Cattle wasteland in southern Idaho. Photo: courtesy Christopher Ketcham. Empire of public land Christopher Ketcham, a daring young journalist from New York, spent ten years observing and studying the public lands of the intercontinental American West. This is an empire of about 450 million acres of grassland, desert, steppe, and forest in Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Wyoming. Ketcham travelled to the American West to learn. His interests overshadowed those of a tourist. He drove a car from New York in the East to the West where an immense amount of land belongs to the people of the United States. He walked extensively in the public lands, getting lost in the mountain forests, sleeping in the wild, and falling in love with the American commons and the beauty of the natural world. His writings about the American West are passionate, powerful, insightful, and revealing of the two sides of the same coin: that of the magnificent public lands. One is the gigantic vision ...

Athena endows with reason the man created by Prometheus. Painting by Christian Griepenkerl, 1877. Public Domain. Prologue Greek myths assert Prometheus, Titan god of foreknowledge, was grandfather of the Greeks. He defied Zeus and brought the fire of knowledge and civilization to his relatives. Zeus reacted with violence. He ordered the god of metallurgy and technology Hephaistos to tie Prometheus on a pillar. Zeus sent an eagle, which tortured Prometheus. Every day, the eagle ate the liver of immortal Prometheus. However, Zeus changed his mind about Prometheus. His son Herakles killed the eagle and freed the god protector of the Greeks. Prometheus and the Greeks Aeschylus, 525-456 BCE, an Athenian tragic poet, recounts stories the Greeks knew about Prometheus. He says nothing about the time when Prometheus took pity on the Greeks. If there is a grain of truth in those myths / stories, the time must be counted in hundreds of thousands of years or millennia bef...