David Hoyt is a native of the American Midwest and has spent most of his life trying to figure out what that means. He thinks it has to do with liking a bigger sky than out East, and more rain than out West. He has academic training in history, with a focus on European social science and anthropology. He also has background in sustainable urban planning and transportation. He is a community volunteer in local conservation efforts, and has undertaken to restore an old Illinois farm to be of benefit to wildlife and birds migrating along the Mississippi Flyway. He has been the primary caregiver of two children, and lives with one of them and his wife in Chicago, Illinois. Email: davidleehoyt [at] pm.me
by David Hoyt When I set out to write this essay on the ecological aesthetic of a loose group of nineteenth-century French painters associated with the village of Barbizon, I did not anticipate that it would coincide with the largest wildfire to strike northern France in over a century. The fire, in the state forest…
by David Hoyt Reading the Boghossian report on current state of the humanities in American higher education I was, as I am sure were many others, struck with a sense of déjà vu. Relativism versus realism, an irresponsible academic left versus a scolding academic right, even the same malefactors singled out, as if a cold…
by David Hoyt 1.I consider myself a farmer. Instead of food, I raise habitat. Another way of saying it would be that, instead of raising food for people, I raise food for everything else. 2. It’s risky to define oneself, because others have their own perceptions, usually different, and sometimes more accurate. In the traditions…
by David Hoyt For most of history, humans have experienced the world as a collective of various agents, many of which were, and are not, human. These agents, typically conceived of as persons, inhabited the things of the world – trees, and rivers, animals, mountains and weather. Together they animated the universe. Their collaboration has…
by David Hoyt It’s hard to love the prairie. If you love it, you tend to be loving a memory of something you’ve hardly known, or a vision of something you dream might return some day, like the American Bison. Or maybe your love is more profound, in that you love it for what is…
by David Hoyt Do birds have a sense of beauty? Do they, or does any animal, have an aesthetic sense? Do they respond to beauty in ways we might find familiar – with a feeling of awe, suffused with attraction, mixed with joy? Do they seek it out, and perhaps even work to fashion it…