On September 11, 2008, I broke camp at the mouth of the Deschutes River and drove the last 180 miles of an 1800-mile journey, arriving at my new Corvallis home at 10:30 in the morning.\u00a0 Ten years and three houses later, I\u2019m still here \u2013 less than two miles from where I started and still driving the trusty Subaru Forester that brought me here, and that Jean immortalized in her 2010 painting.<\/p>\n
Ten years, out of 33 \u00bc years of life, is exactly 30%.\u00a0 In a way, it seems that not that much has changed \u2013 especially compared with the previous ten years that began in 1998 with 13-year-old Mark as an eighth grader and proceeded through spelling and geography bees, band and choir competitions, high school friends-achievements-shenanigans, four years of Carleton, working and teaching in the arboretum, bird banding, singing with the A Cappellicans, a semester in Ecuador, a summer in the Rockies, working for the DNR on fire, birds, and prairie, considering Cornell for ornithology, and finally a crazy idea about biosolar hydrogen and a fortuitous visit to Oregon State that launched me this direction.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not to say that the past ten years have been boring, by any means.\u00a0 I spent the first two years exploring as often as possible with Alija and Kelly, traveled to Sweden and met Elizabeth in 2010, moved to the cabin in 2013 and then to the forest homestead early the next year, graduated with a Ph.D. in 2014 and started working for Wild Garden Seed, developed the Winnow Wizard over several years, married Elizabeth in 2015, purchased a house and helped Ed transition out of physical existence in 2016, started my own business in 2017, and will see that business generate a majority of my income this year.<\/p>\n
Though I haven\u2019t been able to fully replicate the spiritual sense of place I developed during eighteen formative years in the Minnesota River Valley, I have come to belong to this land as well.\u00a0 The scent of rain returning to the forest, with chanterelles pushing up from awakening mycelium.\u00a0 The verdant richness of winter moss and lichen.\u00a0 The midwinter unfurling of hazelnut and willow catkins, setting pollen free on winter storm winds and trusting in warmer weather to come.\u00a0 The grand succession of wildflowers through our long spring, from the Snow Queen of early March through the Calypso Orchids of April, the wild irises of May, the tiger lilies of June.\u00a0 The amazing \u201cbeehive\u201d scent of poplars breaking bud.\u00a0 The mercurial spring weather, where sudden hailstorms give way to rainbows and sunshine only to repeat 15 minutes later.\u00a0 And Marys Peak, island in the sky \u2013 my sacred space for equinox and solstice nights beneath the stars, for sunsets over the ocean, for eclipses and meteor showers, for bright winter snow above the foggy valley, for our beautiful wedding ceremony three years ago.<\/p>\n
If I have changed in the last ten years, it is to become less idealistic \u2013 less hopeful in a way that a suite of technological breakthroughs will solve all of our problems and more determined and ultimately excited to inhabit our planet as it is.\u00a0 At first this was a struggle, seeing firsthand that my photobiological hydrogen \u2013 along with most of the other world-changing ideas being pursued in labs worldwide \u2013 might work passably well in a test tube but would never rival natural systems and existing technologies when scaled up and subjected to real-world conditions.\u00a0 But then I started to ask myself what our world would look like if we freed ourselves from natural limits, and I didn\u2019t like it.\u00a0 I wrote an essay to this effect in 2016: \u201cI do not wish to live on Coruscant<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Since then my focus has been more on appropriate technology and appropriate scale \u2013 helping people to supply themselves and their communities with organic produce, seeds, and homegrown energy to begin to roll back the globalized capitalist structures that have sucked the human relationships and meaning out of human sustenance while neatly externalizing or ignoring the costs.<\/p>\n It\u2019s impossible to say what my life might look like in another ten years, at age 43, but I do have a few goals:<\/p>\n On September 11, 2008, I broke camp at the mouth of the Deschutes River and drove the last 180 miles of an 1800-mile journey, arriving at my new Corvallis home at 10:30 in the morning.\u00a0 Ten years and three houses … Continue reading \n