Fire Resilience 🔥

Fascinating and needed work… imagining something similar here in the Carolinas as we begin to grapple with seasonal fires in a land that once saw large populations of megafauna such as buffalo and mammoths (not forgetting that fires are a part of the solution, not the actual problem)…

Rewilding project aims to restore resilience to fire-prone Spain via wildlife:

Some 30,000 years ago, Stone Age people decorated a cave, today known as Cueva de los Casares, in central Spain with pictures of mating humans (most famously), geometric shapes, and animals. The most popular carved animal is the wild horse.

Cueva de los Casares sports at least two dozen images of wild horses. Eventually, these Pleistocene-epoch horses vanished — likely slaughtered for food or domesticated. But some 10,000 years later, wild horses have again returned to central Spain — this time to help with out-of-control fires and bring economic opportunity to a struggling region.

Amazon Warehouses and Leopard Frogs

Incredible statistic here… we are certainly harming our amphibian friends, as evidenced by countless statistics and news stories (salamanders, especially, in the Carolinas), but this reminder of the devastation humans have created and caused in terms of wetland biomes is especially shocking.

We’re still recovering from Hurricane Helene here in the Upstate of South Carolina a year later (the two homes across our street still sit vacant as a daily reminder), but I can’t imagine the human-scale destruction that another Superstorm Sandy-type event would cause the NYC / NJ region, given the lack of wetlands now…

The Endangered Leopard Frog That Lives Next to an NYC Amazon Warehouse – The New York Times (gift article):

Less than 1 percent of the quarter-million acres of freshwater wetlands that once blanketed New York City still exist. City officials have conserved some marshes, but others are on private property, including the 675-acre site where Atlantic Coast leopard frogs often breed. That land had a vast network of creeks before 1929, when the Gulf Oil Corporation started building aboveground petroleum storage tanks to receive oil from ships in the Arthur Kill strait between Staten Island and New Jersey.

Oceans Rise, Empires Fall

We’ve been listening to a lot of Hamilton lately. Our children have been playing (and memorizing and singing) the soundtrack on repeat this summer. Merianna has a great post about our Hamilton-era here:

“The World Turned Upside Down” – by Merianna Harrelson:

We might be a little late to the game, but we are definitely in our Hamilton-era. Maybe it was the trip to Washington, DC this summer or the Revolutionary War studies last year, but once we found the Hamilton soundtrack it is the only thing that can play in the car (besides the occasional Wheels on the Bus).

 As we head into the cooler mornings of the Fall here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Merianna and I thought it might be time to actually have them watch the full production… so this morning, I pulled up the show on Disney+ and hit play. I’m no stranger to shedding a few tears in front of our kids, but I was moved at the opening song as I sat there with our family. 

A great deal has happened to us personally and in our global community of humans and more-than-humans in this last decade. It struck me that I don’t think Hamilton could be made, or at least received well, today in 2025 in this “post-woke” era of defining good jeans and AI slop. Hamilton captured something real and imaginative and visceral in 2015-2016 that we seemed to have already lost, forgotten, or glossed over (and are intent on erasing). 

People of color portraying our “Founding Fathers” who shed blood to carve out a nascent republic with higher ideals than the established order sparks different emotions in a country of complexity-erasure and intentional forgetting. Take the outrage of Google’s AI depicting Washington, etc. as black a few years ago or the recent hand-wringing and outcry from some of our fellow citizens (no doubt due to the constancy of manipulative coverage by certain 24-7 “news” corporations and social media actors that feed into and from outrage engines) over a corporate hedge-fund controlled restaurant changing its logo. 

I also shed tears when I first watched Hamilton with our older girls a decade ago… the imagination, the pointing to and away from and towards, the use of caricutre and spittle to prove points… and now those tears come from a different place in my consciousness that I feel we are all carrying… disappointment, loss, even despair… at where this country has been led, not from the whims of “a king on a spending spree” but from oligarchs who know that the time is short and the center cannot hold:

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst  
Are full of passionate intensity.

More tears ahead, but I hope I can continue to show our children glimpses of what can be while I rage against this machine. Lack of imagination got us “adults” into this, but imagination will get us out. Mark gives us the prescription to enter the Kingdom through the narrow Way, and as much as I stumble, I hope that we can see through this scanner even darkly and realize that we need eyes to see and ears to hear the imaginative call of grace in new ways and what can be…

People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’ And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

Not throwing away my shot and all that jazz.

Rewiring the Brain with Psilocybin

As part of my studies, I focus on how we as humans internalize and externalize ideas such as ecology or being or intention in general (go read some Owen Barfield if you need a primer on why words matter… start with Unancestral Voice) by looking at the past (medieval but especially ancient). I’m convinced that we’ll eventually look back on this era of classifying natural avenues of therapeautic treatments such as psilocybin as dangerous schedule-1 “drugs” and shake our heads at our naive foolishness in the same way that we wonder how ancient people could have been so “primitive” about ideas (they weren’t!) before the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment movement where so much of our current psychological crises and negative manifestations originate…

Link here is to the archived version (non-paywall):

Just one dose of psilocybin seems to be enough to rewire the brain | New Scientist:

The work suggests it might one day be possible to choose which brain connections to remodel, depending on the mental health condition that is being treated. “Our study hints at an exciting avenue for future research to combine neuromodulation with psychedelics to precisely target specific circuits for neural plasticity,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

Let’s Flood the Planet with Solar Panels

I have very similar thoughts about our growing energy needs and utilizing the very free and abundant (and powerful) resource that is energy being produced by our own star that floods our Earth with more than enough energy potential to get us out of the capitalistic and colonialist matrix that is the fossil fuel industry… a mesh of Whitehead Schedulers powered by solar energy would do wonders to transform the daily lives of humans and more-than-humans here on Earth…

Good read and idea (and stats, espeically out of Pakistan):

A Modest Proposal – by Bill McKibben – The Crucial Years

So let’s start at $2.5 trillion, the number for the panels alone, because, hey, Tik Tok videos. Is that an absurd number to imagine helping to pay? The International Monetary Fund reported recently that the world spends $7 trillion a year subsidizing fossil fuel. And all it gets us is the chance to buy more fossil fuel—the last line of Jacobson’s email makes it clear that even at the full price this would be a huge bargain. You save huge amounts of money because you don’t have to pay for fuel any more. Once the panels are up, sunshine is free. It changes everything.

Ruin of a Sweet Life

An ode to Shakespeare and Barfield…

Not rubble, but root
not the toppled arch, nor the cold stone
marked by lichen and crow,
but the deeper disintegration,
the fall inward where sweetness
becomes sediment, layered,
compost of memory.

Ruin, the old word,
not only decay, but rushing,
the cataract, the river’s surrender
to gravity and sea.
So Shakespeare’s grief,
the “ruin of a sweet life,”
is not just the breaking,
but the swift carrying away…
an eddy, a flood.

And Barfield reminds:
words remember what we forget.
Ruin, from ruina, the collapse,
yet also the running course,
the onward plunge.
Not merely wreckage,
but motion.
Not death, but migration.

So my sweet life,
lived among walnut trees,
between baptisms and poems,
with children’s laughter,
with books that smell of rain,
ruin comes not as thief,
but as torrent:
the unmaking
that remakes.

Here in this homeland,
the sweet ruin of tobacco fields
gives way to pine,
and Cherokee memory rustles
in leaves that still refuse erasure.
Even the cross,
that ruined tree,
bears sap enough
to green the nations.

Ruin is not only ending.
It is the opening,
the washed-out ditch
through which a future grows in weeds.
Sweetness is not lost,
but borne away
to mingle with ocean salt,
to rise again in storm,
to fall as rain on the waiting earth.

The First Archaeologist

Certainly, he wasn’t the “first” but it is fascinating to read about ancient people who shared passions as I do, be they philosophy, religion, racing, or ancient art… patron saints are good to have in this life.

The World’s First Archaeologist Was a Babylonian King – GreekReporter.com:

However, one of the earliest persons we know that we can call an “archaeologist” was a sixth-century BC man who lived at Nippur in Babylonia (modern-day Iraq), according to archaeologist Elizabeth Douglas Van Buren (1881-1961). He was either a collector or a curator of the university museum. This is inferred by a collection of artifacts he had in a clay vessel his house next to the library. He was a man of considerable knowledge, based on the collection of objects he kept. All the objects were specimens of the history and antiquity of his country.

Religion and Ecology Podcast

Great episode from Yale’s Forum on Religion and Ecology Spotlights podcast… enjoyed the discussion of Plotinus (always!), spirituality vs religious as well as some of the background on why we do what we do in this fascinating sphere of Religion and Ecology (plus, the host Dr. Sam Mickey is also a graduate of my program at CIIS):

5.21 Rachael Petersen on Matter, Meaning, and Mind:

This episode features Rachael Petersen, a writer, thinker, and convener. We discuss her life and work at the confluence of philosophy, ecology, and transcendence. As Program Lead of Harvard’s Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative, Rachael guides interdisciplinary explorations into how cutting-edge plant science challenges our ideas of mind, matter, and meaning. She holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, where her research centered on panpsychism, pantheism, and the more-than-human world, with a special focus on German philosophy.

Remembering

Merianna says what a whole lot of us (myself included) have been thinking and feeling and anxious about (particularly about our young ones after our summer travels to D.C. and NYC)…

“The World Turned Upside Down” – by Merianna Harrelson:

As we watched the barricades go up and the monuments close so that a parade route could be established, I wondered what our kids would remember about our trip to Washington, DC. I hope they will remember the stories of those who fought for the silenced and the oppressed. I hope they will remember the leaders who rose up and spoke against injustice and capitalizing on the labor of others. I hope they will remember the beauty of the art and the curiosity that led to innovation.