How about a way to inject some clandestine environmental science into your travels?

I’m looking for adventuresome eco-travelers to help me to identify a number of environmental bad actors. I’m talking about hazardous agrichemical pesticides, and they’re out there in full force. They’ve infiltrated...

Knowing something of my experiences among subsistence farming communities in Asia, the editors of a popular online travel magazine recently asked that I supply a short piece on ‘agro-eco-tourism.’ They wanted me to explain why, in their words, “Working on a farm beats sitting on a beach.”...

As humans, we have basic needs for food, shelter, medicine, and a few durable goods like clothing, tools and cooking implements. The quality of our food, our shelter and our medicines all go to promote our health. To be healthy means to be free of disease and sickness, to be strong and energetic, and...

For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons…

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music…

And in keeping yourself with labor you are in truth loving life,

And to love life through labor is to be intimate with life's inmost...

(Find photos and more from Ladakh at http://joshkearns.blogspot.com)

For six weeks during August and September I participated in the “Learning From Ladakh” farm project put on by the International Society for Ecology and Culture
(ISEC). This program combines immersion in traditional Ladakhi...

With all due respect to Ralph Waldo Emerson...

Pun Pun’s philosophy can be succinctly conceptualized as a practical demonstration of self-reliance. I want to talk a bit out what is meant by this term “self-reliance,” partly because it is integral to what we are doing here and the kinds of...

In addition to being an excellent cook and a skillful earthen builder, Pun Pun resident Pi Ben also happens to be one of the foremost environmental justice activists in Thailand. Recently we have had occasion for discussion with Pi Ben about his work with a Thai grassroots organization called the...

Last weekend we were visited by a group of seventeen students from a special school in Chiang Mai. These young people, mostly between the ages of twenty and thirty and representing several different indigenous ethnic groups, are refugees from Burma. The school that they attend is sponsored by an NGO...

Remember those cheesy “choose your own adventure” novels? I used to read those a bunch when I was a kid. I was kind of a dorky kid that read fantasy novels like Lord of the Rings and I was all into those choose-you-own-adventure books. Can you believe I was a nerdy kid? Seems crazy, I know. But there...

A number of people have emailed me pointing out the recently announced collaboration between the University of California and BP in a big-money deal to research biofuels and thus address sustainability, tackle the energy crisis, etc. I guess this is the biggest collaboration between the corporate...

It turns out I’ll be in Kathmandu at least a couple of days longer than expected.

Royal Nepal Airlines, the company that I have enjoined to transport my self and my belongings along the Bangkok leg of a journey that concludes in San Francisco via Hong Kong, is at the moment perhaps succumbing to...