Rural Virginia’s Solar Gold Rush
Is solar energy destroying the soil it was meant to save?
Fields of Chinese-made solar panels and giant corporate data centers replace farms in Mecklenburg County while electricity prices climb
‘I see God’s beauty everywhere’
There’s a reason the American pastoral has endured in art as it has, tenuously, in life. Paint me a landscape with rolling hills, with cattle grazing in distant fields and a black horse with his white-streaked nose looking curiously up at the fences. Paint in the foreground a woman who spent her life here, who worked this land with her mother and father and then with her husband and sons, who has seen the county change with the crops, and who is thinking now about what world will be left to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. What will they see when they look out over the open pastures? What will they remember?
I am spending an afternoon with Mrs. Betty Upton at her cattle farm in Virginia’s Mecklenburg County. It’s early in the day, just after church, and she is still wearing a black dress embroidered with white flowers and a red woolen jacket with a broad black lapel. The Southern lady is …
No Time For Words
By learning to step out of the way of observation we can experience a greater degree of reality.
‘Stow it, Guv’nor’
Turn On, Tune In, Shut Up.
In the beginning, we observe. We watch, wide-eyed, taking it all in. At first, we do not know what any of it means. There is nobody teaching us, and we have no words. Our only option when we are very young is to sense the world directly — with our fingers and toes, our breath, our noses and our ears, and our eyes.
Soon though, so soon, we begin to have ideas. That person is a friend. This animal is soft. I like the taste of that. Those noises make me flinch. And soon those ideas come to replace observation. Soon we are interpreting as we observe, and it becomes difficult to tease the two things apart. What I am seeing becomes intertwined with what it means.
In the study of animal behavior, one of the most difficult things to learn is to return to a state of observation without interpretation. If you are trying to figure out what an animal is doing, and also would like to understand why, you …
Trimming Season
An elegy for California's Emerald Triangle
An estimated 15,000 illicit farms once operated behind the Redwood Curtain, with a pound of weed selling for upwards of $8k
My friend was bound together with the other trimmers on the floor of the barn, and left there half-naked without food, water, or toilet
Out here, this green earth will swallow anything whole. Consider a felled coastal redwood, one of the largest and heartiest living organisms on earth, breaking down into the dank forest duff and disappearing into the understory. The desert tells time in dust, water through shape. The forest expresses itself in rot.
On my way to Willow Creek, a marijuana nirvana in the mountains above Arcata, I drive past forgotten properties tucked into the darkness of trees. They’re littered with broken-down cars and RVs, abandoned doublewides and graffitied trailers — the collective detritus of old pot farms slowly sinking into the earth. Discarded fuel cans, box fans, grow lights, the skeletal remains of retired PVC greenhouses and five-gallon buckets. Dappled sunlight interrogates the roadside debris.
And these old farms are just the ones I can see from the road. But don’t worry, the rest are being …
