In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I taught at Humboldt State University in northern California, the American University in Washington, DC, and the University of New Orleans in Louisiana. Learning out in the open My teaching was about our environmental tragedy: how corporate business money captured the government, academia, journalism, and the medical establishment, with the result of giving polluters a free hand. The consequences of this massive corruption, I told my students, was cancer and debilitating neurological diseases and ecocide pushing wildlife towards extinction -- and the rising climate chaos. I tried to mingle theory with observation. In each of the universities I taught, I invited speakers and took the students to a field trip. In northern California, we spent a couple days with the Hoopa Native Americans, learning their painful history and seeing them dancing their traditions, and eating salmon they had caught and cooked. In sout...