I watched the last two Democratic presidential debates with heavy heart. Not a single question about the engulfing catastrophe of climate change. The warming waters of   Lake Michigan   are no longer hospitable to perch. However, the billionaire owners of ABC and CBS are not interested if the restaurants in Milwaukee are frying perch. They feel uncomfortable reminding the American people of the coming anthropogenic storm and potential hunger. They like the money they make from advertising fossil fuels and the massive industry they spawned: petrochemicals, pesticides, electricity power companies, and the car economy. Besides, Trump, the Republican Party and the executives of the largest fossil fuel corporations   deny  global  warming. Only Senator Bernie Sanders and billionaire Tom Steyer mentioned climate change.   The television oligarchs running the “debates” ask divisive and misleading questions about the economy and health care, trapping the Democr...

Prologue I met Devon Hartman a few years ago in Claremont, California, where I have been living since 2008. He is tall and lean, wearing glasses and a pointed small beard. He grew up in Kansas. And for thirty-five years, he presided over a successful architectural firm, building and renovating expensive houses with little awareness of the carbon footprint of those houses. The reasons I came to know this energetic member of my community had nothing to do with architecture or construction. Rather, I kept seeing him at City Council meetings and activities of Sustainable Claremont, a small local environmental organization. He used to encourage homeowners to insulate their homes. His company had a flourishing market in exactly that useful house improvement. However, I used to tell him, better yet, put solar panels on the roof of your house. I did that the moment I bought my house in Claremont in 2009. He would smile, saying I was on the right track. China and ecological ...

Herakles sailing the Ocean River in the golden cup of the Sun god Helios. Museo Gregorian Etrusco, Rome, C. 480 BCE. Creative Commons. Wikipedia. Animated myths On Monday afternoon of February 10, 2020, I went to the Classics department of Pomona College for a lecture on Herakles.  Chiara Sulprizio  of Vanderbilt University used cartoons and animation to help us understand the lasting influence and power of classical mythology.  She chose the Soviet Union and Russia to illustrate how animated Greek myths may have inspired a better future in the collapsing Soviet Union. Greek mythology has always been political and pedagogical. The Greeks repeated those mythological stories as memories of their early history.  Early mythological history is full of political views, which have the potential of uplifting modern people in their quest for freedom or equality and justice.   Chiara Sulprizio hit the nail on the head with her focusing o...

Creation of Pandora by John D. Batten, 1913. Hephaistos, left, Pandora, and Athena, right. Reading University. Public Domain. Greek myth is not fiction. There’s a core of truth in each mythological story. Greeks of very ancient times related those stories that later Greek poets and historians incorporated into their work. Pandora: gift of the gods One such story describes the coming into being of the first woman, appropriately named Pandora, all gifts, or gifts from all the Olympian gods. Those divine gifts combined the good and the bad. The epic poet Hesiod, writing in the seventh century BCE, reports Pandora became a scourge and tempting snare for men ( Works and Days  47-105;  Theogony  570-612).  Zeus asked Hephaistos, the technological genius among gods, to create Pandora out of Earth and water. Hephaistos did, sculpting her like the female goddesses around him.  One of those female divinities, Aphrodite, made Pandora sexy and beautiful....