But as I told the contributors to our thirteenth issues, there were times when it was difficult to find a reasonable explanation for the difficulties I’ve faced in putting this particular issue together. Nothing big, really, except that all of the little things that are normally simple simply weren’t. And I have to admit that I thought, more than once, that this is Issue Thirteen. At last, I think, putting this issue became something best described as a war of attrition with Microsoft Word over page and section breaks. And I’m happy to report that, at long last, I think I’ve won that war, at least for now.

So I’m very happy today to offer, at long last, Issue Thirteen in both digital and print formats. The issue features a cover image by a photographer close to my heart, Hillary Urquhart, and poetry and prose by William Cullen, Howie Good, Gabriel “G” Garcia, Beth Paulson, George Korolog, Karla Linn Merrifield, Rae Spencer, Scott Owens, Carolyne Whelan, Inara Cedrins, Shannon Hennessey, Elise Atchison, Jeff Newberry, Judith Skillman, Craig W. Steele, Heather Candels, Dave Malone, and Jeffrey Alfier.

I am grateful for their patience, and for the trust they put in us. And when you see the fine work they’ve shared with us, I’m confident that you’ll find this issue will have been very much worth the wait.

Beginning with Issue Twelve, we have offered the journal in digital and print formats through HP’s print-on-demand service, Mag Cloud. Digital versions of this issue, including iPad and PDF versions, are (of course) free. Perfect-bound print copies of this issue will cost ten dollars and are available through Mag Cloud.

Looking forward, I anticipate publishing our winter issue in early March, with the spring issue following in late April or early June.

Except that following threads in that category rarely brings me to a better place. (Maybe I just need to follow more uplifting folks, although those posting links to well-executed environmental literature seem to elude me.) Instead, in this season of consumption I’m led to question my integrity, or at least dedication, in the matter of sustainable living.

Am I doing enough? And for the right reasons?

The self-accounting goes something like this: One vehicle, not two. A townhome, not a house. Repeated spasms of downsizing, first to move, then to move again, then to fit into a space that is destined—by personal commitment, if not exhaustion—to be a “permanent” one. Less food and even less bad food. Gargling with hydrogen peroxide and cleaning with baking soda.

I’d like to feel good about all this as I coast down Beaver Street on my 10-year-old Raleigh or squeeze into a seat on the Mountain Line bus, Route 2, hoping to beat the campus-bound Mountain Link to the transfer stop. I’d like to feel as if these are concessions and sacrifices made for a high moral purpose.

But my mind, socialized in the Boomer generation and irradiated with consumerism, commercialization, and competition, won’t allow it without a fight.

This is my condition, that flinching inner voice says, because something has gone awry. Two master’s degrees and three (four? five?) careers and a few essays published here and there. And now living paycheck to paycheck, savings rate 0 percent. Really? This isn’t about sacrificing. It’s about mediocrity. No, failure.

But, my rational self tries to counter, this is about choices. I’m living humbly and purposefully in a place that speaks to my soul instead of my ambition. I car camp with my wife and son, the elk and coyotes serenading us at midnight. We walk and bike on urban trails. Our commitment to family—stay-at-home mom, 8-to-5 dad—invokes our commitment to sustainability and simplicity.

Maybe, I hold out, this is a deliberate life?

This current state, simple and modest, with little that is discretionary and disposable, may be more than just the accident of falling off the hamster wheel, or of never having gotten a good grip in the first place. Perhaps, after enough time, the underlying principles and traits that have motivated a lifetime of choices—even the inexplicable ones—begin to take shape as a lifestyle. Even if it took me five decades. And if all generally seems right, then it’s about time to stop carrying around my ready apology for how I live.

One less item on the “unnecessary” list.

• David Blomenberg, for “Unlikely Resolutions” from Issue Ten
• John Paul Calavitta, for “A Mountain with No (Geographic) Will To Be There” from Issue Twelve
• B. J. Hollars, for “Dispatches from a Tornado: March 21, 1932” from Issue Twelve
• Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, for “Peak District” from Issue Twelve
• Timothy Gray, for “wilderness wish” from Issue Twelve
• D. C. Lynn, for “Mother Road Vistas” from Issue Eleven

We send our congratulations to these writers, and our many, many thanks to all those who have entrusted their work to us in the past year.

In the elite University campus where I live there are many trees that ebb and flow with tides of the monsoons. Some of the greenery in these parts still can boast of long term heredity as being indigenous to the semi-dry east coast tropics by the Bay of Bengal. Our high tension electricity lines are drawn for the most above and across these tree clumps that when the tropical storms rage and drive through them the charge could easily be outraged and we have to suffer some long dark nights without power. I have often heard people otherwise quite knowledgeable about many things curse the trees and even opining that they ought to tear down the trees that cause so many problems! Perhaps there is little difference between these electrical highways and the motorways of our developing cities. I am often left wondering why instead of drawing these lines over the green belt we don’t invest a little more and draw them through the other clearer parts of our campus. These are the exigencies of modern living so very much like the highways and byways of traffic that becomes our urban living.

Roads are the nerves of our modern day civilization and one cannot even imagine a country without roads. In fact we could say that our essential societal structure is founded on and depends on the breaking of new wood. Does it by extension become the arch writing that Derrida talks about? In the deep dark woods of the early dawn of human culture when the first homo erectus stood up and walked through and laid the first ever track there was no sense of divide and separation but one only of a sense of direction of the left and the right, the front and the back. Of course as life evolved there was a sequential trail of smell and sense that made out for mental maps and directions as well. Paths and roads made ways for communities and social groups to keep up and cohere. All roads lead back to where one started from. Traveller, says and Arabian proverb, there are no paths! Paths are made by walking.

As I traverse slowly on this mud track through the grass carefully avoiding the rain filled ditches, I hear the harsh notes of the black drongo and the sweet melodious fruity call of the golden oriole. At the edge of the tree line I come across newly felled trees and raked up soil. The red earth is breathing still. All trees and bushes are fated to make way for the growing human needs. All birds and insects like all mammals and reptiles have to stand aside to let the juggernaut of the human machine to slide by. Some are lucky enough to adapt to and be adopted by new habitats. Some are not so lucky, resist and fall. The maps of human evolution are constantly altered and the roads run calmly on and on. Like these red ants that scurry along in silent lines and like the unseen energy that flows through the high tension wires we move, trying to find new and newer paths.

My times are definitely changing. In my boyhood to behold a casual tourist was a cause for celebration. All of us brats would perhaps run after the unfortunate guy and stand around and simply stare. If they are from another land and in another costume we would gape open mouthed not knowing the finer aspects of civilization that staring is such a bad habit! We took our way of life and our nineteen streets so very much for granted that our world closed around them. All beings from beyond were aliens and strange. Nowadays tourism itself is considered as a culture of its own—we speak so proudly about tourism in terms of cultural history and the economics of development. Tourists are an inevitable contingent of every developing nation. The fanciest term these days is eco tourism. We cater to the professed lover of nature—the eco tourist—who roams the country and gapes upon “nature and human nature” with the same benign expression of the children our old times. Eco tourism opens up new inroads into the wild and the seemingly untouched. The eco tourist is invited into the virgin forest to trace the tracks of peaceful and healthy living! Those silent mountains and deep green forests that I have secretly enjoyed in my own mighty solitude have now become the common property of many prying touristy eyes! How could they enjoy the profundity of wilderness if they lay broader and broader roads? This is so very much in the spirit of the cartoon depicting the city tourister asking eagerly of the tourist guide while they settle for the night in their camping site: where do I plug in my electric blanket?

What is wild? Is it something that stands counter to the domesticated and the friendly? Is wild the other side of our cultural habitat? Is it where our children should not trek lest they be swallowed into the unknown? Is it where the savages lurk who do not belong to our known territories? Is it the periphery of our centres? The end of our roads? Can we ever know it for what it is?

Robert Frost has a poem that presents a dark wood from within which a thrush song beckons the passer- by to come in. Is it a welcome song or a sign of something sinister that lurks beyond the known and tested? But then, paths are made by walking and walking leads us to the unknown. It leads us to new signs of front and back and left and right. In the wild our world of relatives and the known collapse—we are left to face the presence of the unknown. The pathless woods are virgin deeps. And to sense the unknown we need a path. The paradox becomes more complex as we reach into spiritual truths. In the wild we return to reason and faith, noted the American philosopher Emerson. The Victorian poet Robert Browning writes: Ah that man’s reach should exceed his grasp/ or what’s a heaven for? To reach into the unknown we need to tame it and know it when it simply ceases to be what it was!

The worm glides majestically over the thorns; the rose blooms silently on the left and right of the winding path. The mist rises slowly and I can see right up to the bend in the horizon. Even the huge electrical grids with their high-rise spires and their welter of high-tension wires have never appeared so beautiful. Did I stray far from my well-worn path? Or have I left all paths and taken that road to nowhere?

For now, I’d rather stitch together those peaceful patches than engage with the fractious world; or more insidiously, engage with the internal, incessant struggle to decipher and rationalize, to painstakingly distill meaning from each day.

This is my vacation from existential hand wringing.

Tests of my nascent resolve arrive frequently, and one in particular induced a wavering that nearly pulled my attention from the lenticular clouds hovering over the San Francisco peaks like the aspirations of an artist’s faraway mind.

The occasion was the outcry of a restive few raised up against a discrete phase of the master plan for campus construction—a phase that called for some tree removal. All of the classic elements presented themselves to me, as a representative of the institution, and fought for ascendancy: duty, loyalty, work ethic, environmental ethic, authenticity. Campus administration called the work revitalization. Others called it degradation. My young son called it “the tree fuss.”

At another stage of my life, this is the juncture at which I would dispassionately outline and analyze both sides of the argument while tearing myself up inside by pitting conscience against conscientiousness.

But I won’t because I choose not to go down that path.

I’m not looking the other way on this matter; I’m just watching out for myself. And if that means keeping my head in the clouds for a few minutes each day, then I’ll take the respite and return to work. The vacation isn’t over yet.

The first and most obvious solution was that perpetual technological advancement would make continued, luxurious life on the planet possible.  One person contended, most eloquently, that it was in fact technology that had gotten humanity into its current mess, so technology could not be counted on as a means of redemption. (Bringing to my mind Audre Lorde’s famous article, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”).   I must admit that I spent years enamored with the person’s position.

And for good reason.  For instance, anthropologists widely agree that prior to the advent of agriculture, adult humans regularly lived into their seventies or eighties.  With agriculture and urbanization came disease and poor diet.  One of the greatest revolutions in history thus cut the human lifespan in half.  The food supplied by the “green revolution” was not really responsible for longer lives.  Rather, the sanitation age managed to bring humanity back to the life expectancy people had  thousands of years ago.  So much time and and so many horrible living conditions had elapsed, all to bring humans to the level of comfort and health they had enoyed before civilization ever began.

Of course, history can never be ignored.  The process of urbanization has been long, but steady.  While humanity may have been better off never starting with this experiment of ours, we have nonetheless embarked on an astounding voyage that has, oftentimes, come at the expense of our environment and our own health.  The human population has already reached six billion, and it will not slow down any time soon.  Earth’s resources will doubtfully ever be as plentiful for human use as they are today.

Given this reality, what are we to do?  Eschewing the need for technology, though poetic, unfortunately feels impossible.  The structure of the planet’s populations could not withstand a harsh return to pre-industrial or even pre-civilization modes of obtaining food and shelter.  Literally billions of people would perish.

I am left with the sense that new technologies–innovations for the betterment of humanity–will be necessary to maintain this march forward, wherever it goes.

And I am all too aware of how optimistic this perspective is.  The deleterious effects of over population and poor manipulation of the landscape can be seen all over the planet.  Today, technology and the global economy insufficiently provide for billions of people.   In fact, the World Health Organization has said over three billion people currently alive are malnourished.  The negative effects of the expansion of the human species are thus already very apparent.

But optimism is my only choice.  In the end, optimism about what the human race has already accomplished, and wonder at what it may some day accomplish, seem the only ways we ever have or ever will make ourselves and our world better.  Perhaps some day we just might figure out how to provide every human with what he or she needs to live a rich, fulfilling, and healthy life, while ensuring the same for posterity.  Such a goal may be lofty–but now that we have been to the moon, split the atom, recorded Abbey Road, and invented the Internet, what should our goals be?

Drill, dig, blast, extract, pollute.

Disputed data aside, most of us understand that these are acts of desperation by a way of life, and a way of thinking about that life, which has no relevance if there is to be a long-term, sustainable future.

Polls differ, but in general they reveal a wavering public. Americans want to lift themselves out of this economic malaise, some with little regard for the environment, others with a commitment to keeping or making the world a place worth living for themselves and their children.

Writers, as always, react to such inputs.

Some express frustration and discouragement—a pathos that works to keep the conversation moving forward.

Others advance the dialogue by brokering wise discussion and fostering more.

Andrew Revkin keeps our feet on the ground and our expectations in check, although the message that positive change will be painfully incremental and incomplete brings a wince. So when I read the headline “Environmental journalism and an antidote to the tragic storyline”, I click on the link wanting to drink at the fountain of hope.

A few try to drive change through action. Bill McKibben, for example, heroically putting thoughts into action by occupying the front lines of activism.

I’m grateful that these writers are out there because they bring visibility to what otherwise could be lost in the smog of partisan conflict. But for those of us writing in obscurity, these times raise the question of purpose more acutely than ever. Without a wide audience, it seems too easy for to fall into constant lament at what has come to pass. At least, it seems that way for me. Choosing merely to chronicle loss is a bitter measure of productivity.

Maybe it’s time for a little change in perspective.

We’ve been told to prepare for a decade of hard times economically—a decade filled with difficult choices and harsh realities. If so, then it makes sense that grim determination may be the strategy for environmentalists. Little victories and incremental advances may be the best for which we can hope.

So here’s to determined writing about little victories—moments that offer reason to believe there will always be something in our world to put into beautiful words.

Worthy labor, whether or not it pays.

I have passed nights with ascetics in the monastery,
I have slept with infidels before the idols of the pagoda.
I am the pangs of the jealous, I am the pain of the sick.
I am both cloud and rain: I have rained on the mead
     –Jalaluddin Rumi, “Soul of the World,” Mathnawi, Trans. R A Nicholson

There is a certain quiet that falls in the mind when one enters any forest. Of course, even the most troubled and the tortured souls have found silence and calm in the solitude of the deep jungle. The Silent Valley reserve forests of Kerala, in south India, are no different. The last of the remaining tropical wet-evergreen rain forests, this 200 odd square miles of almost virgin forest had created such a profound social unrest in the lives of many people living in the far southern coast of India in the mid seventies and early eighties almost to the level of being raised to the iconic level of signifying the struggles of environmental protection and preservation.  The forests are so named because of the huge silence that descends amidst the rocky cliffs and giant trees and the near-total absence of the otherwise persistent cicada.  Through the valley snakes the river Kunthi (recalling the epical presence of the Pandava lineage) and the jungle goes by the name of Sairandhri (Panchali renamed herself as Sairandhri, the queen Sudeshna’s aide, while the Pandavas were in exile).

I first heard about Silent Valley in the summer of 1976, while I was registered as a Graduate student in Trivandrum.  My college was a premier institution in the state and the country considering its stupendous history and the large number of scholars and intellectuals who had sauntered across its portals in the years of yore.  The University College had celebrated its centenary and more by then. As they used to say in the small laid back city this was the college to grow up in!  Those years were also years of tremendous change and political upheaval. Every second student I met there had an ideological point to debate and prove. The teachers who came to the classes were also equally intelligent and committed (or perhaps gave such an impression, or even appeared thus to my youthful imagination.) It did not appear strange to me that our professor turned out to be an accomplished ornithologist and I recall the many hours we chatted about pelicans and pigeons and edible-nest swiftlets, while he did have some spare time away from the classes and other work. The red brick-walls of the old British style building were built to last any amount of student unrests and rebellions apparently because I had witnessed quite a number of those during the years I spent there. The bird-watcher professor was always quite nonchalant and unmoved by those million mutinies and kept on lighting up his non-filtered cigarettes one after another. He was a confirmed skeptic and was quite derisive about student agitations.  The song of a bulbul or the call of the White-breasted Kingfisher was no doubt more capable of creating ripples in his sardonically cynical mind than any number of political happenings. He was the President of our Kerala Natural History Society organized in the lines of the Bombay version of the same. We used to get together during the last Saturday of every month in the Museum campus under the trees or when it rained during the persistent monsoon days in the damp up-stairs rooms of the silent citadels of a colonial era. Nature was our concern and ecology and conservation our subject. It was then that I came across the Silent Valley debate and the time and age were so volatile that soon I was sucked into the maelstrom of the first ever people’s movement for environment in India.  Silent Valley was a passion, it became the icon and symbol of what we humans were about to lose forever on account of the wayward march of uncaring science and technology. The whole project of development was something I came to detest and deride. The very idea of the city and its ambience was what I came to identify with the inhuman policies and projects of the imperial west! When one is young one’s thoughts are pretty fast and the youthful brain adapts easily to the ideas of resistance to authority and power. One arrays oneself always with the underdogs and identifies everything else as potential threats. For my enthusiastic mind urbanization appeared as some kind of Americanisation, and technology that ushered in the terrible change figured as the juggernaut of maldevelopment and calamity. The very name Silent Valley was enough to evoke the idea of greenness and solitude, tranquility and serenity.  Over and above it when I came to know more about the policy of the State Government to build a dam across the placid water of the deep jungle stream—the Kunthi river—I was determined to throw in my might to save all that I stood for at any cost. I trekked the hills and mountains of the western ghats sometimes with friends and fellow naturalists but mostly alone. Many of those few close friends I had in the literary artistic circles thought I was a freak and started keeping safe distances from me.  And yet there were a handful who sympathized with my view and I soon found myself drawn into a larger circle of committed young people like me.

Then came the wild-life week celebrations. The State Department of forests also came to our aid and sometimes provided some sort of help.  During one of the ubiquitous poster exhibitions of those days I was awarded a bird-book by our President in the presence of a few committed naturalists and wild-life enthusiasts—and as he proclaimed it, it was in return for the single-handed service I had rendered for the social awareness raising campaign. Life was in the fast lane those days and much was happening beside the valley issue. The political emergency clamped on the country by the then prime minister Mrs Indira Gandhi was crucial and critical in the way of our growing up. No one was allowed to protest and there was little one could do by way of resistance. Mrs Gandhi herself was a sensitive soul when it came to issues of conservation and preservation, as I came to realize, but the political climate of those days inspired innumerable young people to take to the streets and be tortured and martyred—apparently for no significant purpose. This might appear no big deal to the youth of today so very used to terrorism and needless political massacres.  But then protest and resistance were the order of our youthful days! And Kerala was a hotbed of soico-political and cultural action.  However, there were many so called pretentious intellectuals who hid themselves away from the prying eyes of the Gestapo-like police force of the ruling powers that be. Strangely enough many of them made it big in some way or other in later days, conveniently forgetting those times of struggle in the darkness. I can recall a couple of instances when as a student I had occasions to witness the dastardly and cowardly actions of some so-called intellectuals who later paraded themselves as big shots and culture-vultures! Julien Benda had rightly dubbed such situations as the betrayal of the intellectuals. And then there were other mean minds that played havoc with several innocent younghearts who were absolutely unaware of the profound political intrigues of the times and their deeper significance. They would organize some action rally or other forms of activities like street plays etc and parade the unknowing innocent victims in the forefront while hiding behind their shadows lurking and ducking the vigilant police and political spies. How many times did I fall prey to these dirty games that these political big-wigs played! How many dark nights and sleepless dawns did I tread the erroneous by lanes running reckless errands for these uncaring scoundrels! The worst thing was that I had carried out all these under the pretence that I was doing something heroic! And growing up in those dragon-ridden days and nights I had played out my active part in the dram of the silent valley too. We got ourselves organized as a society calling It the Save Silent Valley Society. There was an equally involved student of Engineering with whom I struck up a good working friendship.  The two of us were the conveners of this society. We sent out a call for a public seminar and proclaimed our intentions to create an open forum to bring the great intrigues into the clear light of day.  There was also a specially mounted exhibition that displayed posters and photographs depicting the facts and figures of the silent valley issue. On the date of the rally and march the court issued an injunction order and it was announced that anyone found defying the court order would be punished—the rally was called off.  But a few enthusiastic friends had decide to take out a march to the government secretariat silently holding forth placards and their mouths covered with handkerchiefs symbolizing the imposed silence. Many were arrested and the march disbanded cruelly. Some of my friends forcibly locked me up in the exhibition hall to keep me safe from being arrested. I don’t actually know what happened except through the newspapers that carried detailed reports daily. There were of course no television or cell phone in those days—and anyway we were too poor to afford to buy even a book or a journal: the ubiquitous newspapers came and went.  And days moved onto nights and darkness made way for the next dawns. The people’s movement had caught on and there were many hands to carry the placards and prepare the posters and many mouths to spread the message.  The Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad the people’s science movement in the state had taken up the issue and another organization acme to be founded: the Prakriti Samrakshana Samithi (the people’s association for the protection of nature) Leading poets, intellectuals and cultural acitivists came to take up the flag from our tired hands and the burden of saving the valley came to be the problem of a larger community of sensitive people. The silent valley was silent no more.  It was a burning issue and vociferous political problem debated and discussed by thousands and millions not only in Kerala but all the way from Gujarat to the far eastern states and from Kanyakumari to Kashmir. The desecration of the valley symbolized the perilous avarice of the human beings and its deprivation signaled the disappearance of an all-time green soul from the human body. The silent valley was a passion in my youthful mind and its memories are even now ever-green, and will be like that forever, even after I pass. Three decades after that when I visited the place, I lugged with me the dead weight of a long lost past. I walked down the much trodden path into the green jungle and trampled carelessly over brown and yellow leaves and rounded boulders. The rush of the forest stream had not lost its power and passion. The wild breeze taunted me with the touch of evergreen green deeps. Occasional bits of blue sky showed through the rich verdance of the west coast tropical wet evergreen rain forests. I had forgotten even to wet my feet in the swirling waters of the Kunthi river. Did I hear the whistling thrush mock me for attempting to stop the building of a dam across these waters? Who can resist the juggernaut of change? When I left the forest I fumbled in my pockets for the change I had brought along.  I pulled out a clutch of currency notes but no change! I realized I had lost the coins in the jungle. The deep-chested whoop of the Nilgiri Langur  floated down wind and a Sambhar stag bellowed.  An old friend who had spent long years in Russia had told me that whenever the Russians leave a place where they want to return later they fling a coin behind their backs. The magic of the lost coins would take me again and again to Silent Valley! Who knows! At least, there is still a valley one could think of going back to.

For me, the Silent Valley is a wild thorn—a painful memory of a lifetime.  I have kept it buried deep within my secret memories with the sacredness and rectitude of a serene religious experience, nursing and preserving the bitter-sweetness of an unhealing wound, not relishing or caressing it even in my dreams for fear of losing it forever!

Biomimicry, studying nature’s best systems and then imitating them to solve human problems, has made some headway in the military, medical, and architectural fields but, as far as I can tell, the everyday products we take for granted are farther behind in their adaption and relationship to natural systems.  For the most part it seems that we create plastic, we generate materials, we cause runoff, we toxify the environment in search of just the right “in season” product produced in the cheapest and most efficient way possible in order to maximize profits.

We create large machines that sit in huge warehouses that are powered by one of our nation’s three power grids in order to make millions of pieces of plastic ware which get dumped in a garbage can and taken to a landfill to sit for hundreds of years before maybe breaking down.  If we’re lucky, a third of that garbage is filtered to a recycling plant and can be used again in another manner–the movie Addicted to Plastic suggests only about 5% of plastic actually gets recycled; the rest is downcycled to produce other products.   Why do we use so much plastic? Because it’s cheap, because it can be any shape or color, any weight, and because it offers lots of new solutions to old or new problems. To use something else, or pay for research to find another material is an added expense, an added detractor from the profit growth performance that corporations need to keep their market price high so the big guys at the top of the food chain can retire and allow the next four generations of their families to live in riches. 

Yet in a few generations’ time, the great grand-kids of those corporate bigheads may be coughing dust, drinking brown water, and wondering what it was like in the old days when birds could be found in the city and it was actually safe to eat the fish in the ocean.

An unnatural obsession with profit growth drives some companies to morally bankrupt themselves, producing products as cheaply as possible, treating customers with as little service as they can get away with, disposing of their waste however necessary to avoid public scrutiny, keeping worker morale and income at a minimum, and creating products that have a short lifespan because they will need to be replaced and purchased again.  This is not a “healthy” species of company culture or manufacturing practices. 

I heard once that a species is healthy if its population is growing 1-2% a year.  We should be mimicking this in our expectations of companies.  Why do we look for 10-30% profit growth a year? If a species is “healthy” growing at 1-2%, can’t we be happy if a company grows 1-2% a year? 

By concurrently learning more about how products are currently made–the good and bad case studies–and joining it with studying the science and properties of plants and natural systems and materials, I’m hoping to apply some philosophies found in our natural systems to shift more products to models that are able to be recycled or downcycled again and again and again, that last longer, take less to produce and maintain, and solve problems of design we encounter every day.  How can we better design products in harmony with natural systems through practices that corporations may be attracted to adopt?  Understanding that consumerism is a modern truth, can we make the process better?  My hope is yes, but right now I have a lot to learn.

For me, it has been a summer of change: we moved closer to campus last month, and our daughter started college this week. And there is change here, too, at Willows Wept Review.

Not only did we add Kathleen Kraft to our masthead as associate editor this summer, but we are also adding a print edition to WWR beginning with this issue. Many of our readers and contributors have requested a print version of the journal, so I’m glad to announce that beginning with Issue Twelve, the journal will be available in digital and print formats through HP’s print-on-demand service, Mag Cloud. Digital versions of the issue, including iPad and PDF versions, will (of course) be free. Perfect-bound print copies of the issue will cost twelve dollars.

I hope that readers who choose to order the print edition of this issue will have the same experience of fascination and joy that I had on the day the proof copy arrived in the mail–I had read all of the work many, many times, but it was wonderful to hold it in my hand, to experience something of what Walter Benjamin might have described as the aura of the issue.

And so I’m very happy today to offer Issue Twelve in both digital and print formats. The issue features a striking cover image by the 15-year-old award-winning photographer Eleanor Leonne Bennett, and it includes work by John Paul Calavitta, William Cullen Jr., Jim Davis, Howie Good, Timothy Gray, A. H. Hofer, B. J. Hollars, Rose Hunter, Colleen Khachatourians, George Korolog, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, Tarn W.P. MacArthur, Florence Major, Dave Malone, Neila Mezynski, Lisa Roney, Rae Spencer, Judith Skillman, Nicol Stavlas, Alison Carb Sussman, and Helen Vitoria.

For trusting us with their words, I am thankful.