(this essay originally appeared in the October 2015 issue of The Ethical Spectacle) During the 1950s, my father and Edward Abbey used to burn down billboards in New Mexico. This was their rebellion against admittedly gaudy tourist trap advertisements. But it was also a good bit of belated juvenile vandalism…

The great writer John Mortimer’s most famous fictional character was Horace Rumpole, a British barrister. In one story, Rumpole warns his son about the preoccupation with purity in the United States. “Be careful of living in America,” he wrote, “The purity! The terrible determination not to adulterate anything!” One manifestation…

An old environmental debate in the USA from the 1960s and 1970s involved the “purity” of nature and its preservation. Some of this debate became encapsulated in America’s 1964 Wilderness Act, followed by the 1975 Eastern Wilderness Act. The latter bill mainly included acreage in and near the Appalachian Mountain…

No one should litter cigarette butts, yet various birds in Mexico City seem to be using them to line their nests because the nicotine repulses a parasitic mite. It is astonishing to consider the intelligence involved in this avian behavior. But this also illustrates how practically all fauna and flora…

If we abandoned our towns and cities, they would instantly begin “reverting” to nature. In my neighborhood, this would take on the form of an ash and cottonwood forest during the first summer. It would be a young forest, of course, but only a few years later hundreds of thousands…

A PERSONAL STORY I’ll close this series with an account of my mother’s experience in Big Cove, North Carolina; the comparatively traditional eastern Cherokee community of the late 1960s. I’ll change all the names and characters except for my mother and her wonderful friend, Annie Crowe. My mother got hired…

A RICH TAPESTRY Cultural mixing is inevitable and has happened throughout human history. It is especially featured in a land of tremendous racial and ethnic diversity, like the United States. Consider the American South. The South represents some of the most intense historic mixing of Scots-Irish, African, Native American, Spanish…

PERSONAL ANTI-RACISM It is an old observation that much racism or race-based hatred is rooted in ignorance. Ignorance, unfortunately, evokes fear and insecurity in a great many people. They lash out in hatred against what they do not understand. So much racial strife is a result of strangers interacting. My…

CULTURAL “AUTHENTICITY” The United States is still such a young nation. Groups like the Sons of Norway are eager to preserve “tradition” such as the Potetlefse (potato lefse) flat bread recipe. But we know potatoes were originally a western hemisphere food. Only well after the Spanish “discovery” of the Americas…