Hope Is Not Like A Lottery Ticket

For Me, Childhood Roaming Was What Developed Self-reliance, A Sense Of Direction And Adventure, Imagination, A Will To Explore, To Be Able To Get A Little Lost And Then Figure Out The Way Back.

I've Been Gratified To See Over The Twenty Or So Years Of My Writing Life The West Become Less Of A Colony Of The East; Maybe New Technologies And Too Much Travel Undermine The Idea Of Provinciality.

Too Many Of Us Seem Far Too Fond Of Narratives Of Our Powerlessness, Maybe Because Powerlessness Lets Us Off The Hook... But We Don't Need Everyone On Board; We Don't Need One Magic Person In Office; We Need Ourselves. To Act. It's The Wind, Not The Weathervanes.

Anarchists Believe That We Can Govern Ourselves In The Absence Of Coercive And Centralized Authority; The Underlying Premise About Human Nature (to Use An Infinitely Problematized But Necessary Term Here) Is Fundamentally Positive. And The Evidence That In Disasters People Are Really Pretty Kind, Generous, Brave, Resourceful And Creative Fed That.

Perhaps The Central Question About [eliot] Porter's Work Is About The Relationship Between Science, Aesthetics, And Environmental Politics. His Brother, The Painter And Critic Fairfield Porter, Wrote In A 1960 Review Of [porter's] Colour Photographs: 'there Is No Subject And Background, Every Corner Is Alive,' And This Suggests What An Ecological Aesthetic Might Look Like.