My small town on the outer edge of the Denver metro area is beginning to experience a push for more housing — particularly for affordable housing. This is driving developers to construct dense multi-family apartments and condos on vacant lots and on clusters of what would have been single-family home lots. There is much concern […]
Category Archives: ecosystems
I met Paul Kilburn at the turn-off into the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, decommissioned a few years before. Paul and his volunteers had permission to collect native seeds from the buffer zone around the facility that had been created to provide both a security barrier from outside intrusion and physical separation from what was […]
I’ve been everywhere, man.I’ve been everywhere, man.Crossed the deserts bare, man.I’ve breathed the mountain air, man.Of travel I’ve a-had my share, man.I’ve been everywhere. ~ Johnny Cash I chatted recently with a friend about her days married to a park ranger and all the places she’d lived and the adventures they’d shared. It got […]
I remember running out the back door across the hot cement patio to the safety of the cool grass of the lawn. Going barefoot in Texas most summers made me extremely conscious of the surface I walked on. We learned where the patches of goathead stickers were, where the gravel was scattered on the sidewalk […]
“As factories grew quiet and traffic dropped, ozone levels fell by 7 percent across the Northern Hemisphere. As air pollution across India dropped by a third, mountain snowpacks in the Indus Basin grew brighter. With less haze in the atmosphere, the sky let more sunlight through. The planet’s temperature temporarily jumped between a fifth and half of a degree.” […]
“I think we are still grappling with a narrow view of nature and wildness, that this is remote and faraway and we must travel to find nature in some distant place. What we need to appreciate and connect with is the nature all around us, the nature near to where we live and work and […]
“The argument between “sparing” and “sharing” as a conservation tool has been raging since researchers first coined the terms more than a decade ago.” ~ Fred Pearce Most people, and almost all scientists, see the effects of climate change as threatening our very existence, since every species on Earth is interconnected and dependent on […]
“When we sow a seed, we plant a narrative of future possibility,” ~ Sue Stuart-Smith Yes, things are kind of crappy right now. We’ve got this incredibly bad pandemic keeping us mostly housebound for the last year and killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions worldwide. We’ve had four years of white supremacy, […]
It’s noticeable lots of places, but I am most sensitive to it when on a road trip. For example, on the Interstate across southern Idaho that follows the Salmon River through sage plains and various agricultural enterprises scattered around the small towns — I notice it. I also used to notice it when driving across […]
Hercules. The Scarlet Pimpernel. Paul Bunyan and Babe, his Blue Ox. Pecos Bill. Robin Hood and his Merry Men. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Santa Claus and his reindeer. The Easter Bunny. Bigfoot (Yeti). The Kraken. Albino alligators in the New York City sewers. UFO’s. We mostly believe or at least, […]
Writes of Nature 