New Year’s Eve, 2025 Suddenly, it is New Year’s Eve. Are your resolutions lined up for after the gluttony and consumerist excess of the “Holiday Season.” Can we make 2026 a good year? Opinions vary, as well they should, given the diverse indicators suggesting multiple sources of chaos emerging. Are you determined to live the … More Living the Good Life in 2026: A Difficult Choice
I never liked the term, “lifestyle.” It reflects an extreme version of the American obsession with personal individualistic consumerism, which ultimately is at odds with the hard facts of life on planet Earth. The unattainable “lifestyles of the rich and famous” promoted and enthusiastically accepted in the industrial era are built on illusion and propel … More On the Urgency of Abandoning Lifestyle
Oh my! Seventy-five! Seems like it happened just yesterday. Actually, it was two and a half years ago. Copper is no longer a puppy. Yet, full-grown now, she still has quite a lot of that puppy playfulness. I have not changed much. When I turned seventy-five years of AGE, three quarters of a century seemed … More Seventy-Five and One
We are so used to the idea that we must each have the freedom to choose, well, just about everything in our lives. We imagine that we are independently constructing a “life of our own.” We have, in our minds at least, an inalienable right to choose and to live our own unique “lifestyle.” That … More Climate Imperative, Freedom, and Democracy
In the modern and post-modern worlds, we are set adrift. Who now lives fully integrated with a clan, tribe, or other group ‘emplaced’ for many generations in a particular location and fully integrated into the ecology of that place? Nobody on my block! We are all individuated, barely a member of a family, and that … More Becoming Indigenous: Settling a Population Adrift in an Unstable World
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 