BIOLOGY UNDER THE INFLUENCE: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health by Richard Lewontin and Richard LevinsBUY THIS BOOK Biology under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins is an exciting book.  The title suggests that biology is hampered by narrow theoretical constructs that block interchange between […]

We humans are basically big furless animals who make tremendous demands on energy and materials for staying warm in cold places and cool in hot places.  It wouldn’t hurt any of us to recognize this biological fact.  Right now I’m burning big chunks of stove wood, to keep warm at zero F.  We possess, each […]

When Harker sold off the hay ranches, the new owner, a super-rich businessman from Denver, kept Lester on as maintenance man.  This owner, Christopher Bane and his wife Audrey set themselves up in Harker’s old headquarters ranch and right away started drawing up plans for a big house on the sage bench across the creek […]

At noon in the hay sheds Lester and me, we kept mostly quiet and old Enos didn’t say much either.  Maury and Vern did almost all the talking.  Vern was a cowboy, an all-around Marlboro Man, calm and rugged, except that back then he smoked Camels.  And Jared, the man we called Preacher when he […]

It might look strange, Harker paying bus fare clear down to Laramie for two guys to take possession of the same model pickup he could’ve bought from Jim Sturgess’s dealership, right there at home.  What happened was Harker found out he could shave a considerable slice off the price if he dealt with a certain […]

The clouds quit teasing, gave us a hard rain with long rolls of thunder and lightning sky-splitters. We hid out in the hay sheds, shifted a few bales around to make the stacks look a little neater. When the rain quit we went to work in the fields, propped bales endwise against each other so […]

It was comical, how Maury and his friend Red kept meeting each other, like in Idaho for potato or sugarbeet harvest, or Montana to fight forest fire, and then they’d drift off, going their own ways, and somewhere down the line they’d run into each other again. It got to be like a serial on […]