A dog musher with a ministry

During my career as a journalist, I've been lucky enough to meet some of my heroes, and also to write about people who became heroes to me. Arleigh Jorgenson, the subject of this profile in St. Olaf magazine is one of the latter. He has a divinity degree, and was ordained to be a Lutheran pastor, but when the moment came to put on the collar, he realized his true calling was as a dog musher. He has raced dogs in the Northwest Territories of Canada, Montana, and in Minnesota's Beargrease Dog Sled Marathon. While he probably never had the kind of mind that could abide a lot of rigidity and bureaucracy, he has been able to inspire others toward a spiritual path with his love of the wilderness and his dogs. Arleigh lives a modest life in a rustic cabin on 40 acres near the Canadian border. He has little material wealth, but he's lived his beliefs while retaining humility and a beautifully opened mind. After the article was done, he found out he had a cancerous tumor in his colon, and underwent surgery last week to have it removed. The surgery went well and it looks like he's in the clear.

My New Year tree

St. Olaf magazine was looking for a photo that would illustrate the idea of philosophy and nature. Originally I'd hoped to photograph a scene of night stars, with a building of some sort tiny and low on the horizon in the foreground. I wanted to indicate a human presence, small and fragile, under the vastness of the ever-spinning cosmos. Unfortunately, the call for the image came during a long stretch of cloud cover. I went to Wild River State Park on the day of the winter solstice, hoping for some kind of inspiration, and found this lovely burr oak on one of the park's large tallgrass prairie meadows. At dusk, when the light spectrum shifts to blue, I tried a variety of several-minute-long exposures, framing myself in the image as a silhouette, above, and moving through the image with my flashlight, below. I don't know yet if either made the cut, but I loved the experiment.

Climate change vs. the rhythm of change

A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail from Dawn Adrian, a senior scientist with the non-profit Tapestry Institute and a member of the Choctaw Nation. She provided a link to her essay on the nature of the debate on climate change. She points out that the two factions arguing the loudest are both laboring under an assumption that is fallacious.

"Their arguments are based on an unspoken but crucial assumption that isn’t about present or past climate either one. It’s about future climate instead — that it should normally be expected to stay roughly the same as it is now."

Adrian goes on to show that a constant rhythm of fluctuation is the normal state of the Earth's atmosphere. Extended droughts, extended monsoons, ice-ages and hot spells come and go, retreating and advancing, one always balanced by another — eventually.

Adrian isn't arguing that we should ignore human-made climate change or that we shouldn't act to minimize the damage, but that we need to consider our place within this ebb and flow. To my mind, her essay calls on us to live with smaller footprints, less consumption and a more humble attitude toward our home.

The humble stars of curling

TOP: Dan Brown warms up before playing against the Olympic curlers at the Eau Claire Curling Club. BOTTOM: au Claire, Wis. — Laurie Marsh, left, and Lynita Delaney, right, sweep for Ava Roessler, 3, at the Eau Claire Curling Club. Delaney is Roessler's grandmother. Marsh and Delaney curl at the Centerville (Wis.) Curling Club.

Pat Borzi, a Minneapolis journalist who often strings for the New York Times, has a good eye for great stories. He recognized a golden opportunity when he heard of a fundraiser at the Eau Claire (Wis.) Curling Club. The Men's Olympic squad and the Skip (or leader) of the women's team would take on all comers to help raise money to send the olympians' families to Vancouver later this winter. As he told me "that's like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James heading down to the local gym to take on the guys in a pickup game." I shot the story in mid-November, and it appeared in the Times Dec. 15-16.

A friend reports from the frontlines of climate change

Joanna Kakissis was one of the five journalists in the Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism program at CU with me last year. Joanna was born in Athens, Greece, but grew up in Williston, N.D. She's particularly interested in immigrants and their stories (and she's particularly adept at such reporting, too, perhaps because of her finely tuned empathy). For the past few years she's been based in Athens, reporting for the New York Times and other publications. At CU, she focused on the climate justice movement and on climate refugees; people who are being forced out of their homes because of desertification (as in Darfur) or rising seas and mismanaged waterways (as in Bangladesh.) After the Scripps fellowship, she received an International Reporting Project fellowship, and headed to Bangladesh to report on what's happening there. Here's her report.

A beautiful place with some hard edges

Crestone, Colo., has been getting some buzz as "the new Sedona." Don't believe it. Sedona has become something of a New Age tourist trap. I've never been comfortable with the way Native American rituals and practices have been bent there to meet the needs of caucasian seekers. When you strip one element of a culture from its context (such as the sweat lodge, or fasting, or one tribe's concept of God) and then commercialize it, you risk all kinds of distortions. And outright danger. That appears to be the case in the sweat lodge deaths in Sedona in October.

Crestone's evolution as a tourist destination is happening in a much different way. There are 22 religious retreat centers in the area, but they are almost all attached to larger institutions and disciplines (Catholic, various branches of Buddhism and Hinduism). There isn't much in the way of tourist infrastructure in Crestone, but there are places to meditate for hours on end, places to chant and places to pray. The people I talked to there where distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of endowing the landscape (which is stunning) with special powers to relieve spiritual woes. Instead, they emphasize the idea of discipline and practice, of doing the work of the religion, whether it is Christian, Sufi, Hindu or Buddhist. See my story and photos in the Dec. 13 Minneapolis Star Tribune Travel section here.

Overblown, underreported Climategate

The e-mails that were stolen from scientists at England's top institution for studying climate change quickly became a political soccer ball for the politically motivated skeptics who seem to believe that scientists operate as they do — with an ideological ax to grind. (And judging from my conversations with relatively well-informed friends, the story introduced some skepticism where there wasn't any before).

There's been a lot of empty debate on the significance of the e-mails but very little reporting on how the e-mails were stolen, who stole them, what they say and whether or not anything in them actually diminishes the case for man-made climate change. (From what I have read, they don't in the least). My friend Keith Kloor at the Collide-a-scape blog has, as usual, been on top of the issue. This Wall Street Journal commentary piece is by one of the scientists whose correspondence was stolen. It's worth a read.