b'Were going to need imagination of the lively serious kind. If Wendell Berry is the pope of American Agrarianism and Washing Bear is the one and only Soil Mother, if Eliot Coleman is the non-pope of Post-Modern Peasantry and Winona LaDuke is a fierce fire breather of Native Knowledge, if Alexa Firmenich is Clumps of Ladybugs Thick as Fists and Greta Thunberg is the uber priestess warrior of Climate Peace, then Tom Robbins is surely the high-low poet preacher of the Lively Serious. Notice that Alan Greenspan didnt make the list. It doesnt matter whether he was right or wrong about the causes of irrational exuber-ance or how much his Federal Reserve policies contributed to the Great Recession. He doesnt make the list. Neither does Elon Musk.It doesnt matter whether shooting a Tesla into space was a master-stroke of marketing ingenuity or an act of commercial hubris so sloppily ill-conceived that it verges on species-level silliness. He doesnt make the list, either. Which might lead the categorially inclined to wonder just what the criteria are for making the list.People who are prone to pre-epiphanies (huhs and hmmms in the run-up to AHAs!); have a penchant for the quirky; know when a hug is called for and when it is not; dont know the meaning of meaninglessness; recognize the difference between the reptilian, the mammalian and the floral; happily abjure the shortest distance between two points; harbor a certain skepticism when it comes to moonshots and unicorns; try not to think about Polysorbate 80; never miss an opportunity to appreciate a farmer; and less often than more-often-than-not act out of fear, hate, hubris or greed; make the list. 71'