I am a sur le motif painter, always in-the-field, with a French easel that folds up into a box, with backpack straps on it. Many of the sites I haunt are desolately beautiful. Few other people go there. I am gloriously alone, unmolested, and absorbed in attempting to see what I am looking at.

I urge people not to think in terms of "solutions," but in terms of intelligent responses to the quandaries and predicaments that we face. And there are intelligent responses that we can bring forth. But when I hear the word "solution," I always suspect that there's a hidden agenda there. And the hidden agenda is: "Please, can you please tell us how we can keep on living exactly the way we're living now, without having to really change our behavior very much?" And that's sort of what's going on in this country. And it's not going to work.

My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there's no question we're going to have to rely on them. For me, it's an issue of scale.

No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we're running, the way we're running it.

We're not going to reform our moronic land-use laws, which mandate suburban sprawl one way or another. They're simply going to be ignored when it becomes self-evident that we cannot build stuff that way anymore.

Most of suburbia will end up in three ways: ruins, slums, salvage yards for materials.

It pays to remember that societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.