“If you want to destroy a barn,” a farmer once told me, “cut an eighteen-inch-square hole in the roof. Then stand back.” Chris Riddle, quoted in The World Without Us by Alan Weisman Ask any farmer what happens to his fields when they lie fallow for a year or two. He’ll tell you that it […]
Monthly Archives: May 2015
The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them. – Unknown Professor Noreena Hertz, University College London, reporting on her recent surveys, described today’s teenage girls as profoundly anxious. The news reports deplored the abundance of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films and TV shows that inundate us with peril and danger at every […]
I grew up in Texas, where each of the four North American poisonous snakes lives, so it seems natural to me that I’m afraid of snakes. I grew up with horror stories of giant rattlers, quiet and sneaky copperheads, and vicious cottonmouths that aggressively defended their watery territory. We swam in many farm ponds, where […]
The great yellow eyes were fixed upon him with a wicked and baleful gleam, and the red tongue licked the longing lips as Sabor crouched, worming her stealthy way with belly flattened against the earth. Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs I watched our cat cross the lawn, belly to the grass, eyes […]
“You are one of the forces of nature.” Jules Michelet, quoted in the comic “Mutts” The other day I inadvertently stepped on one, thus proving that X-bugs are more mortal than X-Men. Every spring the boxelder beetles swarm out from the two boxelder trees at the back of the yard, coating various surfaces with their […]
Writes of Nature 