“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.” […]
Category Archives: life
“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, […]
“Scientists say the weight of human-made objects will likely exceed that of living things by the end of the year.” ~ Helen Briggs A good friend warned me years ago about peak oil, when the production of oil from the Earth reached its peak, and the amount of oil remaining would continuously decline, exacerbating […]
“Bury me not, on the lone prairie.” ~ The Cowboy’s Lament It was a lonely grave, no other markers or structures nearby. An old board, with flaked paint almost obscuring the message, stood upright in the desert at the base of Utah’s Book Cliffs. Maybe it had been some cowboy riding the lonely range […]
… It is not a sentimental but a grimly literal fact that unless we share this terrestrial globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for long. ~ Joseph Wood Krutch “The truth is that we need invertebrates, but they don’t need us. If human beings were […]
The greater the circle of understanding becomes, the greater is the circumference of surrounding ignorance. ~ Edwin Chargoff As an adult, I’ve pretty much always read the newspaper daily. I’ve never been much for the evening news, but over the past few years, my wife and I have routinely watched Rachel on MSNBC. I […]
There’s a strange and undeniable draw towards abandoned places. Ghost towns, forsaken movie palaces, swank shipwrecks, crumbling castles and the like all lure in adventurers with their promise of poignancy and a special brand of voyeurism. ~ Melissa Breyer Every day it seems like I’m reliving some great disaster of history — a pandemic, […]
“Mushrooms are one of our biggest allies if we hope to have any chance of healing the earth.” ~ Sarah Kuta Humans have changed the planet’s ecosystems, both intentionally and inadvertently. Our very presence requires competition with other species for resources and our successful proliferation compounds that issue. We also perform actions that damage […]
Writes of Nature 