Paul Krugman tells me in today's New York Times that the thought police are after William Cronon.
It makes my heart sink. Cronon, a professor of environmental history at the University of Wisconsin publicly spoke out against the style of the Republicans in Wis., and now the GOP had demanded copies of all his emails. Krugman predicts that it will attempt a smear campaign against Cronon.
Cronon studies and teaches the history of our relationship to the environment. Here's his web site. He's written books and essays on how humans have altered the landscape to suit their needs. His writing reveals something that is all too easy to forget – that we are of nature and intricately linked to the natural world around us, and always have been. It's a lesson that has inspired hundreds of students that take his classes at the University of Wisconsin, many of them from Minnesota. One of them was my daughter.
