Well, this was a surprise....

I am now pursuing other interests and spending more time with my family.

So, as of today, I am no longer writing for Treehugger.

In 2004 I was trying to promote green modern prefabricated housing in the early days of blogging and discovered Treehugger shortly after it started. Having a lot of time on my hands (I was not a very good prefab salesman) I wrote for my own prefab blog and sent what I couldn’t use as tips to Treehugger.

Founder Graham Hill wondered why I was doing this; I said I admired the site. He offered to pay for them, and soon I was getting ten bucks for fifty words and a teeny stolen photo.

Blogs were a big deal then, and in 2007 companies were nosing around, looking for acquisitions. Graham was running everything out of his apartment and PayPal, but realized he had better bulk up a company. He hired me and a few others to write full time and Ken Rother to be President. In 2007 he sold Treehugger to Discovery Communications.

They could never figure out what to do with it, and in 2012 sold it to Narrative, which owned the Mother Nature Network, who sold it to Dotdash in 2018, which bought Meredith, publisher of People and other big mags, making us part of the world’s largest English language print media company. It was sort of downhill from there; we were a tiny fish in a very big pond, and the eyes were all on the bigger fish.

Dotdash is all about hard information that people search for on Google, and the newsy and commentary stuff that I do was never really a great fit. Many people have told me that they came to Treehugger to read my stuff, so I will keep writing, probably right here on Substack. If I get consistent and popular enough, I might put up a meter, but not now.

So watch this space!