The Return of the Indigenous Gene: Why We Need Goat Herding in the Digital Age

Doug Fine

Funky Butte Ranch

The heart of the Talk (which was a delightful, slightly scary — because scriptless — experience in front of a sold out house of 2,000 in Albuquerque) is my belief, cultivated during the half decade since writing Farewell, My Subaru, that encouraging a sweet spot between Digital Age life and our indigenous selves might play a major role in saving humanity. Which is to say, while researching and writing about the sea change underway in worldwide drug policy, I’ve still been busily cultivating the carbon-neutral good life. In fact, right now I’m eating an egg one of my ducks was kind enough to give me. Well, exactly right now I’m wiping yolk off my keyboard. I’m not saying that finding the sweet spot will be easy. Just fun and important.

In other news, Too High to Fail is cruising along in paperback here (and at your local bookstore), my Drug Peace Bumblebee columns are now archived here, and my just-finished next book, about the almost unfathomably lucrative future of industrial hemp, comes out in March — on hemp paper. I’ve waited two decades to make the tree-free leap. Now I finally have a legitimate answer when a sharp college student during a post-live event Q and A asks me how a sustainability journalist comes to be writing books printed on harvested forests. All it took was research in Manitoba in February. More info on this fun project to come in future dispatches.

Following a fairly intense week-long river trip on a flooded New Mexico wilderness stream, I’m just starting a new book, about which more soon. I’ve been having a blast doing my preliminary research — always a good sign, and easy when not taking place in Manitoba in February.

For now, I’m off to milk the goats. As always, thanks beyond words for giving mind and heart time to my work. And also as always, feel free to forward these dispatches to all you think will appreciate them. If I’m enlisting you as unpaid marketers, at least know it’s appreciated. And at least I admit it. Facebook calls it “friending.”

Doug

Funky Butte Ranch, NM

Tags: back to basics, doug fine, Farm Wars, farmwars, funky butte ranch, goats, off-grid