Browse Topics

Road To Ruin

An Interview With Jan Lundberg

State and federal expenditures on highways and major roads total more than $160 million a day. The Cyprus Freeway in Oakland, for example, cost taxpayers thirty-five hundred dollars per inch. Simply to maintain U.S. roads in their current poor state would cost taxpayers about $25 billion per year. Yet we typically spend only $16 billion per year on maintenance, thus assuring that existing roads will deteriorate. Meanwhile, we spend more than $60 billion per year to widen existing roads and build new ones. Even from a strictly fiscal standpoint, it makes no sense to build more roads when we’re not maintaining the ones we’ve got.

Selected Poems

An Epidemic Of Deception

Why We Can’t Trust The Cancer Establishment — An Interview With Samuel Epstein

The American Cancer Society’s money — even that used for research — is spent in ways guaranteed not to offend either big polluters or big pharmaceutical companies. Why? In part, because the board of the ACS is closely interlocked with those same companies.

Smog Baby

Limiting The Future

An Interview With David Ehrenfeld

Our new false god is the idea that we can order the future. It’s a secular messianic view of a world in which there will be no death, no sickness, no stupidity — a world we will have totally ordered by the force of our own intellects and technology.

Leaving Walden Pond

Thoreau was not afraid to die for the same reason he was not afraid to leave Walden Pond after two years, two months, and two days. Why did he leave? He said he had several more lives to lead. To be born means to die, but Thoreau was one of those who saw also that to die means to be reborn.

Anna In The Aisles Of Plenty

As Marx himself knew, sheer physical discomfort is not the worst form of suffering. Greater by far is the hardship that results when privation is due to injustice, incompetence, corruption. Then the pain is compounded by the indignity of victimization.

Field Observations

An Interview With Wendell Berry

The first necessity is to teach the young. If we teach the young what we already know, we would do outlandishly better than we’re doing. Knowledge is overrated, you know. There have been cultures that did far better than we do, knowing far less than we know. We need to see that knowledge is overrated, but also that knowledge is not at all the same thing as “information.” There’s a world of difference — Wes Jackson helped me to see this — between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers, libraries, and the rest of it, great stockpiles of data, and the knowledge that people have in their bones by which they do good work and live good lives.

The Garbage Truck At 7:30 A.M.

A Charm Against The Language Of Politics