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Landlocked on Purpose

In the fall of 1922, Aldo Leopold and his brother Carl paddled a canoe into the delta of the Colorado River and found a wilderness of green lagoons, a hundred channels braiding through two million acres of cottonwood and willow, egrets standing in the shallows, deer in the cane, and somewhere beyond the firelight the jaguar they never saw and never stopped feeling. Leopold wrote about that trip a quarter century later and confessed that he never went back. He preferred the delta as memory held it, because he understood what was coming for it. He was right to stay away. In November of that same year, in a lodge outside Santa Fe, commissioners from seven states signed the Colorado River Compact and divided the river on paper. The canoe and the signature belong in the same paragraph because one of them canceled the other.

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Hope Has No Shovel: Why We Fling Our Wishes at the Sky

Watch what the body does with a wish. The child inhales before the candles, holds the secret behind her teeth, then gives it to the room with one hard breath. Lovers press lips to a palm and push the kiss off the hand like a paper boat, up toward a window, a balcony, a departing train. A meteor scratches the dark and everyone beneath it makes the same silent motion, hurling a private want after a falling rock. Mourners lower the casket and lift their eyes. Whatever hope is made of, it has a launch angle, and the angle is up.

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Has Technology Ever Reduced Labor?

Has technology ever reduced labor? The question sounds rhetorical. We carry small computers that answer any factual query in seconds, our laundry tumbles itself clean while we sleep, our cars drive themselves on highways our great-grandparents traveled by mule. Of course technology has reduced labor. The question barely needs asking.

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Luck of the Land: How Agriculture Ruined the World

10,000 years ago agriculture was invented and in the midst of its successful evolution, the world was ruined because the fruit of the land — the wealth of our health — was held in a few hands instead of everyone’s.

America built its reputation in the world by being fresh-faced, fertile, undiscovered and undeveloped.

We fed ourselves first and then we fed everyone else and in that process our families split apart, people in the Homeland grew hungry and we lost the ability to individually feed ourselves with our own labor and the sweat from our own hewn hands.

There was a time — in the pre-industrial Age — when families would raise their own crops, hunt their own food and feed their own families. You canned food for the winter.

You hoped for the best against the rain and wind and snow.

The commoditization of sugar and cotton created slavery and the fertility of the land became more valuable than its people. Prosperity in the industrialization of agriculture was determined by the luck of the land and never again by individual familial hard work.

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