O'Sterity

Note: I finally broke down and got a new computer today; I buy and use as little technology as possible, so this was a big deal for me. My apologies if I haven't responded to comments and e-mails quickly; I'll get to you. 

The village of Sallins in County Kildare, Ireland, lies on a stretch of road with two stone bridges — one over a railroad built in the 1840s, the other over a canal a quarter-millennium old. The bridges, canal, and railroad are sturdy and remain in use, but now they sit in the shadow of a modern office complex, a stillborn child of the recent economic boom. It opened just in time for the crash and instantly became a graffiti-covered derelict.

Ireland seems to specialize in this smashing together of the ancient and the modern. Just a brief drive from my house in Sallins, a new Starbucks overlooks medieval ruins, and a thatch-roofed pub has a satellite dish. But many of the new features are destined for a short shelf life. The country has seen the same troubles as my native United States — layoffs, bailouts, bubbles, and cutbacks — and the vacant office buildings reinforce the picture of desperation. Talk to the people, though, and a more complex picture comes into view.

The Irish have a lot in common with Americans, and not just because our globalized culture has everybody listening to Beyoncé and talking about the series finale of Lost. To a Missouri boy like me, many things seem familiar: faces and last names, crops and churches, country music stations and county fairs. This is where much of rural America comes from, the original of the species. In other ways, of course, Ireland is a European nation, with nationalized health care, coalition governments, no death penalty, and no guns.

And when it comes to attitudes toward economic hard times, the Irish could not be less American, owing to the country's unusual modern history. Ireland’s stark landscape of windswept plains and ancient monoliths draws legions of tourists, inspires New Age records, fantasy literature, and inspirational calendars. But we see those ruins out of context. When built, they were surrounded by towns, farms, and a cold rainforest like Oregon’s today. In medieval times, Ireland was a civilized and densely populated country compared to most of Europe. Even after the land was conquered and the forests felled, as many as 8 million people lived here — almost twice as many as today. Over the last 200 years, the populations of most countries increased dramatically — Britain’s by seven-fold, America's by a factor of 50. Ireland’s was cut by almost half.

The most important reason was the Famine, of course, and you can still hear the capital F in today’s Ireland. But that epochal crash was just the worst chapter of a history that emptied the land and made Ireland the world’s most famous exporter of sad songs and refugees. Perhaps no other people but the Jews have been so defined by tragedy and exodus.

In the U.S. and around the world, the descendants of the Irish multiplied until they vastly outnumbered the population of Ireland itself, and many retained an (often sentimentalized) love for their ancestral homeland. It’s the reason so many cities celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, why Ireland became such a popular tourist destination as the Land that Time Forgot. Even when Ireland’s cultural exports expanded beyond the Quiet Man stereotypes to U2 and The Commitments, the country retained its image of charming poverty.

Poverty looks better in memoirs or through the tour bus window. When my wife moved to County Clare in the 1970s, indoor plumbing and electricity were new and still not universal. Potatoes and cabbage really were the staple foods, and pubs and gambling houses were more common than libraries or grocery stores.

Perhaps surprisingly, then, most older people I talk to remember those days fondly. They recall a life that few modern people have experienced, spending the days working in the company of family and friends. They speak with pride of being able to provide their own food and fuel. They say that neighbors helped each other through the lean times, weaving a dense web of indebtedness. They too might be sentimentalizing a life most of us would find harsh, but they also tend to agree that in its prosperity, Ireland has lost something precious.

During the 20th century, the modern world slowly crept in, until most Irish had cars and televisions, and cracks began to appear in the old culture. Contraception was legalized in 1978, homosexuality in 1988, divorce in 1995. Then in the 1990s, a number of computer companies settled in Ireland, and the unthinkable happened.

In just a few years, Ireland went from being one of the poorest of Western nations to one of the richest, with double-digit annual growth some years. For the first time in centuries, poor immigrants flooded into Ireland, mostly Slavs who filled the service sector. Land prices in our area doubled, doubled again, and doubled yet again. Villages swelled with housing developments — the population of Sallins quadrupled in a decade. Traffic jams filled the newly built highways, traditional pubs remodelled as trendy nightspots. It was as if the whole country had won the lottery.

The shake-up gave a boost to other changes that were already in the works. It dealt a final blow to the Troubles with Northern Ireland, effectively ending a thousand years of conflict. It did the same for the Catholic Church’s once-uncontested power. By European standards, Ireland remains devout: abortion remains illegal, state schools are Catholic, and the national television stations take breaks for vespers. When my bus passes a church, half the passengers still make the sign of the cross. But most remember the Church’s sometimes abusive history, and few today rue the breaking of its political power.

But even the newfound excess was frugal by American standards. The Irish use less energy per capita than most Western European nations, and half of the energy per capita as the average American. Personal savings remain much higher in Ireland than in the U.S. Personal debt has increased, but only because so many acquired new mortgages in the last decade.

More significantly, few people here saw the boom as normal or permanent. No leaders announced grandiose plans for a 21st-century Irish Age, or invested their new wealth in forming a global empire. As religious as Ireland has been, no one decided that Ireland was now the chosen nation of God. In short, the Irish did not react as many of my own countrymen did to the rising economic fortunes of the U.S.

Most Americans don’t imagine themselves to have lived through a boom of their own, but they have — just one that has lasted a human lifetime, so few people now remember frugality. The current crisis has left many Americans feeling helpless and outraged: this isn’t supposed to happen to us. The Irish make no assumptions, and now that lean times have returned, any older Irish person remembers how to live through them.

Living on an island makes Ireland more vulnerable to a depression, fuel shortage, or food crisis, and yet the Irish seem more prepared to endure it. Agrarian self-sufficiency ran too deep, too recently to be fully abandoned. Many people here grow gardens, and until recently it was common for schools and hospitals to have a garden outside to feed the students and patients. Cities and towns are compact to the point of claustrophobia, so arable land is never far away. Public transportation is widespread and carries no stigma of poverty. Perhaps most importantly, everyone seems willing to help even distant relatives — and if they live on the island, they are never far away.

Finally, much of the old infrastructure is still functional, or could be put back into service again soon, and could last for centuries after the boom’s plastic and plywood have collapsed. The railroads still run through Sallins, and could be electrified or horse-drawn if needed. The old canal barges may be lying on the banks with trees growing through them, but new ones could be made. The 250-year-old bridges are used every day with little sign of wear. They were built before the throwaway world was even imagined.

No one in Ireland would find a post-crash world pleasant or easy, but their culture might allow them to cope better than most. Traditional Ireland, the culture that older people remember and that still exists all around, was a post-crash world, its institutions and customs shaped by the Famine experience. The boom swept away the uglier aspects of the old order — the institutional abuse, the Troubles — but did not fully replace the qualities that older people here miss.

Many Irish see austerity not as the end of the world but as the hangover after the party, after which life will go back to normal. They have been here before. This is where they lived.

Originally published by Big Questions Online

Gardening in March

This article originally appeared in the Kildare Nationalist, County Kildare, Ireland.

March can be a frustrating month, inuring us to springtime days of sunshine and green fields and then plunging us into the damp and chill again. Its unexpected turns make it difficult to judge the last days to prune, or the first days to plant or put delicate seedlings outside.

If you haven’t planted anything yet, there still might be time to order seeds and plant something for later in the year; buy seeds for more than one year to be on the safe side, but not more than a few years ahead, as after that some seeds tend to lose the ability to germinate.

Your first concern should be soil; in some places here, the soil can be solid clay, while other people have a wet and acidic bog. Gardening soil should usually be dark and mostly compost – that is, well-rotted plant matter – with some clay and sand. You can make your own compost and enrich your soil by composting kitchen waste or manure for two years, until it is dry, crumbly and feels like soil – and then mixing it in. Alternately, you can mix it in now and wait just a year, but then you would not be able to plant anything in the meantime.

If you have particularly boggy soil, you might want to build raised beds and lay down mulch or branches underneath and rich, sandy earth on top. This allows the bed soil to drain properly and provides nutrition for the plants as the wood slowly decomposes. Boggy soil can also be acidic, and many gardeners “sweeten” the soil with lime or some other alkaline – although such measures are said to increase the risk of disease in potatoes. Outside the beds you could plant crops that like acid soil, like blueberries.  

If you are experimenting with gardening for the first time, it is probably best to try small patches of the easiest crops – courgettes are famously easy and prolific. Other relatively easy crops that thrive in this climate include brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage), alliums (onions, garlic, leeks) and peas. All of them should go in the ground quickly if they’re not planted already, along with other local staples like carrots, parsnips and lettuce, as well as crops that more Irish should experiment with -- artichoke, celeriac, chard, beetroot and asparagus.

Check your saplings and young shrubs, especially those planted over winter, to ensure they have not been rocked by wind --- you might have to pound a post into the ground and stake them. Remember that they need extra water when they are producing leaves. If your trees haven’t begun to bud yet, this might be your last chance to prune them this year; some trees react badly to being pruned with leaves or buds.

Since the March weather is so variable, it helps to plant seedlings inside first – ideally you should have had them going for a month or two now. A greenhouse or poly-tunnel is an immense help in growing veg, and allows you to grow year-round. If you can’t afford one right now, build a cold-frame, a box with a window on top that allows sunlight to come in – ideally slanted toward the south and placed in a sunny spot.

Inside your greenhouse, this is a good time to plant tomatoes, chili peppers, bell peppers and other warm-weather plants. Feed and water them well to prepare them for summer – remember that a greenhouse needs to be watered no matter how much it rains outside -- and check for greenfly, whitefly and other pests. If you get slugs, you have treats for your chickens and ducks. If you get snails, you can experiment with French cooking.

Most of all, look around for larger areas to garden, for yourself or your neighbours, for when times get tougher. We are surrounded by fields, most of which are used for grazing if at all, and growing crops generally feeds more people than animals on the same ground.

Silver screens

"The great rival of the Catholic Church in Ireland was not Protestantism, or even Communism, but the cinema, in that cinema was competing for the same part of people's inner lives as the confessional and the Church.

When cinema started in the early decades of the century, it wasn't just a church that was in opposition, it was also cutting across the idea of the national revival, and the Los Anglesation of Ireland was feared as much as the Anglicisation. So what might be called the culture of protectionism of the 1920s and 30s militated against media and jazz.

One of the ironies of the Gaeity Cinema in Carrick-on-Shannon was that it established against the backdrop of a movement to ban jazz in Ireland, founded by a parish priest in the adjoining district of Cloon, County Leitrim. And that led to marches of over 5,000 in Moyle against jazz - jazz was Beelzebub’s music. And the dance-halls can be seen as part of that as well, their libidinous energies cutting across the austerity and puritanism of the new state."

-- Unidentified interview subject in the RTE documentary, "Closing the Gaiety in Carrick-on-Shannon," August 2010, remembering the cinema's role in the town during the mid-20th century.
Photo: Still from the 1920 Irish film Come On Over.

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Owl on the Burren

Stewie the Owl, orphaned and raised by humans at the Raptor Center by the Ailwee Caves in County Clare. The humans who work there say owls are difficult to train, as they have the attention span of a kitten -- they are constantly alert and being distracted by random sounds in the distance. They can hear sounds kilometres away, so now that the surrounding countryside is full of cars and other human noises, they live in a world of distractions.

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The Real Social Network

The other night I saw the end of a life well-lived. I didn’t know him; I just saw his funeral.

My bus rolled through the dark night I was riding the bus from my job in Dublin to our home in the Irish countryside, and the tiny roads take us through one rural village after another. That night police stopped us just outside one where a funeral was being held; as there is usually only one road through town, there was nothing to do but wait half an hour or so.

I’d seen funerals here, but never one this big – by my estimate, several times the population of our village. I pictured half the farms and houses for many miles around emptying out for this man, who by all accounts was not wealthy or renowned, but simply beloved.

I was one of the only people left on the bus, and the driver and I stepped out, caps to chest, chatting as the procession slowly passed. Turns out the bus driver lives down the road but we’d never met either, and that set us talking about mutual acquaintances and local gossip. We’d seen each other once a week for years, never exchanging more than a sleepy mumble – but now that we’re on first names I can more comfortably pass the long ride chatting, or more comfortably bring up the delicate matter of the drunk in the third row.

We don’t get enough moments like that, when a stranger suddenly a neighbour. We become moral animals when we care about others as we do ourselves, and in most eras that wasn’t a problem.
Whether in Stone Age tribes or bucolic villages, we lived in the constant presence of people like ourselves, with whom we shared a lifetime of memories and on whom we depended. Accommodating one another was in our obvious self-interest.

For our neighbours, local and family histories can go back a thousand years or more, so relationships run deep. They might have conflicts or even feuds, but after sharing three sacraments, a football championship, the rights to the nearby pasture and two great-grandmothers, they learn to get along. Relationships like this civilise us, and thousands of such threadlike connections, layer upon layer, cushion the weight of the world.

Today, though, we spend much of our lives alone even in a crowd, often insulated by headphones and absorbed in a screen of some kind, whether a laptop, television or phone. In this protective bubble we find it easy to treat the icons on Facebook like the icons on a video game, or the cars on the road like moving images on a screen. We can fill online comment boxes or the space between our cars with language we would never use over a cup of tea, because we can now live in a world free of identity and consequences. As individuals we default to being self-absorbed, and now we have technology that allows us to stay that way.

We had drifted apart long before the digital revolution, though, across most of the Western World and particularly in my native USA. Thirteen years ago American sociologist Robert Putnam, in his seminal book Bowling Alone, compared survey data from across the decades, exploring how often people ate together, joined clubs, talked to neighbours and so on. The conclusions were dramatic and sweeping: Most traditional forms of human interaction have declined, and some have almost vanished.

Read that again: Most traditional forms of human interaction have declined, and some have almost vanished.

“Human interaction” covers quite a bit of ground, of course, and Putnam goes through hundreds of pages of examples – any of which might seem tiny in isolation, but fit like mosaic pieces to portray a crisis. Over two decades, for example, the number of times Americans entertained friends at home had fallen by half. “Time diary” studies show that Americans spent a third less time socializing in 1995 than in 1965. Instances of family members vacationing together, going to church together, or “just sitting and talking,” as one poll put it, have all declined. Gradually and silently, hundreds of millions of neighbours became strangers.

Of course, many Americans work longer hours than they used to and commute longer distances, but those have become solitary activities too. Many of our jobs consist of work at individual “workstations,” and carpooling has nearly disappeared as an institution. Going out for drinks afterwards declined almost 50 per cent, and Cheers, the television show about the bar “where everybody knows your name,” has become a period piece.

Nor do we eat together, that basic glue of communion; the number of families who eat dinner together fell by a third in the last 20 years of the 20^th century, while the number of old-fashioned restaurants fell and the number of fast-food “refuelling stops” doubled. (1)

Participation in bridge clubs, local politics, men’s clubs like Kiwanis and Knights of Columbus, after-work poker games and bowling leagues – hence Putnam’s title – have all receded into shrinking pools of elderly since the Woodstock era, when young people stopped joining. (2)

Putnam’s 2000 work spawned a decade of journal papers and studies looking at various kinds of “social capital” and hot academic debates over its definition. Most of us, though, know it when we see it, and when we have it we live longer, feel better, are stronger, healthier, and have more meaningful lives when we are part of a close family or a loyal group of friends. Our community gives us gossip confidantes, fellow sport fans, walking companions, fellow worshippers, and an unspoken savings-and-loan of personal favours. They are, in short, the ones who share in the numinous moments of our lives.

Most people won’t have the centuries-old relationships that some families here have, of course, but they don’t need to. Sometimes a chat with a bus driver is enough to build what Putnam calls “thin trust.” Our lives are made up of thousands of tiny gestures like this every day, and ninety-nine out of a hundred fly right by us. We don’t think much about the pedestrian who shifts to one side to let us pass, the clerk who smiles at us, or the kids who walk around our property instead of through, but we coast on a sea of such courtesies, and where such moments disappear – say, in a violent inner-city neighbourhood – we immediately feel their absence.

“Members of a community that follows the principle of generalized reciprocity – raking your leaves before they blow onto your neighbours’ yard, lending a dime to a stranger for a parking meter, buying a round of drinks the week you earn overtime, keeping an eye on a friend’s house, taking turns bringing snacks to Sunday school, caring for the child of the crack-head one flight down – find that their self-interest is served,” Putnam wrote. (3)

Since all our human institutions are just groups of people, such widespread and tight bonds of community transform the landscape; they turn a church into a parish and a political drop-box into a movement. For much of the USA’s history, political decisions were made at the local and state levels, built from thousands of town-hall meetings, caucuses, conventions and chautauquas. The nation hosted a rich stew of multiple political parties no longer found in the USA, partly because the two largest parties passed laws to ban their competitors and partly because power shifted to the federal level when the republic became an empire.

By the post-war era, politics had gone national and the number of choices had narrowed to two, yet Americans were as committed as ever. “Not only are Americans flocking into bowling leagues and garden clubs,” wrote Life magazine in 1964, “they are satisfying their gregarious urges in countless neighbourhood committees to improve the local media and garbage collections and to hound their public servants into doing what their name implies.” (4)

So what caused my native country’s transformation in less than half a century? Putnam and many other researchers point to television, which fills a few hours a day that used to be spent in contact with others. Time researchers John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey reported in 1995 that Americans spend about 40 per cent of their free time watching TV, the highest rate in the world. “Television,” they conclude, “is the 800-pound gorilla of leisure time.”

Another factor might be the passing of the wartime generation; most of Putnam’s indicators peaked in the mid-1960s among an adult generation of Americans who had spent their formative years in the greatest conflict in human history. They had either spent the war years as young soldiers or as children organising recycling and blood drives on the home front. Almost all the change has been due to generational succession, with older Americans from a more dutiful time dying off and younger, hipper generations taking their place.

The mid-20^th century USA offers a rich mine of surveys and focus groups from which to draw data, but in truth most traditional societies were built around mutual aid, worship, politicking and labour exchanges, all lubricated with schmoozing. Nineteenth-century New Englanders made “informal Sunday visits, attended maple sugar parties and cider tastings, stayed for extended visits, offered assistance in giving birth, paid their respects to the family of the deceased, participated in quilting parties, and raised houses and barns. … It was through visiting, in fact, that they created their communities.”

From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, though, the number of Americans who had attended even a single meeting on town or school affairs in the previous year was cut by 40 per cent, and the number who had been officer for any local organisation also fell by 40 per cent. In 1973 most Americans engaged in some kind of activism – they signed a petition, wrote their congressman, made a public speech or wrote an article. Twenty years later most Americans did not do any of those things, and 20 years further on such behaviour seems plucked from an alien world.

This erosion of trust cascades through our entire social infrastructure, costing us not only in political idealism and energy but in dozens of other neglected ways. “Other things being equal, people who trust their fellow citizens more volunteer more often, contribute more regularly, participate more often in politics and community organizations, serve more readily on juries, give blood more frequently, comply more fully with their tax obligations, are more tolerant of minority views, and display many other forms of civic virtue,” Putnam notes.

“Moreover, people who are more active in community life are less likely (even in private) to condone cheating on taxes, insurance claims, bank loan forms, and employment applications. Conversely, experimental psychologists have shown that people who believe that others are honest are themselves less likely to lie, cheat, or steal and are more likely to respect the rights of others. In that sense, honesty, civic engagement and social trust are mutually reinforcing.”

Since those pre-hipster generations began dying off, our religion and politics have grown ever more apocalyptic, and my countrymen grew more and more suspicious of their leaders. In April 1966, in the middle of race riots and the Vietnam War, 66 per cent of Americans rejected the view that “the people running the country don’t really care what happens to you.” In December 1997, in the midst of a long prosperity, 57 per cent of Americans endorsed that same view.

This creeping death of our better angels had an immediate impact on the legal profession after the Sixties; crime, for instance, skyrocketed as generations of children grew up without a social network to limit their behaviour. Various other studies show all manner of less severe behaviour has worsened – for example, the proportion of drivers not stopping at stop signs trebled in the 1980s and 90s.

For this reason, the proportion of lawyers and judges in the population doubled after holding steady for the previous 70 years. The proportion of police and security guards also almost doubled, and television, film and on best-seller lists filled with increasingly sadistic crime and courtroom dramas. As conservative writer P.J. O’Rourke wrote more than 20 years ago, a (then single) generation of hipness has made us all familiar with the jargon once known only to criminals and criminal lawyers.

Some areas of public life might seem to have improved; the number of organisations in the USA more than doubled in the last few decades of the 20^th century. Many of these organisations, however, have no individual members, and most are based not in the Midwest or South like the older and more traditional organisations – the Boy Scouts, Kiwanis, Boys and Girls Clubs, VFW and the American Legion. Many of the largest and most influential non-profits to arise in the USA in the last few decades operate out of a few zip codes in Washington, DC. They are lobbyist firms, whose members tend to write a check to Washington rather than meet in their local town hall.

The modern USA has a few institutions that might seem to take the place of old-fashioned relationships, like crime watch groups, but Putnam calls them “sociological Astroturf, suitable only where the real thing won’t grow.” What modern Americans call “neighbourhood associations,” likewise, can quickly turn into fashion-enforcement groups, trying to stop their property values from haemorrhaging any further; friends of mine who moved into such neighbourhoods complained that they couldn’t repair their homes properly, grow gardens or hang their clothes out to dry.

The popularity of Putnam’s work meant the number of papers studying “social capital” has multiplied in the years since, and more recent studies show a continuation of the same long-term trends. His main work predated the rise of so-called social media, but while some studies show they do not further destroy social capital, they don’t seem to build it either; people who have more friends have more Facebook friends, but Facebook doesn’t build friendships. (5)

Works like Bowling Alone also focused entirely on the USA, with its massive and highly studied population, and no similar work has pieced together hundreds of studies from other parts of the world. The UK has seen about as much erosion of social capital as the USA, according to a 2009 study by the Italian sociologist Francesco Saracino, but most European countries have seen less. (6)

Moreover, if Europeans have done far better than Americans in maintaining their communities, Ireland seems to have done far better than Europe. In Limerick, notorious in Ireland for its poverty and crime, a recent study looked at “an extremely disadvantaged inner-city community” with “one of the most deprived Electoral Districts in the country” and found that even there, 80 per cent of residents felt a part of their neighbourhood and three-quarters of residents say people “look out for each other.” No two polls are precisely equivalent, but the number of Americans overall – disadvantaged and wealthy, rural and urban – who answer similar questions positively peaked at 55 per cent after World War II and had fallen to less than 35 per cent by the time Putnam was writing in 2000. (7)

Perhaps Ireland has merely lagged behind; it had a highly traditional and agrarian culture until the final years of the 20^th century, when an economic boom brought some of the same suburban sprawl and social disruption that other Western countries had seen decades before. My in-laws remember growing up here as children with horses and carriages, and in some cases without electricity or indoor plumbing. Of course, far fewer people had televisions, and no one owned the mountains of personal toys that US suburbanites do today.

In other words, you can see Putnam’s generational transformation here, too, but perhaps two or three generations behind the USA. That makes my adopted home an ideal place to see the things that our own culture lost, that would otherwise come to us only through the memories of the elderly or not at all.

We watched this happen the other night at the funeral. For generations my countrymen have handled birth, child-rearing, sickness, old age and death by paying expensive specialists to do it for us, out of view, and we merely show up for a ceremony. In a more traditional age, though, family and next-door neighbours were the ceremony, laying out the body on the kitchen table, gathering around it to drink, mourn and celebrate their life in the world to come.

What made our bus wait for half an hour was not a line of cars, you see, but a line of people. Friends and family, perhaps a thousand of them, marched down a lightless country road on a winter night – for miles, I’m told — carrying the body of their loved one in a wooden box to the church. It wouldn’t have surprised me if they had sawn the box.

This would have been normal a century or two ago in more industrialised countries; today, we can imagine that many people turning out for a celebrity they never met, but not for a neighbour.

The driver and I stood there a long time watching them pass, and I thought the deceased had been a lifelong part of an older and real social network, the one that you don’t leave when you die.


–
(1) Bowling Alone, Page 100-101
(2) Data from the American Bowling Congress, via Putnam, p. 108
(3) Putnam p. 135
(4) Life magazine, Feb. 21, 1964, p. 91, 93
(5) Social Capital and the Spiral of Silence (2012) http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/municipal/social-capital-spiral-silence
(6) Social capital and subjective well-being trends: Comparing 11 western European countries. Francesco Sarracino. The Journal of Socio-Economics, Volume 39, Issue 4, August 2010, Pages 482–517
France and the United States: A comparative analysis of social capital on both sides of the pond, Patrick Merle and Weiwu Zhang, French Politics 10, 269-289 (September 2012)
The French move half as often as Americans. “Legal Sources of Residential Lock-Ins: Why French Households Move Half as Often as U.S. Households”; Ellickson, Robert C. University of Illinois Law Review.
(7) Bowling Alone, 467

Photo: The graves at Glendalough.

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Published at Front Porch Republic

Good news! The valuable publication Front Porch Republic has published my latest piece, "The Real Social Network," which starts with a funeral in rural Ireland and then goes somewhere else. Feel free to check it out.

Published at Mother Earth News again

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