Building Sustainable, Local, Equitable, Economies
Swiss Watch
“Where you hear singing, stop. Wicked men have no songs.” On June 14, we took a train from Locarno to Lugano, Switzerland. The station in Lugano is high above the city center. Our steep descent took us into the old town filled with upscale shops. At the bottom of the hill, elders dressed in mismatched green and white were raising their voices high, accompanied by guitar and accordion. Swiss and Italian folk tunes. When they were finished, they marched into the courthouse. When they came out, a male chorus had gathered to fill the square with their song. A soloist hit the highest notes...
The Rebels of Lago Maggiore: Ticino, Switzerland
What is it about Lago Maggiore—this lake, these mountains, this air, this space between the Germanic and Latin worlds—that attracts rebels? In 1868, Carlo Cafiero, Italian leader of the International Workingmen's Association and comrade of Friedrich Engels, first met and became a follower of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Cafiero, who came from wealth, found his new mentor a house on Lago Maggiore where Bakunin refined his critique of Marxism while translating Das Kapital into Russian. Bakunin grew up in the village of Pryamukhino, northwest of Moscow. Lago Maggiore on the...
Food First
We've been on the road since October 2023. It's funny that I don't write much about food, because it is 57% of what we do: buy, transport, cook, eat, and clean food. In a new place, we must find markets, discover new foods, and learn a new kitchen. We don't have a car, so we shop almost daily, carrying what we can in our backpacks. We eat out too, in less expensive places, for taste and company. Sometimes we are acutely aware of prices. Other times, everything is cheap for us, though costs are rising to painful levels for local people. Food is personal. One reason I don't write about...
Transportation = Eating in Nuestra America
Water and food. When I think of the hierarchy of human needs, these two come to mind. Traveling in Latin America since November has got me thinking about how transportation makes those two essentials possible. If you want to destroy a community, targeting its transportation is a good way to start. Today, February 23, 2026, Mexican drug cartels are attacking the country's transportation system to avenge the death of their leader. As one Michoacan resident told Al Jazeera: "They have co-opted the leaders who manage transport, and at any moment they can block the...
Seeing Peru through Prisms, in the Winter of ’26
It is our duty not to ignore our national reality, but we also have a duty not to ignore the global reality. José Mariátegui In Lima, the temperature in January is a delightful mid-70s—yet I felt woozy by midday, and drenched in sweat. It rarely rains, yet clouds do not stay in the sky. They creep in like sea creatures. Sometimes they blanket, and the cityscape disappears. Most times, they slither through a neighborhood, hiding one slice of the massive metropolis, revealing others. In Cusco, the weather was perfect, cozy in a sweatshirt in the morning and evening, rising to...
16 things to do in and around Medellín, Colombia
We spent seven weeks in Antioquia, Colombia, primarily in Medellín, with shorter visits to Pereira and Retiro. "That is long enough to become a paisano," one man said, kindly. Of course it is not, but it is long enough to repeat one's steps and see the same people on the same corner. It is long enough to become a regular customer of the woman who sells avocados from her cart and the man who sells mangoes and plantains. And that is the first thing I recommend you do, even if your time is short: 1. Support a local vendor. 2. Almuerzo: Find a comfortable cafe that serves a menu del dia...
Beauties and Beasts: A Month in the United States, 2025.
After two years of global travel, we now know how beautiful the world is. As bicycle travelers, we knew the land we call the United States is as stunning as the rest. We forgot just how lovely the US Northland is in the fall. I do not remember a year when red and gold Massachusetts beech and sweet gum, Minnesota sugar maple and poplar, Washington State ginkgo biloba, reflected so brillantly on Sudbury River, Wellfleet Bay, Bde Maka Ska, Puget Sound, Minnehaha Creek, and the Mississippi River. What a treat to witness them holding their leaves beyond their season, resisting the march...
Surprises in Belgrade, Serbia
Our plane from Rome to Belgrade, Serbia,, was three hours late. The Serbian government had shut down its airport to rehearse for its upcoming military parade. Despite the ominous delay, I enjoyed the flight. It was a cloudless day. We saw the contours of both Italian coasts and the Croatian islands. Over Bosnia and Herzegovina, we were low enough to see tiny ancient bridges over rivers! The plains of Serbia looked as flat as central Iowa, but without the grids and monotone. In fact, from the air, Serbian farms looked more like an Iowan crazy quilt of green, yellow, brown, and purple...
Local Global Switzerland.
When we were in Sarajevo, a politician said he wanted Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH ) to be like Switzerland. I thought that was ambitious. In our global Capitalist system, Switzerland is where world leaders solve a "problem" like Bosnia. But he was not referring to international politics. He wanted BiH to adopt the Swiss Canton (state) system, so that Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks could live autonomously, but linked as a confederacy. Switzerland, like BiH, is composed of diverse ethnic groups. German, French, Italian, and Romansh-speaking people live in four different sections of the country,...
Latvia: Enchantment and the Weight of History
Whenever the pine recalls the olden days, a few tears still push their way through the pine’s bark in the shape of the drops of resin Latvian folktale ....The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living". Karl Marx, Latvia: familiar and strange We understand new places by comparing them to where we've been. Latvia reminded me of the US upper Midwest: a feeling, as I passed through forests and fields on the bus and visited small towns on the banks of waterways. I looked at museum photos of log-filled streams next to sawmills, and saw...