Why subscribe?

Here are my credentials. I was trained at the London Bureau of Time Magazine, spent seven years there, ending as European Bureau Chief of LIFE Magazine. I published a novel, The Monkey Puzzle Tree with Knopf and Bloomsbury. I’ve written for the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail, Harper’s Magazine, the Sunday Times Magazine, British Vogue, the Independent, the Guardian, the Observer. I have moonlighted writing for the Daily Mail (fun!) and covered the collections in Paris and London for the Toronto Sun and the LA Weekly.

In 2012, I published Eco-Fascists, How Radical Environmentalists are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, with Adam Bellow at Harper Collins New York.

To research the book, I drove 20,000 miles into the American backcountry, deep into the towns and counties no one visits. Over a full decade, I talked to thousands of men and women negatively impacted by the regulatory regime put in place by activists in government. They care deeply about the land and its health and no one listens to them. Regulations are put in place by people who live thousands of miles away and who are utterly heartless in their orientation, because the devastation is extreme. 20 million have been driven from their lands in the developing world, and I counted 14 million in the USA. Those lands more often than not, degrade. No one else has done that reporting in any systematic way, and I am, God help me, an authority on zoning, regulations, rules, legislation, land use, environmental NGOs, and the bitter fight over land, water and resources in the US, and to a lesser extent in Canada.

While I spent my early 20’s in the arts, at grad school, I studied and came to love economics, statistics, business and the calm rational side of my brain. 

I’m from the founding families of the US and Canada; both parents ancestors arrived in the Connecticut Valley in the early 1600’s. Many of my ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War, my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather and his son were Commissary and deputy Commissary of the Revolutionary Army. Washington complains in his diary about the tight-fisted Puritans running supplies. That was us! Today, in my blended family we have four native bands, Venezuelan, Jamaican and Jew. We are the new America. As is everyone, ffs.

I am a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Fcpp.org.

Oh, I also have a long-term spiritual practice. It is everything.

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