Those young women and men doing something currently illegal have been disguised, of course...Those Americans who do what is considered perfectly legal...car dealers who sell Toyotas by the scads to marijuana growers, for instance, or lawyers, sheriffs, district attorneys and those who run the current drug war for the administration, these people appear exactly as they are, or as close as possible.
Marijuana...has become as American as computers and apple pie...Marijuana.. .sinsemilla..is as down-home as moonshine, and a far bigger business than moonshine ever was. Because marijuana is no long smuggled contraband. It's home-grown, American-made and better for it, the nation's second-largest cash crop after soybeans... ahead of wheat.... It is farmed mainly in Georgia, Kentucky, California..ten miles form the Santa Barbara White House.
An award-winning author of numerous books and screenplays, Chapple has appeared on Larry King and Charlie Rose, speaking on politics, culture, adventure and the environment. While in Montana, he was the host and producer of the outdoor sports and adventure show "Under A Big Sky," shown in the West on certain CBS affiliates. Raised in Montana and La Jolla, educated at Yale, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation,) he lives above Wind & Sea Beach with his wife and their three children. He holds the patent on the "Geospatial News Engine," for the Internet.
His national newspaper column, "Intellectual Capital," is anchored in the San Diego Union-Tribune, and covers game-changing people, ideas and perspectives. The columns are entertaining visits with some of the smartest minds in the country--people ahead of the wave, with a wise eye on the past, and with something very readable to say about the news of today.
He is also under contract to Yale University Press for HEARTLAND & GULF (co-author Jeremy Jackson,) a book about the Mississippi River and its often tumultuous relationship to the Gulf of Mexico.
KAYAKING THE FULL MOON: A Journey Down the Yellowstone River to the Soul of Montana (HarperCollins) was a New York Times Notable Book, and won a Lowell Thomas Award for best travel book of the year. "A graceful writer with a journalist's sharp eye and a heart as big as his subject," wrote Hampton Sides in the Washington Post Book World. "A sensitive and sensible book in search of Montana's calico soul," said Thomas McGuane.
LET THE MOUNTAINS TALK, LET THE RIVERS RUN: A Call to those Who Would Save the Earth (HarperCollins) was written with David Brower, the poetically irascible former executive director of the Sierra Club, and savior of the Grand Canyon. "This is the testament of one of the few authentic sages of our time. Brower's voice is passionate, perfectly cadenced, humorous, and very wise,"--Edward O. Wilson. "Nothing I have heard from anybody else has affected my thinking so deeply as what I heard from David Brower,"--Charles Kuralt.--"the path breaker, not given to easy answers or ruinous compromises,"--President Jimmy Carter.
Doubleday published his first novel, DON'T MIND DYING A Novel of Country Lust & Urban Decay. It is a joining of San Francisco and Montana and retells the history of the West. The screenplay adapted from the book was written for Epic. BUFFALOED, a more recent screenplay, is in development. It is a wry tale of the modern West, centering on the controversial killing and culling of the Yellowstone Park bison herd.
CONFESSIONS OF AN ECO-REDNECK (Perseus/HarperCollins) was a wild culling from the sporting pages of the NY Times and Sports Afield. Booklist ranked it one of the Top 10 Sporting Books of the Year.
OUTLAWS IN BABYLON (Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books) recounted the wild days on California's marijuana frontier.
BURNING DESIRES: Sex in America, A report from the Field (Doubleday,) written with Salon.com founder David Talbot, summed up the contradictory yet rollicking nature of American sexuality in the '90's, and was excerpted in four issues of Playboy.
CONVERSATIONS WITH MR. BABY: A Celebration of New Life (Little Brown) was about new parents confronted by a wise-cracking baby who is at first reluctant to be born.
Studs Terkel called ROCK 'N' ROLL IS HERE TO PAY: The History and Politics of the Music Industry, (NelsonHall, co-author Reebee Garofalo,) "the definitive book on rock music as an industry." After withdrawing from Yale College in 1972, Chapple put on numerous rock concerts with Bonnie Raitt, Dr. John, and Allan Ginsberg (these last, decidedly spoken word,) as co-founder of the non-profit foundation, Entropy, Inc. He also briefly produced radio shows on the history of rock, at WBCN, in Boston. After moving to California, he became a staff columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Chapple's op-ed piece in the NY Times, "What Is a River Worth?" kicked off the successful campaign to save Yellowstone Park from a potentially disastrous gold mine, at the headwaters of the Yellowstone River. He contributes to National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, Men's Journal, Outside, the New Yorker, Conde Nast, the LA and New York Times, Reader's Digest, and Scuba Diving. From time to time he lectures at the Smithsonian and the California Academy of Sciences, about various adventures down the Zambezi, the Yellowstone, and in the South Seas.
Though he has canoed and kayaked most of the Zambezi and all of the Yellowstone, his most daunting achievement as an adventurer, so far, has been his historic first descent of the LA River.
