“Water Dog” by Mary Hockenberry.

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With the avalanche of opinions on the challenging issues that face Montanans and the world today, it’s hard to know where to get reliable information.  We know the conundrums of climate, energy, resource depletion, and the economy are complex and interrelated, but it can be difficult to grasp exactly how they fit together.  And just what are we going to do to slow these run-away trains?

I recently got some clarity on this subject when I attended a gathering for the Fellows of the Post Carbon Institute.  The Fellows are a think-tank focused on today’s interconnected sustainability crises —a one-stop shop for cutting edge thinking on the transition to a post-carbon world.

Twenty-five of the nation’s leading experts in transportation, green building, health, urban and rural agriculture, water, sustainability, eco-literacy, population, climate change, and peak oil attended. We gathered to answer two questions:

I knew I’d like this guy from the moment we were introduced. Underneath the “Hello! My Name Is” on his paper name tag, he’d scrawled “NONE OF YOUR GODDAMN BUSINESS.” A man after my own heart.

Clarence Worly (he took his nom de guerre from Christian Slater’s character in ‘True Romance’) joined my fraternity, Delta Tau Chi, in Pocatello in the early 80’s, when we were occasionally attending the alleged institute of higher learning there. We put a lot of effort into putting the “high” in “higher learning,” and that led to our inevitable frat band, Rotten Tuna. We played sorority mixers and local taverns for a couple of years, culminating in our professional peak, a last-place finish in the local Battle of the Bands in 1984.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, if you’re a regular reader of my column, you’ve no doubt seen Worly’s punchy, profane prose in the comments section. He frequently comes to my defense, wielding his opinion like a cinder block. To say his writing is edgy is an understatement. It’s like saying a corned beef and PBR popcorn fart is “unpleasant.” If you like reading internet commentary that occasionally makes you spit coffee onto your keyboard, he’s your man.