A couple of items worth your time.
First, a brief blog piece from Malcolm Gladwell, “Degree of Difficulty.” Gladwell, bothered that a recent article he did for The New Yorker wasn’t appreciated as much as he would have liked, notes that “We can see all the things that someone, in a different profession than us, does. What we cannot know is the relative difficulty of those tasks.”
Next, the wonderful Peter Matthiessen writes “Inside the Endangered Arctic Refuge” for The New York Review of Books. His opening paragraph:
Wild northern Alaska is one of the last places on earth where a human being can kneel down and drink from a wild stream without being measurably more poisoned or polluted than before; its heart and essence is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in the remote northeast corner of the state, the earth’s last sanctuary of the great Ice Age fauna that includes all three North American bears, gray wolves and wolverines, musk ox, moose, and, in the summer, the Porcupine River herd of caribou, 120,000 strong. Everywhere fly sandhill cranes and seabirds, myriad waterfowl and shorebirds, eagles, hawks, owls, shrikes and larks and longspurs, as well as a sprinkling of far-flung birds that migrate to the Arctic slope to breed and nest from every continent on earth. Yet we Americans, its caretakers, are still debating whether or not to destroy this precious place by turning it over to the oil industry for development.