Petition of Grievances We, citizens of this American land, haunted by the nihilism of separation, meaninglessness, and powerlessness, subsumed by political elites who use corporate, state, and military power to manipulate our lives, pawns of a global system of dominance and deceit in which transnational megacompanies and big government control us through money, markets, and media, sapping our political will, civil liberties, collective memory, traditional cultures, sustainability, and independence, and as victims of affluenza, technomania, cybermania, globalism, and imperialism, do issue and proclaim thisDocument of Grievances and Abuses Governance A government too big, too centralized, too undemocratic, too unjust, too powerful, too...

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on the land is invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise. -Aldo Leopold Rachel Carson’s first book was titled, The Sea Around Us. In Silent Spring, published in 1962, she proclaimed that humanity now lived in a “sea of carcinogens.” Prominently included among these carcinogens was radiation from the fallout of nuclear bombs. Rachel Carson’s main message in Silent Spring was a warning to...

In 1869, The United States Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. White that a unilateral secession of a State was unconstitutional. It did allow, however, that either revolution or consent of the states could lead to a successful secession. The debate continues in the present as the State of Vermont and several other states are sustaining active secession movements. Historian Maury Klein, a colleague of mine at the University of Rhode Island summarized the debate: "Was the Republic a unified nation in which the individual states had merged their sovereign rights and identities forever, or was it a federation of sovereign states joined together for specific purposes from which they could withdraw at any time?" Klein then concluded, "the case can...

In 2006, in anticipation of my retirement from academia, we bought 160 acres of beautiful land in the central highlands of New Mexico. There we were going to live out our cowboy fantasy by raising horses and riding them on my rancher friend’s cattle roundups. The high desert land was covered with grass, juniper, and some Pinyon pine trees, and offered a spectacular view of the Manzano Mountains. The land sat atop the Chupadera Mesa about 13 miles outside of Mountainair and six miles off the main road. Santa Fe was only an hour and a half to the North. One beautiful March day, my rancher friend, and real deal ex-bull rider cowboy, Blaine and I were riding about to check his herd. A blizzard had buried his 12,000 acres under three feet of...