

Words like Clear Water
Underneath a large white tent strung with lights, Cynthia Gómez stepped up to a wooden podium to offer a Land Acknowledgment. We were...


An Economy of Quiet
In the modern world, there are not many places where silence is a virtue. My quiet nature is often scrutinized in the workforce as a lack...
The Air Belongs to All Living Things
From the standpoint of biology, all living creatures need oxygen to exist and continue to create. As a person with a compromising medical...
Beware the Pogonip!
Your wife is pregnant, and you’re worried. Ozone levels spike higher and higher. But both of you have good jobs. You can’t just up and...
Inversion
We are singing beneath the ochre haze of smog and sleet and phosphorescence, trundling up the great hill in the great car, the sharp...
We Can and Must Adapt
I am a professional skier and outdoor adventurer. I am proud to call Utah home and I love this state for so many reasons: the snow,...


The World as It Is, as It Could Be, and the Spaces Between
At a community coalition meeting several weeks ago, I took on the role of a “spider”—building relationships with different people and...
Clear Air: Our Will Must Equal Our Technology
In 1991 I relocated the small outdoor equipment company I founded, Black Diamond Equipment, from the coast of southern California to the...
The Air We Breathe
A popular '60s expression was “you are what you eat.” True but incomplete. You are what you eat, what you drink, and what you breathe....
Leaving Salt Lake
In the spring of 2009, my husband, Steve, and I left Salt Lake City—an unacknowledged act of desperation. Without knowing how we would...