Welcome to The Inversion

Relaunching my blog with a shiny new name

One of the best photography tips I’ve ever heard is to point your camera the opposite direction that everyone else is pointing theirs. I live near several national parks, where the wisdom of this advice is perhaps plainer than anywhere—even if you point away from the most interesting feature of the landscape you are still going to capture something incredible.

I also like to make cyanotype prints. These are made by painting paper or another material in photoreceptive chemical wash. When sunlight hits the material the painted area turns deep blue. You can print anything on cyanotype, but the image will be inverted. I’ve found that the mental exercise of inverting what you are used to seeing makes you notice things you usually take for granted, and the same applies to writing.

You are probably starting to see why I chose the name—Inversion. I want to explore old ideas from some new angles, and give myself the freedom to write about the topics I want in the way I want, without caring too much about how they’ve been approached before. The name also comes from a local natural phenomenon, which I will write about in one of my future posts.

What You Can Expect

Not everything I write will be an attempt to subvert the common way of thinking. The name isn’t meant to be a gimmick but more of a shorthand for what you can expect to read on this blog. First, I don’t plan to write about current events, at least not often. While everyone is looking one way, we are going to look the other way.

What am I going to write about? This blog doesn’t have a single central thesis but here are topics and ideas I am interested in and will probably write about:

• Nature, technological progress and how they interact

• Wilderness and what it means to different generations

• Nuclear power, geothermal energy

• The American West—the actual geography, as well as the mythology

• The history of environmentalism in the US and how it influences current policies and ideologies

• Technologies that change our ability to control the natural world—geoengineering, gene editing, etc.

How often will I write? My goal is to write 1-2 blog posts per month, plus a smaller segment that I’ll send out every other Friday. Roughly half of what I read on Substack are blogs about energy and emerging technology and the other half are naturalists and people interested in the environment. I’d like to write about both things and that’s how I’ve set up my blog.

My longer posts will be about any of the above topics and how they relate to policy, economics, and technological progress. Those could be published any day of the week. The shorter biweekly Friday posts will be about a specific natural phenomenon that I find interesting. I will probably make it possible to subscribe only to the long form posts since some people won’t be as interested in the nature segments. But I think there are people like me out there who think it’s fun and useful to learn about why it’s always cold on top of a mountain and how the Columbia River Gorge was formed.

It will look something like this:

Week 1: Full post about nuclear power or the history of environmentalism, etc.

Week 2: Natural Phenomenon Friday (300-500 words)

Week 3: Full post or no publication

Week 4: Natural Phenomenon Friday

I don’t have many subscribers and I haven’t posted anything in a long time, so what I publish may not be what you signed up for. I plan to use this blog as an informal place for me to think through ideas I’m interested in, share appreciation for the natural world, and hopefully hear from you about what you are reading, writing, and thinking about. I hope you’ll stick around! And if you do, you’re always welcome to leave comments and point me to your own work on Substack.