Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet. ~ Roger Miller “If you want to understand hydrology, go stand in the woods in the rain,” he instructed. We looked at our environmental engineering professor as if he was crazy, but over the next few weeks, most of us tried it. Once I was […]
Category Archives: human nature
At the same time that we’re solving for climate change, we’re going to be building cities for three billion people. That’s a doubling of the urban environment. ~Peter Calthorpe Nationalism seems to be sweeping the U.S. and Europe, but maybe it’s just a pushback against natural forces. I remember reading that R. Buckminster Fuller saw […]
I bent down and picked up a plastic six-pack ring from the ground, cut it apart with my pocket knife and tossed it into the back of the car. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Cutting it up,” I replied. “But why?” “Ever seen those photos of ducks or other birds caught up in one […]
I talk to the trees, but they don’t listen to me. I talk to the stars, but they never hear me. The breeze hasn’t time to stop and hear what I say I talk to them all in vain. ~ Pardner (Clint Eastwood) in Paint Your Wagon She was crooning to her Wandering Jew, […]
“He went to Paris, looking for answers, to questions that bothered him so.” ~ “He Went to Paris”, Jimmy Buffet A few years ago my sister was unable to get email or easy phone access and so we wrote letters to each other — most often weekly. In a letter, you have time to tell […]
“Stop, I’ve gotta go,” Sammy directed, and I pulled off the dirt track next to a deep arroyo. My Navajo assistant liked to pee off of high places, and I joined him at the edge. Off in the distance, across the sage-covered desert, a pair of small mesas shimmered in the summer heat. It wasn’t […]
Some people walk in the rain; others just get wet. ~ Roger Miller It’s easy for me to get depressed these days. Heat waves and glacial melting present as dire warnings that climate change is here and not just some far-off threat that may plague future generations. National politics have become horribly malicious, and so […]
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” ~ Margaret Attwood My father’s garden was a small area about ten-foot by ten against the south side of the house that got intense sun early in the day, but was shaded in the afternoon. He didn’t start a garden until […]
Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss. The language of hunting has a word for such mark-making: ‘foil’. A creature’s ‘foil’ is its track. The path’s sediment comprised sentiment, and to follow a path might therefore […]
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil” ― William Shakespeare, Hamlet Hamlet came across the bones of an old friend, Yorick (that some claim he knew well). In those days, in Europe and elsewhere, people […]
Writes of Nature 