Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
JUNE 10, 2021 – Lately, extreme heat has descended upon our part of the world. My wife habitually announces that “It’s so hot” to remind me so. I’d adapted to warming trends. After all, I figured, isn’t adaptation a hallmark of evolutionary success? I used to hate the heat, but that was back when I …
MAY 25, 2021 – Displaced by news of human beings beating up on each other are the latest reports regarding “climate change.” Like 90% of an iceberg, this climate news is below the surface. Consider the following: The May 17 study, published by Nature Geoscience, concluding that global warming will expose more of the Antarctic …
MAY 4, 2021 – Yesterday on my hike inside “Little Switzerland,” I cut a beeline off the bend of a border street, down a steep slope, and across the eighth tee. Recent rains had brought out “a bunch of ants”—my pre-ant education terminology—as revealed by multiple, unmistakable “ant foxholes” dotting the tee—as it were. As …
JANUARY 17, 2021 – Yesterday my wife and I with son-Byron and daughter-in-law-Mylène, loaded a weekend’s worth of gear, food, and accessories into the RAV4 and headed north—first to the Amnicon Falls State Park in extreme northwest Wisconsin, then southeast from there to the Red Cabin. Byron drove, and because Mylène tends to get carsick …
DECEMBER 10, 2020 – As I dig deeper into my “tree garden” project, I’m reminded of my reaction to Black Lives Matter. How in the world could these two matters—trees and racial justice—be connected? Read on. As revealed in prior posts, our older son’s community activism prompted my wife and me to learn more about …
AUGUST 22, 2020 – Yesterday afternoon while deep in my “tree garden,” I heard the rumble of distant thunder. When I emerged for a look at the end of our dock, an enormous thunderhead was closing in. I felt like a sailor in one-person dinghy in line with the prow of an aircraft carrier steaming …
JULY 6, 2020 – I’m not a “math and science” guy, though in school I did just fine. It’s just that I didn’t advance very far. I was too busy being a “words” guy. Still am. No apologies. And my disclaimer regarding math and science doesn’t disqualify me from deploying words about a scientific concern. …
MARCH 12, 2020 – Tuesday evening I’d composed a post for Wednesday. Entitled, “BERNIE BURNIN’,” it lampooned CNN coverage of primary results Tuesday evening. By Wednesday morning it seemed trivial, irrelevant, and not very humorous. My daily voyage got struct by a rogue wave, within a sea-change inside a hurricane. For days I’d been on …
FEBRUARY 2, 2020 – Yesterday’s edition of The Washington Post published an opinion piece by James Comey, one of Trump’s many outspoken nemeses. Comey provided cool reassurance to those among us who can’t stand Trump. He cited major upsets in our history, from the assassination of JFK to the demise of the Democratic Party with …
OCTOBER 28, 2019 – Last week The New York Times carried an article about a recent find of mammalian fossils revealing how life bounced back after the demise of the dinosaurs. The article was a welcome respite from all the stories about human dysfunctionality aboard spaceship earth. After reigning over the earth for 165 million …
SEPTEMBER 24, 2019 – In case you haven’t already heard it, you must listen to the speech of Greta Thunberg (pronounced, TŪN-berry) at the UN Climate Change Summit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAJsdgTPJpU Her words and delivery smack you directly between the ears—where the brain resides. As she cuts to the quick, you remind yourself, “To travel from her …
SEPTEMBER 22, 2019 – Everything—everything—from a quark to the universe is part of a larger system. At extreme ends of the spectrum lie quantum physics and grand-scale philosophy. Between those extremes, an infinite (paradoxically) number of systems interact. In our daily work and lives, however, we largely ignore the totality of most systems that affect …
AUGUST 5, 2019 – Gun control; immigration reform; student loan burdens; opioid crisis; arms sales to Saudia Arabia; support of Israel; relations with NATO allies; relations with Russia; relations with China; disease control; tariffs; war in Afghanistan; religious extremism; white nationalism; investment in public transit; transportation safety; affordable and accessible quality health care; storage of nuclear …
JULY 15, 2019 – Whenever I spend time up at the cabin, I think about nature and . . . climate change. I think about what scientists are saying about changes to the environment around here; that over the next two decades, loons will be forced farther north until they disappear from here altogether; how a …
JUNE 7, 2019 – If we don’t materially alter our course now, big portions of the world’s 7.7 billion people will find themselves in areas so environmentally compromised as to be uninhabitable. Mass migrations will increase, threatening existing political and economic structures around the world. Consider, for example, rising average temperatures in most of India …
MAY 7, 2019 – We hear and read regularly that we’re slip-sliding into ever deeper ecological do-do. The latest cause for alarm: a U.N. report on the imminent disappearance of a million species. I count myself (smugly) among the 63% of Americans who accept what’s believed by 97% of actively publishing climatologists: human activity threatens …