Hello Walls

Hello wall, (hello, hello)How’d things go for you today?                                                 ~ Hello Walls, Faron Young and Willie Nelson Humans seem to need walls. We build them to separate things and ourselves. We put up walls to keep our things inside and to keep other things out. We put up walls to establish ownership and create boundaries. […]

Both Sides Now

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides nowFrom up and down, and still somehowIt’s cloud illusions I recallI really don’t know clouds at all                                                 ~ Joni Mitchell Climate change is bringing worrying uncertainty to our weather patterns. We try to minimize or eliminate carbon emissions to reduce the greenhouse effect, but we’re taking too […]

Evolving

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and […]

Urban Nature

Humans need to find peace and quiet. Any parent has reached their screaming point from all the chaos that children and jobs can bring into their lives, but we all occasionally need some calming, uninterrupted time for our brain to settle down and clear out our thoughts. For some, a walk in the woods or […]

Ugly Pumpkins

Leaves are covering the yards, the garden plants are slowly (or, if a freeze, quickly) dying, and the squirrel-mutilated faces on pumpkins are moldering across front porches everywhere. It’s the perfect time to start your garden compost pile! Composting is an age-old practice to conserve the nutrients that nature provides. Normally, trees, shrubs and grasses […]

Still Hope

The hot weather — 90+ degree highs for several weeks in Denver, in mid-September! — coupled with the continuing isolation of the pandemic has me thinking about the apocalypse. Wildfires ravage the west, leaving destruction, homelessness, haze and foul air across the country and flooding locally. Drought has decimated the Colorado River and dropped many […]

Bored and Grumpy

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”                                  ~ Isaac Asimov​ “The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.”                                 ~ Rachel Carson It’s nearly fall, so the weather is turning but still be […]

Hey, Buddy, Can You Spare a Little (Climate) Change? Part 2

Carbon dioxide, that fizzy stuff in our ‘carbonated’ beverages, is our climate’s enemy. Not the beverages, but the amount of CO2 that we have been emitting since the start of the industrial age. While many people try to ignore the science of human-induced climate change, others are trying to figure out what to do about […]

To Bee or Not to Bee

“In recent years, the mysterious disappearance of bees has puzzled experts from across the world. In the United States alone, the honeybee population has dropped by 50 percent from midcentury levels, and 700 species of bees are now at risk of extinction. Scientists can’t really pin down the cause of the ‘bee apocalypse,’ but point to […]

Not Man Apart

“We can no longer afford to consider air and water common property, free to be abused by anyone without regard to consequences. Instead we should begin now to treat them as scarce resources, which we are no more free to contaminate than we are free to throw garbage into our neighbor’s yard.”                                             ~ President […]