Wilderness might be reducible, acre by acre, but wildness is something else again. Michael Pollen, The Botany of Desire It was early, just before dawn, when we took off from Fairbanks. We surmounted the low hills to the north and gained altiltude, but stayed low enough to see the snowy, forested terrain clearly. The small […]
Category Archives: nature
“Not only can we stop damaging nature, but we can also restore, it, too. And when you put the two together, you get powerful and natural solutions to climate change.” ~ Bronson Griscom “We need bees for the future of our cities and urban living.” ~ Noah Wilson-Rich Envision downtown Denver before it was developed: […]
In 1735, when Carl Linnaeus organized all the species in the world into one vast taxonomy, he included a section on “Animalia Paradoxa”: creatures, common in folklore and myth or attested to by far-flung explorers, that he felt compelled to itemize yet deemed unlikely to exist. ~ Kathryn Schulz “I hate that noise,” she said, […]
Since 2009, the world has been stuck on a single narrative around a coming global food crisis and what we need to do to avoid it. How do we feed nine billion people by 2050? ~ Sara Menker “Take a look,” he showed me a photo of a basket of apples wrapped in cellophane. “Apples […]
“Sometimes all I need is the air that I breathe And to love you All I need is the air that I breathe Yes to love you All I need is the air that I breathe” ~ The Hollies* “It’s my morning ritual,” he said, “I have to do this every day before I sit […]
“Climate change will increase the risks and hazards facing urban populations in numerous ways, from increasing heat waves to more intense rainfall to rising sea levels. For some of these risks, trees and other natural features can be a way to reduce the threat, in effect serving as part of the climate adaptation strategy of […]
“…in order to do something big, to think globally and act globally, one starts with something small and one starts where it counts. Practice, then, is about making the ordinary special and the special more widely accessible — expanding the boundaries of understanding and possibility with vision and common sense. ~ Nabeel Hamdi Over thirty […]
All good solutions are beautiful. They have proportion, balance and harmony – all parts fit with one another, and the solutions fit rightly into the bigger picture. ~ Boast and Martin, Masters of Change If you’re doing transit-oriented development without adding transit, then what’s the point? ~ Peter Moskowitz My adult son groans when I […]
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 […]
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 […]
Writes of Nature 