When I was a child, magic was everywhere: big buildings and scientific discoveries and amazing medical interventions, known mostly from the glowing black and white magical moving picture box in my family's basement; then computers - with their dark screens and "panic green" blinking cursors, and transport to go anywhere, anytime. Later, when it dawned on me that these things weren't given whole to humans by some magician or alien, I began to understand that these were the collective efforts of millions of humans over thousands of years, and how marvelous that was, and what a Long View we have, even if that somewhat diluted the achievements themselves. Now, nearly 40 years later, my view on these accomplishments has evolved to a darker shade. I know each human gain brings losses for some other thing - another human, another animal, another place, another natural see-saw- delicately balanced, and my response has been to desire the requirement of worth to substantiate each of these gains. If they are so costly, then they should be important enough to absolve the sins of their destructive twins - always tagging along hand in hand. The darkness arises in the knowledge that most are not worthy. They are for the gain of a few, and many times, a gain that far surpasses an objective level of reasonable need - for comfort, for health, for spirit. What's to blame - opposable thumbs, the knowledge to extend human capacity with tools, simple greed, all multiplied then by our multiplication itself? When I was a child, we had barely left the era of civil street training alarms for the Cold War, but my mother knew to dive in the nearest ditch at a siren's sound. We kept up the "lite" version in Catholic School, along with drills for tornadoes, a real threat in the Midwest. These were similar: line up head to rear along the walls of the classroom, like so many little beetles in a line, away from the windows, open - to thwart the suction of the twister, or the blast of the bomb. It seemed so macabre in the face of all that magic. What kind of world was this? The cautioned voices were there: The Indian on his canoe shedding a single tear at the bottles and garbage floating on his river, the smokestacks on the horizon; the Mother Earth News and those long-haired voices advertising to a guitar about thoughtful navigation on our giant rock; new reports on the Silent Spring, the ozone's hole, the oil-slicked herons... To a child, these things were hardly related to my shoes, my parents' car, our packaged cereal. My mother tried to lessen our impact through home-made granola, bread, yogurt, candles and clothes, at least part of which was to extend the financial leash tethering her, to "feed an army on a pound of ground beef". My father was less interested in that homemaker stuff, and as long as there were meals, there were other important things to consider: the need for America to keep peace by proclaiming and maintaining the largest guns, and the need for spiritual conquest of his growing brood. Hearts in the right place generally, but agency, intelligence and birthright all overestimated, we functioned like the rest of society, moving forward either unaware or uncaring of our wake, or perhaps just unempowered to address it. We were a tiny version of an endless collective paradox. My evolution has been slow and shackled by naivete (mercifully), but the depths of the fall are marked, and I begin to mimic my mother's mid-life push for self-sustainability, for an interaction with my world more in-line with my rightful portioning. I am mocked as she might have been, and her mother before her for thinking these things. We are ants with a giant's shadow, but believing we are giants, no ant should question the disparity. What difference does my bike make (insert real danger here), my refusal to get a new cellphone or computer (insert planned obsolescence here), both choices complicating and frustrating my modern convenience? And to what end-the car is apparently the right of every person on planet earth, regardless of the operability of that plan. The new cellphone will last a few months less than the last if I am lucky. Who am I to make any difference in the trajectory of our herd, racing to the cliff, and who are the spear-holders driving us there anyway? They are in bed with the myopic card-holders of every nation: politicians, moneymen, militias, clergy. My art is a reflection of these philosophies. I spend a lot of time engineering around objects that are cast-offs from other life processes. Much less about being frugal, they are a double attempt at conservation. I keep the old material out of a landfill, and the new that I would use, if I used new materials (because, make no mistake, all of these things will be trash again someday). Perhaps that is why there are so few works. It is harder to renovate than to build from scratch. This is a large part of the waste we make - the path of least cost is to start over, and as our pace and taste speed up, so does the turn-over and the commesurate use of resources. People are lost in the push too, but people far away, with softer voices. With money the primary motivator, this will stop only when forced to stop - by societal or environmental collapse. It is heresy to call out this base flaw of capitalism, at least the capitalism that settles on product over service. How long will I be able to function at this reduced consumer identity? I gave in - to the credit card, to the cellphone, to Facebook. How long will my aging operating system allow me to check my email? How long before my small financial footprint labels me a persona non-grata in the eyes of the government? Can I grow enough in pots on my porch to escape Monsanto's reach? Would this save me from early cancer anyway? I still have to breathe. So will these writings, musicalities and objets d'art be social, environmental and philosophical rantings? Probably. But perhaps the vent will allow the softer things to speak, too: beauty, mystery, compassion, generosity, and most importantly for me, the Long View.