I am lying in a meadow high in the Rocky Mountains. The sun is warm and comforting. I watch the clouds, puffy white in the blue sky, but soon pull a cap over my eyes…
GROWTH! GROWTH! GROWTH!
The motor force of capitalist economies is the accumulation of capital—the drive by businesses to make as much profit as possible and use as much of this profit as they can to expand their operations.…
Down Along the Coast, Part 3
If you have never driven the Big Sur Highway, which is the most famous part of California 1, you should to do it someday. Just east of Carmel, where Clint Eastwood was once mayor, you…
Down Along the Coast, Part 2
We were so entranced by Point Reyes that we returned three weeks later. After our first stay, we reserved a room at the Point Montara Lighthouse hostel, on a cliff overlooking the ocean, twenty-five miles…
Down Along the Coast, Part I
California 1 is an engineering marvel, a highway that hugs the breathtaking California coast for hundreds of miles. It doesn't go from the northern to the southern border, but it covers enough of the coast…
The "I" and the "we"
We have been nearly fifty days in California. It is a state of geographical extremes: the deserts, the Sierras, the long ocean coast, and the central valleys. It is a great agricultural state, and every…
The Rise and Fall of the United Farm…
After reading The Union of Their Dreams, Miriam Pawel’s fine account of the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers Union (UFW), I re-read an article I wrote for the Nation magazine in November…
Mining
[Note: We have been staying in hostels, and internet connections are poor. So I can’t upload pictures. You can see some on my facebook page, which is public] The earth in the western United States…
Las Vegas
We left Yuma and drove due north on lonely US 95, through desert mountains, and stopped a few miles past the farm-worker town of Blythe to see the Blythe Intaglios (more formally, "geoglyphs"). These…