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'm serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a time out from technological progress as we know it.

I think the deeper truth is that the Kyoto Protocols will not be followed by anyone really and that, in effect, nothing will be done to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions.

We are in for a fiesta of default, repossession, and distress selling of suburban property, much of which will lose its presumed usefulness and monetary value in an energy-scarce economy.

We could do some household and neighborhood or town wind energy. But even this will run up eventually against the problem of needing an underlying fossil fuel economy to fabricate the hardware. Same with photovoltaic (solar) energy. We're going to be disappointed by what these things can do for us.

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.

Americans threw away their communities in order to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying.