Category: Social Justice Work
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40 years of living with things that might eat us
Bear shit, Glacier National Park. The Endangered Species Act turned 40 this past weekend. With two full wolf hunting seasons almost done, rumblings of Grizzly delisting making headlines, and varied efforts at Lake Trout suppression, it is a very good time to sit in Montana and ask what sort of progress has been made over […]
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A Prolegomena to the 2013 Bedrock & Paradox Ideological guide to Holiday Gifts
Don’t buy your loved ones any physical objects in the next six weeks. If you have regular access to the technology and leisure which reading this requires, you almost certainly have enough stuff to do a great many fun things in the year to come. So give those you care about the means and inspiration […]
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Pieces and pieces
Most readers here enjoy starting at maps. The above visual rendering of the rivers in the lower 48 is a good one for nostalgia, and the general aesthetic value of fact. A massive, scrollable version can be found here. Discussion of the technical aspects of the image-map, which is beyond me, can be found here. […]
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Glacier National Park: My master plan
…access to wild places could be seen as an essential precondition to the pursuit of meaning in human life…national parks have done this by removing vast tracts of land from private ownership forever, an act and an ideal which contradicts such inextricably American things as manifest destiny and our pathologic fetishization of the right to […]
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Recognition in the age of online adventure
It does not take much directed experience, either online or face-to-face, to conclude that communication is fundamentally flawed. Note that I don’t need to say “human experience” of “human communication” because that would be redundant. Because we are human we cannot speak coherently outside our own experience, and therefore any type of communication is necessarily […]
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’13 Prescriptions
In my recent post on the Sandy Hook shooting I wrote that “Real progress is not a movie-friendly month of intervention and epiphany, but a slow grinding of years and small moments whose efficacy is not seen for years, or decades.” Since it’s easier to throw stones than pick them up and build a wall […]
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2012; the most beautiful year
This has been a difficult year. To use one easy example, the progression of my wilderness skills was orderly and logical in years past. In 2008 Chris Plesko and I went to Yellowstone. In 2009 Kevin Sawchuk and I traversed the Bob in October. In 2010 I traversed the Thorofare alone in May, and learned […]
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Newtown for a new century
What’s in your closet? Gun control is not the answer. Yes guns make it easier, and perhaps therefore more probable, for the Lanza’s of the world to kill many people. But let us remember something which most have forgotten in the past four days: the second amendment has nothing to do with hunting, or with […]
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A living pack
Above are the closest to stock packs which currently exist in our house. At upper left is my brand new Hill People Gear Runner’s Kit bag (in foliage, which is a great color). It costs 85 dollars, and is (conspicuously) made in the United States out of US-produced materials. The body is entirely 500D cordura, […]
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Internal Wars, Tenkara Wars
My day job as a social worker is rooted in paradox. The perception of an empathic provider is a prolegomena to effective mental health treatment, which is not something suited to fakery. At the same time, we as professionals must maintain a distance, to be able to make effective, “objective” decisions on matters of treatment […]
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