Robert Norman Ross was an American painter and art instructor Standing in front of a wet canvas on television, a soft-spoken painter in a denim shirt painted a stroke of dark brown paint onto a bright landscape. He looked directly into the camera and offered a quiet thought:“The very fact that you’re aware of suffering…

‘The life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth’ When a single human life is weighed against material wealth, the right choice seems clear. Yet everyday real-world systems constantly do the math in reverse. Car companies weigh the cost of fixing…

For much of its history, the San Joaquin River carried cold mountain water through California’s Central Valley, supporting forests, farms and some of the southernmost populations of Chinook salmon in the western United States. That connection began to disappear after the construction of Friant Dam in the 1940s, when large sections of the river were…