some other stuff I’ve written,
or
a stroll through the morgue
(morgue, n.: a collection of clips and other printed materials at a newspaper or magazine)
Listen up, America. We’re failing at play.
It was during the Great Malaise of the Carter years that Zippy the Pinhead, clown prince of non sequiturs, first wondered, “Are we having fun yet?” The questioner was a simpleton, but time has endowed his question with the ring of profundity.
The bio line on this piece for California magazine—in which honest-to-God UC Berkeley scholars indulged me by applying their vast expertise in a range of disciplines, albeit indirectly, to Zippy’s addlebrained query— read, “Barry Bergman is alternately working and playing at writing a novel.” Spoiler alert: The novel’s done. Fun!
Dave Foreman has hung up his monkey wrench, but the veteran wilderness warrior stubbornly keeps on putting Earth first
The world lost Dave Foreman, self-dubbed “eco-warrior” and co-founder of Earth First, in September 2022, just shy of his 75th birthday. This is something I wrote for Sierra magazine after rafting the Colorado River with him in 1998.
Love him or hate him, he was an American original.
Faced with forced relocation, a handful of traditional Navajos struggle to hold their place on the sacred earth
“To the Diné and their supporters… coal is the unmistakable source of the troubles in this endlessly anguished land.” This is reporting I did for Mother Jones in 2000. Amazingly—perhaps because there’s no word for “relocation” in the Diné language—the story’s not over yet.
“Ingram’s first time wearing the beagle suit was in a windowless office in the bowels of the stadium, two levels below the refreshment stands. The office had concrete walls and exposed trunk cables and smelled like tuna fish.”
Thus begins my one (1) published short story, not counting a few things I wrote in college. I’m not sure where it came from, though this photo of me with Oski—the taciturn mascot of the Cal Bears and a former colleague of mine at UC Berkeley—might hold a clue. Probably best not to ask too many questions.
A trek among the islands and inlets of the Great Bear Rainforest is a return to a lost continent. But if logging companies have their way, British Columbia’s temperate treasure is headed for oblivion.
A story I did on the eve of the millennium, when the home of the “spirit bear” was under siege. In 2016 First Nations, conservation groups, the B.C. government, and the forest industry agreed to a plan aimed at conserving 70 percent of the remaining old-growth forest. To sum up: Logging companies did not have their way.
A dummy’s guide to Mendeleev’s masterpiece
I’m not a chemistry geek. I’m not a science writer. Yet I unaccountably took an assignment to pick the very large brains of Berkeley nuclear scientists and chemistry savants about the wonders of the periodic table on the eve of its 150th birthday in 2019. The real wonder is I didn’t totally screw it up.
Nobody ever said happiness would be fun.
In another moment of weakness in 2015 I agreed to enroll in an eight-week online course called “The Science of Happiness,” and to note my progress in a weekly blog. I had my doubts. “If you try it, it works,” the course’s co-creator assured me, pitting her positive attitude against my skeptical one. “But you have to try it.”
I tried it. Honest. Got through four weeks. Happiness? Not for me, apparently. This was my final post.
How do you get into UC Berkeley?
Try shooting 250 hours of film
In a 2020 profile on Fred Wiseman, the remarkable—and remarkably prolific—documentarian, the New York Times asked, “What if the Great American novelist doesn’t write novels?” It’s a good question.
I interviewed Wiseman in 2010, and again in 2013, when he returned to UC Berkeley to unveil his 40th film. Which, truthfully, I may have been too familiar with—from the the persistent campus turmoil to the supposedly heroic administrators struggling to tamp it down—to love.
To see the environment through America’s eyes,
go to the movies.
This long-ago look at environmentally themed movies, which ran in Sierra mag, refers to “your friendly local video store,” a place where people used to rent movies if they didn’t get DVDs in the mail from Netflix. I watched these gems on VHS, but most are streamable now. Many include literal streams.
(Being geographically impaired, I reported that Cross Creek—the story of writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings—was set in the Everglades. We regret the error.)
