I'm Back! Personal Update and Book Announcement! (Plunderers of the Earth)

Link to Amazon
#CommissionsEarned

When the world is burning, the hardest thing of all is to resist the paralyzing urge to fixate on the flames. Somewhere in between the two extremes of either burying one’s head in the sand or losing oneself in outrage at the senselessness of it all lies the middle path that is forged by focusing our energies on the things within our control.  

Even the myths passed down to us by our forefathers warn us about this — as the wicked biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were engulfed in fiery destruction, Lot and his family were saved because they kept their eyes on the path that led them away from the chaos. But as they fled, Lot's wife turned to look back at the infernal cities as they were consumed by a rain of burning sulfur and was promptly transformed into a pillar of salt.

In 2022, my wife and I put the bright lights of Ottawa in our rearview mirror and moved back to our familiar stomping grounds near the family farm in B.C.’s North Okanagan region. After ejecting the furry four-legged rodents infesting our new walls, renovating to remove all traces of their destruction, updating the building, and bringing order to all the chaos that comes with settling into a new home and a new life, I finally recovered the headspace to write. 

I expected my first writing project to keep me “offline” for a couple of months, but as the tangled threads of the story I set out to tell grew ever more complex, a few months quickly turned into two years. 

When Scientific Minds Abandon Scientific Principles: The Mystery Behind Why My Grandfather Refused to Talk About Dinosaurs

When I was a kid, my grandfather used to fascinate me with stories about all the most wonderous discoveries that were pushing the boundaries of knowledge. He talked about space and time and evolution and the Big Bang and even Einstein’s theory of general relativity. 

Through his stories he introduced me to the scientific way of approaching questions and offered me a peek into another world, which was totally different from the practical day-to-day routine on my parent’s farm. Those conversations undoubtedly led to my decision to study geology, which is all about unravelling the history of life, the universe, and how we (along with our little blue planet) got here. 

And yet, despite his willingness to approach nearly any other mystery with all the curiosity and discipline demanded by science, there was one topic that he categorically refused to discuss. For my grandfather, who grew up during the first decades of the 1900s, dinosaurs were a bridge too far. Talking to him about dinosaurs was like trying to debate a brick wall.