in the making, yet too many people remain […]
Fear and Loneliness – and Hope
I oscillate these days between crippling fear and endless hope. It’s a strange dichotomy, actually. The fear is both very real and very fantastical. By that, I mean what I have an imagination for – climate collapse, the collapse of our democracy, economic collapse, the pending authoritarian threat and the very real damage it could […]
Seeking a Climate Revival
I was asked at a climate conference in Washington, D.C. recently to forgo my digital devices – no laptop, no phone, no watch. Given how bleak things are in this moment, and the fact that I had seen firsthand how frequently governments hack those they deem “dissidents” in the press freedom space – this layer […]
Wake People Up, Remind Them Who They Are
In the heart of the Hudson Valley’s sloping hills is an agroforestry project with a beautiful end goal: return to the land the plants and trees indigenous to it. Decades of invasive, endless growth have left the land with a lack of biodiversity. Slowly and surely, though, this diversity can be reintroduced. Even the pawpaw, […]
