No matter how refined we may think ourselves, at some level we are all still wild creatures, made up of the same materials as the mountains, the deserts, the oceans, the distant stars. ~ Gary Kamiya There’s a war going on in my yard. Clover, dandelions and violets run rampant in the lawn, overgrowing the […]
Category Archives: human nature
Obviously, I do rockets, so I like things that fly. This is not some inherent bias against flying things, but there is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy, the wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, a whole bunch of […]
“So whether it’s redeveloping dying malls or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out of parking lots, I think the fact is the growing number of empty and under-performing, especially retail, sites throughout suburbia gives us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places.” […]
Hot town, summer in the city Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty Been down, isn’t it a pity Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city All around, people looking half dead Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head ~The Lovin’ Spoonful “… in cities … one seems to lose […]
“Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy, Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry.” ~ John Denver “A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.” […]
The last light went out, plunging the neighborhood into darkness. First, a quiet rustling, then silence. Somewhere a dog barks. The rustling resumes. The garbage can lid shifts slightly with a tinny sound. Suddenly, the lid flips off the can and an explosion of plastic straws, disposable water bottles and fast food wrappers cascades onto […]
There is an urgent need for a new paradigm that integrates the continued development of human societies and the maintenance of the Earth system (ES) in a resilient and accommodating state. The planetary boundary (PB) framework contributes to such a paradigm by providing a science-based analysis of the risk that human perturbations will destabilize the […]
The great hope of the Enlightenment – that human rationality would enable us to transcend our evolutionary limitations – has taken a beating from wars and genocides, but only now, on the problem of climate change, has it foundered altogether. ~ Jonathan Franzen Earth system scientists … say biogeochemical pollution is one of four “planetary […]
Bird collisions happen because birds see the world differently. ~ The American Bird Conservancy “Creak, creak, creak…” lazily interrupted the silence of the prairie. Another hot day quail hunting, we walked up to the ancient windmill where the dogs could get water and tried futilely to avoid stepping in the cow pies where the […]
(Apologies to Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith) “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.” ~ Jonathan Swift As a regulator, I was often criticized for being biased and letting that bias prejudice my decisions. Of course, it was always the people who disliked my […]
