Taking stock and guessing at what's in all the sealed boxes of the new year. More reading, more walks in the weather, more day adventures to new places, more getting out of town and out of state, more pots of tea with friends, more visits with southern family and friends. Things to continue: working with local non-profits to make the world better, working with town committees to make our community ready for the future. Things to watch for on the evening news in 2015: big social movements coalescing around climate change and inequality with, who'da guessed it, the pope in the middle of it.

While still plowing through This Changes Everything (the collusion of the big environmental groups with big oil, the horrors of geoengineering), I have started in on Winter World by Bernd Heinrich because it is deep winter here and because the author grew up at Good Will Hinkley where Melissa works and because in a recent Maine referendum he came out in favor of prohibiting baiting and trapping bears. Already he can deliver sentences like "A 'rule' is nothing more than a consistency of response that we have deduced animals exhibit because it serves their interests. Rules are the sum of decisions made by individuals. They are a result. The chaos, and the art, of nature remains."

He notes that humans are adapted for a tropical climate and we build such a climate for ourselves with clothing and heaters. It's good to know that winter torpor is an adaptive behavior for animals like me and that I hibernate the same way squirrels do, laying low on bad weather days and then scooting out to Left Bank Books, Chase's Daily, and Reny's on a good day like today.

The selection of a town logo and tagline goes on. I put the proposed selection up for some feedback. People seem to like having their opinions solicited, and we've had some thoughtful responses. We need to involve citizens like this more often. For me, the proposed logo is too modern and stain-glassy, and the proposed logo (Come grow with us) is a generic, cheezy, over-used cliche. The logo colors could altered to be earthier while keeping the hub, ground, water sky suggestion and perhaps the rest of our short town name could be worked into the graphic rather than printed below it in a radically different font. For a tagline I like "Small Town, Big Community," but I could live with others from the list that have the word "community" in them.

As the end of the year approaches, lots of best of lists are appearing and I'm scouring them to see what I might have missed. NPR has been a great source of leads to new music all year and their year-end lists are great. Everyone on the Folk Alley list, except one, has appeared on my mixes this year. Guess I'm a folkie at heart. the alternate root is another good source. At the end of this year there are 2525 cuts in the almost 11 years of mixes.

My new discoveries in 2014 include pianists Caroline Dahl and Lafayette Gilchrist, jazz singers Laura Mvula, Gregory Porter and Stacey Kent singing the novellas of Kazuo Ishiguro, and anybody playing with Lionel Loueke; and other singers as distinct as Sturgill Simpson, Popcaan, Sinkane and Kandia Crazy Horse. Among super creatively arranged sounds there was Tune-Yards discovered by way of Angelique Kidjo, Imogen Heap, Garrison Ulrich. New girl groups include the Parkington Sisters, the Henry Girls, and Bonsoir Catin. Several old reliables had fantastic new albums: Lucinda Williams, Jackson Browne, Ruthie Foster, Eliza Gilkyson, Suzanne Vega, the Duhks, Paul Thorn, Frazey Ford.

Have you ever been on the interstate in many lanes of heavy traffic with most vehicles carrying one person, or maybe in a huge parking lot full of cars and had the thought that this is not sustainable, that we can't go on living this way? I am in the middle of the scariest book I've ever read, Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything. It may be the Silent Spring of our time. Her thesis is that growth-driven capitalism will make it impossible to save ourselves from disastrous global warming, that innovation alone can't save us unless it's a part of huge social and political changes.

It's true that the market is great at generating technological innovation and, left to its own devices, R&D departments will continue to come up with impressive new ways to make solar modules and electrical appliances more efficient. But at the same time, market forces will also drive new and innovative ways to get hard-to-reach fossil fuels out of the deep ocean and hard shale--and those dirty innovations will make the green ones essentially irrelevant from a climate change perspective.
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What industry calls innovation, in other words, looks more like the final suicidal throes of addiction. We are blasting the bedrock of our continents, pumping our water with toxins, lopping off mountaintops, scraping off boreal forests, endangering the deep ocean, and scrambling to exploit the melting Arctic--all to get at the last drops and the final rocks. Yes, some very advanced technology is making this possible, but it's not innovation, it's madness.