Fires burning the southern region of the Brazilian state of Para. INPE, Brazil, August 2019. Courtesy Wikipedia. The Brazilian volcano One of the lasting highlights of my teaching at the University of New Orleans in 1991-1992 was  my travel to Brazil in January 1992 for a conference on climate change. This was a rehearsal for the June 1992 Earth Summit on Climate Change in Rio. My conference took place in Fortaleza, a beautiful town in the state of Ceara in the northeast of Brazil. The conference passed quickly with meaningless speeches while the conference was besieged by indigenous people pleading unsuccessfully for a hearing. However, I enjoyed a tour of the semi-arid countryside of Ceara. I sensed more than dryness and desert. I saw fragments of the Brazilian Atlantic forest. These moist woodlands are full of golden tall trees, marshes teeming with life, bleeding streams carrying away the red soil. Yet perpetual danger follows the trees, plants and animals. ...

School of Athens by Raphael, 1510. The painting depicts Plato and Aristotle coming into a school of thinkers exploring the cosmos, a model for the Renaissance. Common Domain. Rising imitation of the dark ages The dawn of the twenty-first century is giving us a whiff of another Dark Age. Christianity and Islam have been hovering over each other, fighting small-scale crusades. More than a billion Moslems hate America because America has been an ally of Israel and because America destroyed Iraq, eyeing the oil of the entire Middle East. Even  Europeans  resent America, its pretense of exceptionalism, superiority and military prowess. Capitalism is fueling climate change Second, and much more potent than religious conflicts, is the Western invention and globalization of nuclear weapons, and other weapons of mass destruction. In addition, the West prides itself of capitalism, which is at the core of a largely immoral private and state trade and business system tha...

EPA logo. Public Domain. The US EPA I joined the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1979. It happened by accident. A friend in Alexandria, Virginia, was working for the personnel office of EPA. We talked and I expressed interest in EPA. I said to him something to the effect the EPA was a great and necessary institution in late twentieth century America. You could not hide from pollution. Millions of cars harmed our health and defiled the atmosphere daily.  My friend also knew something about my education and work experience: having had a doctorate in history, a book published, and working on Capitol Hill. I used to see him at the neighborhood swimming pool where we used to take our children. He promised to pass my name to the personnel official of the Hazard Evaluation Division of the Office of Pesticide Programs of EPA. That organization was advertising for a program analyst. Not long after I spoke to my friend, someone from that office called me for an interview....

Extremely endangered Mexican Wolf in the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuse, New Mexico. Public Domain. The beauty and truth of nature Ancient Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese and Indians respected or worshipped several gods. Those gods were usually forces of nature, which opened the mind, eyes and hearts of human beings to the mysteries, beauty and truth of the natural world. The vast human majorities of the ancient world were peasant farmers and shepherds who cultivated the land and raised food and tended animals.  The winds, rains and the snow, the trees, the different plants and grasses growing for their sheep and goats and cattle, were not abstractions but real manifestations of nature affecting them daily and giving them clues about life and their own fortunes. They noticed the different birds living near them and flying to the water of the creeks, lakes and rivers, according to the seasons. And soon they figured the appropriate time of th...