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Nature. Science. History.

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National Ocean Exploration Forum: All Hands On Deck

11/16/2018

Time worked in a double fold way during the 2018 National Ocean Exploration forum at the MIT Media Lab in Boston. The days passed quickly, and yet it feels like so much was achieved in those hours that clock time lost its relevancy, and instead took on the quality of both the movement of the tide and of the quick dancing steps of the shorebird. The theme of the conference was 'All Hands on Deck', and that phrase speaks to one of the most important issues facing us, for the ocean needs all of
A Trip to Another World

10/17/2018

The woods at Jacobsburg State Park are surprisingly quiet in spite of all the cars parked in the lot. Birds are heard but rarely seen as we walk from one environment, a deciduous forest, to another, a coniferous one. Leading us is one of the few birds we do see on this day - a white-breasted nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis). According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds website: "White-breasted Nuthatches are birds of mature woods and woodland edges. They’re particularly
Learning About Monocultures at SCBI

10/09/2018

A heavy mist pillows and blunts the top of the mountains outside Front Royal, Virginia. Yesterday my son and I rode the foothills of these mountains, our horses gauging their footing on the wet, muddy slopes as we let our hands sit forward on their necks, trusting them to gauge their own steps on what was, to us, unfamiliar land. We rode across the now obscured tracks of horsemen from both sides of the Civil War, as well as those of George Washington. We learned about history on that muddy
Sometimes you ride the horse...

10/02/2018

It is the first really cool day of fall but the morning chill mostly burns off by afternoon. By the time I get to the barn, it is almost too warm for a long-sleeve shirt, but not everything is as it seems. There is still something in the air that whispers, just barely hints, at autumn. Maybe it is the birds, jays and grosbeaks that fly over in a thin migratory stream. Duncan, the quarter horse that I ride, is in an interesting mood. There are no hitches in grooming and saddling him, and I feel
Tara Expeditions: A place to begin, a home to return to

09/24/2018

There is little about this late September sky in New York that would make you think about Georgia during the Civil War. The gray clouds had been gathering through the night, thickening all morning, and lacking a consensus on whether they should openly downpour of move along, seem to have agreed now on a meager drizzle. Rather it is a French ocean research vessel that the people who cluster on the dock hoping tour, a schooner whose name references the plantation in Gone With the Wind, that
The autobiographies of snails

09/19/2018

Aristotle gets short shrift in contemporary writings about animal issues. He is seen as the progenitor of Descartes' ideas about the animal as machine, devoid of the divine light of reason that sets humans apart from other animals. Descartes isn't kind in his writing to animals, equating them with machines. This criticism of Aristotle is not completely untrue, but should perhaps be tempered with a bit of understanding. Aristotle was not just expanding the field of biology, he was in a very
Book Review: The Fly Trap by Fredrik Sjöberg- Ensnared By Beauty

09/10/2018

There is a little book that escaped my attention for far too long, The Fly Trap by Fredrik Sjöberg, but having read it I am now ready to join the legion that proclaim not only its merit, but to laud its worth in a time when far too often the news we get about the environment is bad. This is not to say that there are no warnings or concerns in this book, but even more than these there is an overriding sense of beauty and wonder that reminds us of why we love the natural places of the
Finding an Answer: Goose-Necked Barnacles

08/28/2018

It has taken a book written in Japanese to spur the solution to one of the problems that has been sitting like a dark cloud of ignorance over a beach find during the Maine trip. If you are unfamiliar with the complete lack of Japanese language skills that I have , and the hushed tones in which the words “I hear you are buying books in Japanese again” are spoken by colleagues, then this might make sense. But it doesn't make sense, and yet here in this pocket guide to seashore life, 水の生き物
Things Too Deep to be Known : Father, Son, and the Ghost of Memory

08/21/2018

(The beginning of a piece that will never end) Tonight: My son and I stand on the dunes at Great Kills beach looking out at a horizon where the slate gray darkening clouds meet the slate gray darkening water. Only the lights from ships moving in and out of New York harbor across the Lower Bay through Ambrose Channel and the Chapel Hill South Channel truly show us where the one meets the other, those lights and the one from the stationary lighthouse of West Bank Horn blinking in the distance.