Author: Crist Inman

Planting Trees In New Haven

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From left, Jess Jones, Ed Rodriguez, Zach Herring and Joshua De-Anda, planting a crab apple tree at 10 Wolcott Street in the Fair Haven neighborhood of New Haven, Conn. Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Ed Rodriguez has a few years on me, but we have comparable tree counts. The caption of the second photo below captures my my own preference of activity on any given day. Having grown up in Connecticut and moved to Costa Rica decades ago, I note our reverse patterns of migration.

Colbi Edmonds, a member of the 2023-24 New York Times Fellowship class, reports from Seth’s previous hometown New Haven on an initiative I love reading about as much as I enjoy my own versions of the same kind of activity:

“I love to dig and mess around in the soil,” said Ed Rodriguez, who grew up in Puerto Rico but moved to Connecticut in the 1960s. Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

One Neighborhood, 90 Trees and an 82-Year-Old Crusader

Ed Rodriguez is on a mission to convince his neighbors that they need trees to help combat summer heat — and to make the world a better place. It’s not always so easy.

Maria Gonzalez, who lives in New Haven, Conn., was envious of the other side of her street. It was lined with trees, offering some beauty as well as a shield from this summer’s unusual heat. But the sidewalk directly in front of her residence was bare, with trash littering patches of grass. Continue reading →

Cats Coming In From The Wild

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Wild cats were a big part of our life in Belize, when our business included operating a lodge in the northwest of the country. As a “cat person” I appreciate this evolutionary biologist walking me through the adaptation from wild cats to domesticated:

long-legged, striped cat peeks out of scrubby greens

An African wildcat doesn’t look so different from a domestic cat. pum_eva/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Cats first finagled their way into human hearts and homes thousands of years ago – here’s how

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to go on safari in southern Africa. One of the greatest thrills was going out at night looking for predators on the prowl: lions, leopards, hyenas.

As we drove through the darkness, though, our spotlight occasionally lit up a smaller hunter – a slender, tawny feline, faintly spotted or striped. The glare would catch the small cat for a moment before it darted back into the shadows. Continue reading →

Solidarity, Class Traitors & Ambiguity Management

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Solidarity by Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra TaylorThis book comes with a strong pitch by Bill McKibben. It came to my attention while reading this profile by Andrew Marantz. Full of ambiguity, about a balancing act between privilege inherited from fossil fuel wealth and sincere commitment to solidarity movements, what follows is entirely worth the read to get to the last paragraph (which only works if you have made it through the entire text):

What Should You Do with an Oil Fortune?

The Hunt family owns one of the largest private oil companies in the country. Leah Hunt-Hendrix funds social movements that want to end the use of fossil fuels.

Leah HuntHendrix photographed by Platon.

“Leah was clearly preoccupied with how a person of extreme privilege can live responsibly in the world,” her Ph.D. adviser said. Photograph by Platon for The New Yorker

Let’s say you were born into a legacy that is, you have come to believe, ruining the world. What can you do? You could be paralyzed with guilt. You could run away from your legacy, turn inward, cultivate your garden. If you have a lot of money, you could give it away a bit at a time—enough to assuage your conscience, and your annual tax burden, but not enough to hamper your life style—and only to causes (libraries, museums, one or both political parties) that would not make anyone close to you too uncomfortable. Or you could just give it all away—to a blind trust, to the first person you pass on the sidewalk—which would be admirable: a grand gesture of renunciation in exchange for moral purity. But, if you believe that the world is being ruined by structural causes, you will have done little to challenge those structures. Continue reading →

Notes From A Pennsylvania Garden

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Borage

The thoughts and images in this article inspire pre-dawn work on that soil I mentioned yesterday. We do not have the heat here that she does there, but the nudge to go out in the dark is welcome. My attention has been solely focused on regeneration below for the coffee that once  thrived above ground. Time to start thinking of accent colors and other edibles:

Stokes asters

What You Discover When You Garden at Night

Daytime heat forced a writer with a green thumb to change her routine. She found unexpected pleasures.

When it’s too hot to garden during the day, what is there to do but garden at night? Neither floppy hat nor gobs of sunscreen will lure me into the glare of a hot and humid, possibly record-breaking, 90-plus-degree day. Or, as our local meteorologist reports: one with a heat index of 103. So instead, I venture out into the garden after dinner, dogs in tow, surveying the raised beds in the coolness of evening.

Poppies that have gone to seed, bringing to mind “the coming glory of red, white, and pink blooms” next season.

I carry a basket full of seeds, green string to tie the tomatoes higher, and wooden stakes and black markers to record once again what I have sown, some new crops and others a repeat of those planted earlier in the season. It is midsummer now and the lettuce, radishes, and shallots are fading, but the basil and tomatoes, beans and zucchini are finally coming into their own. A little more rain and warmth and I will be able to make my first tomato sandwich, one of the driving forces, no doubt, behind planting a vegetable garden. Continue reading →

Among The Reasons To Regenerate Soil

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Organikos soil regeneration view from above, early Tuesday morning

When we started the berm where the sugarcane grows now, we knew we had a multi-year project ahead of us. This morning, before the sun had risen enough to shine on the land, I snapped the photo above, looking down on the acreage where we have planted more than 100 trees to provide shade for coffee we will plant in the near future. Besides all that, plenty of good ideas for how and why to regenerate the quality of the soil on that land; here’s some more:

A springtail crawls over snail eggs. ANDY MURRAY

Nearly Two-Thirds of All Species Live in the Ground, Scientists Estimate

Soils are more rich in life than coral reefs or rainforest canopies, providing a home to nearly two-thirds of all species, according to a sprawling new analysis. Continue reading →

Huilo Huilo’s Hojarasca

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We first noticed this film contest three years ago, and have followed it since. The 3rd-place winner of this year’s film contest was made in the Huilo Huilo Biological Reserve, habitat of the endangered species pictured above. In 2009 I was in the middle of a two-year work engagement in southern Chile. During the middle of that year Amie, as well as Seth and Milo, were able to join me for a few months and we spent time in this reserve. I am happy to be reminded:

In a Chilean Forest Reserve, the Remarkable Darwin’s Frog Endures

Four emerging filmmakers from Latin America collaborated to film Darwin’s frog and the biologist who studies the endangered species in Chile’s Huilo Huilo Biological Reserve. “Hojarasca: The Hidden Hope” is the Third-Place Winner of the 2023 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest.

Worldwide, amphibians are going extinct — victims of habitat loss, climate change, pollution, and fungal diseases. Continue reading →

Rural Lives & Other Options

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The reviews are in, and below is an excerpt. The book does not appear to be available through online booksellers in the USA, but I will be watching for it. The excerpt echoes my experience growing up in an equivalent place. A key difference between my youth and hers: my family’s income was modest but, due to my immigrant mother and father’s New England heritage I inherited a clear sense of mobility. I never had the oppressive sense of class boundaries that can dictate exclusion.

Instead I had the sense, and still do, that I could have chosen to earn the requisite fortune that would have afforded me the luxury of owning my own home in that town. But I chose otherwise, and for plenty of reasons I have no regrets whatsoever.

The view from the author’s bedroom window at Graythwaite. Rebecca Smith

Jane Austen’s English Countryside Is Not Mine

Often people assume I am someone I am not. My childhood was spent making dens in the hidden corners of the landscaped gardens of a grand country estate in the Lake District. I wandered woods full of baby pheasants being fattened up for the shoot. I roamed the hills listening to my Walkman like a modern Brontë sister. I had lakes to paddle in and a dinghy that we bumped down the ­path to a private beach.

The author playing in the garden at Graythwaite. Rebecca Smith

But they weren’t my gardens. It wasn’t my beach.

Until the age of 18, I lived on three private country estates in England. First in Yorkshire, then in Bedford, then on Graythwaite Estate, in Cumbria in the Lake District. In each of these my dad had the job of forester, working his way up until he was head forester, overseeing 500 hectares of woodland at Graythwaite, where the job came with a three-bedroom lodge on the estate. Continue reading →

Antarctica Off The Bucket List

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

During my two years working in southern Chile I was close several times to going further south. In spite of my disappointment at the time, in hindsight I am fine with not having made the journey. Thank you, Sara Clemence, for getting that clear in my head:

The Last Place on Earth Any Tourist Should Go

Take Antarctica off your travel bucket list.

On the southernmost continent, you can see enormous stretches of wind-sculpted ice that seem carved from marble, and others that are smooth and green as emerald. You can see icebergs, whales, emperor penguins. Visitors have described the place as otherworldly, magical, and majestic. The light, Jon Krakauer has said, is so ravishing, “you get drugged by it.”

Travelers are drawn to Antarctica for what they can find there—the wildlife, the scenery, the sense of adventure—and for what they can’t: cars, buildings, cell towers. They talk about the overwhelming silence. The Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge called it “the quietest place I have ever been.” Continue reading →

Stop Digging

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A man cools off by a fountain during a heat wave in Seville, Spain, on July 10th. Photograph by Cristina Quicler / AFP / Getty

It is difficult to imagine, from where I sit in cool weather in the mountains of Costa Rica’s central valley, what that heat would feel like. But it is not difficult to imagine all the possibilities for doing something about it. When you are in a hole that you do not want to be in, stop digging:

Is It Hot Enough Yet for Politicians to Take Real Action?

The latest record temperatures are driving, again precisely as scientists have predicted, a cascading series of disasters around the world.

We’ve crushed so many temperature records recently—the hottest day ever measured by average global temperature, the hottest week, the hottest June, the highest ocean temperatures, the lowest sea-ice levels—that it would be easy to overlook a couple of additional data points from this past weekend. But they’re important, because they help illuminate not just the size of our predicament but the political weaknesses that make it so hard to confront. Continue reading →

Capsicum Futures

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The World Vegetable Center conducts research, builds networks, and carries out training and promotion activities to raise awareness of the role of vegetables for improved health and global poverty alleviation.

Among the essential components of Kerala cuisine, various chili peppers were central in our diet during the India work years. I became quite tolerant of high intensity heat from capsicum, and learned to enjoy the steamy delirium of a typical mango curry. I am out of practice, not sure I can still handle high Scoville meals any more, but heartened to know that Derek Barchenger and the W.V.C team are taking care for capsicum’s future, so thanks to Clarissa Wei for this story:

The Quest to Save Chili Peppers

A seed bank in Taiwan is home to more chili varieties than anywhere else on earth. In a warming world, we’re going to need them.

In 1999, Susan Lin, a bespectacled plant researcher at the World Vegetable Center, in Taiwan, pulled on a pair of latex gloves and got to work cross-pollinating some chili peppers. She collected tiny white flowers from a cayenne-pepper plant, shook their pollen into a tiny test tube, and walked over to an aji-chili plant. Using tweezers, she removed the petals and anthers from its flower buds, exposing the thread-like stigmas that serve as the plant’s female reproductive organs. Then she dipped the stigmas into the pollen, hoping that they would eventually form peppers. Continue reading →

Taking Inspiration From Smallhold Farms In Africa

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A farmer in Niger tends to a tree sprout growing among his millet crop. TONY RINAUDO / WORLD VISION AUSTRALIA

I am nearing the point where I can offer an update on the trees we have planted in advance of 1,000+ coffee plants going into the ground in their shade. Thanks to Fred Pearce, reporting in Yale E360, I have some inspiration coming from across the Atlantic on the broader value of those trees:

Dooki (Combretum glutinosum) trees grow on a millet field in Niger. P. SAVADOGO / ICRAF

As Africa Loses Forest, Its Small Farmers Are Bringing Back Trees

The loss of forests across Africa has long been documented. But recent studies show that small farmers from Senegal to Ethiopia to Malawi are allowing trees to regenerate on their lands, resulting in improved crop yields, productive fruit harvests, and a boost for carbon storage.

For decades, there have been reports of the deforestation of Africa. And they are true — the continent’s forests are disappearing, lost mainly to expanding agriculture, logging, and charcoal-making. But the trees? Continue reading →

Costa Rica’s Ceramic Craft

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Amie and I work together, but most of my days are consumed by coffee. Especially in the March to May period, when coffee harvests are finishing and the first cuppings of the new crops are possible, my time for other activities is limited. But in June, there is more time. For the past 4+ years our shared work has included my joining her to meet artisans whose work our shops might carry. This work never disappoints, even if we conclude that the product is not a good fit for Authentica. Recently we had an afternoon together with a ceramicist we knew about, but had not yet had the opportunity to spend time with. The biggest surprise was seeing this smoke stack in the photo below.

It is rustic, and at first sight not much to look at. But listening to him tell its history you can appreciate how often in history artisans lead the way that industrialists eventually follow. This was the first smokestack in Costa Rica using technology that reduces carbon and particulate emissions. Continue reading →

Miyazaki, Trees & Authentic Experience

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A photograph of children walking along a path in the woods. Two of them are holding hands.

The magazine sent the Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi to Ghibli Park on a day when it was closed to the public, and she took along her daughter and some friends. Rinko Kawauchi for The New York Times

Links to the writings of Sam Anderson have not appeared in our pages before, and I almost missed this opportunity because at first appearance this article does not fit the norm for our themes. But if you read to the end, it does so in one clear way. It has to do with the power of nature, trees in particular, and once you read the article you will understand (if you are familiar with our platform). You can also listen to an audio version of this article here, but be sure to see the photos in the original publication:

Spirited Away to Miyazaki Land

What happens when the surreal imagination of the world’s greatest living animator, Hayao Miyazaki, is turned into a theme park?

A Totoro-like climbing structure. Rinko Kawauchi

As an American, I know what it feels like to arrive at a theme park. The totalizing consumerist embrace. The blunt-force, world-warping, escapist delight. I have known theme parks with entrance gates like international borders and ticket prices like mortgage payments and parking lots the size of Cleveland. I have been to Disney World, an alternate reality that basically occupies its own tax zone, with its own Fire Department and its own agriculture — a place where, before you’ve even entered, you see a 100-foot-tall electrical pole along the freeway with Mickey Mouse ears. This is a theme park’s job: to swallow the universe. To replace our boring, aimless, frustrating world with a new one made just for us. Continue reading →

Birds, Citizen Science & You

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Seth has been working in various African countries recently, and is somewhere in Kenya at this moment, for work. There is a school in the vicinity, with these signs. We have not yet had the chance to hear any details about the school, but these signs anyway say most of what we might want to know.

His work, related to forest management, clearly intersects with his longstanding interest in birds, strengthened by his three years working at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. That period coincides with our learning about citizen science and in the years since we have shared many stories from the field.

The pictures arrived from Kenya just as this initiative between the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the New York Times comes to my attention, which you might find interesting:

Mike McQuade

Go Birding With The Times

Our understanding of birds has been profoundly shaped by the work of everyday people. After all, anyone can step outside and pay attention to an untamed world swooping above. Continue reading →

11 Years, 11 Months & 11 Days Later

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Mermaid (now in Escazu, Costa Rica), handcrafted by Rock Bottom from driftwood in Port Antonio, Jamaica

June 15, 2011 was the day we first posted on this platform, and while we have evolved since then we have remained constant and consistent in a few ways. In the daily search for something worth sharing, photos of birds from around the world have been the most constant–as in, every day since the first photo was shared by this old friend who got us started on that daily routine. Thank you, Vijaykumar, for a healthy habit-formation.

Consistent have been the shared convictions that environmental conservation, no matter how bleak the news, is worth our effort.

Maroon shaman mask with third eye for healing power (now in Ithaca, NY USA), handcrafted by Rock Bottom from driftwood in Port Antonio, Jamaica

Plenty more constantly interesting sub-topics like books and libraries, seemingly unrelated to the environment, have been the focus of daily posts; but they are related. As is artisan production, riffed upon many times in these pages, especially now that it is the focus of our day jobs.

So today, heading toward the twelve year mark posting here, a nod to an artisan named Rock Bottom. He carves driftwood in Port Antonio, Jamaica.

There is an effort in that part of Jamaica to revive and strengthen traditional crafts, and the work of Rock Bottom is a model for what we can hope to see more of. My hope is that the amazing engine of economic activity that Jamaica’s tourism sector represents will valorize his work and the work of others akin to his.

About The Food Waste Known As Diversion

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Photograph by Grant Cornett

As still life compositions go, the photo to the right is classic in style and weirdly perfect for the essay it accompanies.  Helen Rosner frequently writes about food, including a review that convinced me to watch The Bear, and this is the best of her work that I have read:

The Promises of the Home “Composting” Machine

A new crop of techy appliances wants to help fight the food-waste crisis. How virtuous should we feel using them?

In the course of a week, my kitchen produces a shocking quantity of what we might think of as edible trash: apple peels, garlic nubs, a bit of gristle from a steak, Dorito dust, tea bags, the iron-hard heel of a loaf of bread that’s been sitting out overnight. The meat scraps I feed to my dog. The bones and vegetable scraps I store in the freezer in gallon-size ziplock bags and periodically bung into a pot and simmer into stock. But even then, once the stock is made, and the chicken bones or onion ends are leached of all their flavor, I’m left again with edible trash—only now it’s soggy. And then there are the times when the strawberries aren’t sealed right and become fuzzy with mold, or the delivery sandwich turns out to be gross, or the refrigerator’s compressor breaks and somehow we don’t notice, or I’m just exhausted and overwhelmed and want everything gone. Continue reading →

Auchan 2000 & Authentica 2023

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The Auchan hypermarche in Cergy is at the location of the red balloon in the image above. It is a short walk from the ESSEC campus (lower center of map). Click to go to the map on Auchan’s website

On each of the occasions I have read articles about Annie Ernaux I have been reminded of the first of my five years teaching at ESSEC. During the 2000-2003 academic years I lived on campus for extended periods away from home and family in Costa Rica. My grocery shopping was at the same Auchan elegantly dissected by the woman who last year won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  During my fourth year teaching there I was completing work on a project in Montenegro that made it more convenient for our family to be based in Paris for 12 months. This turned out to be one of the most culturally enriching experiences our family ever had together. And relevant to life now.

Adrienne Raphel’s article in The Paris Review begins with her own “big retail” experience, and at first read it connects dots between our Paris time and our retail life now. For the last 4+ years we have been waking up each day looking for novel ways to succeed without following the “pile it high and watch it fly” model. So, if that resonates with you for any reason, read on:

INTERIOR OF THE WAL-MART SUPERCENTER IN ALBANY. PHOTOGRAPH BY MATT WADE, COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS. LICENSED UNDER CCO 3.0.

“The Dead Silence of Goods”: Annie Ernaux and the Superstore

The first and only time I went to the Walmart in Iowa City was surreal. When I was in high school, my parents’ business-oriented small press had published a book called The Case Against Walmart that called for a national consumer boycott of the company; the author denounced everything from the superstore’s destruction of environmentally protected lands to its sweatshop labor to its knockoff merchandise. So by the time I made a pilgrimage out to the superstore at age twenty-one, I hadn’t stepped in a Walmart for nearly a decade, and it had acquired this transgressive power—the very act of crossing the threshold was as shameful as it was thrilling…

Plenty To Question About Milk’s Status

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We began featuring food-related stories by employees and interns, plus occasional visiting friends, during our first couple of years living in India. More recently, taste of place considerations first explored in India became for our Authentica shops in Costa Rica a key differentiator.

So my eye is drawn to food writing that overlaps with ethnicity considerations, and Mayukh Sen’s review of Spoiled brings out that book’s relevance to our pages:

A Fresh History of Lactose Intolerance

In “Spoiled,” the culinary historian Anne Mendelson takes aim at the American fallacy of fresh milk as a wonder food.

Six decades ago, Pedro Cuatrecasas, a fledgling resident at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, was studying the lives of impoverished residents of Baltimore when he noticed an unsettling trend. In interviews, a number of his Black patients would confess that they found milk repellent. Continue reading →

Keeping It Honest In Costa Rica

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The Nairi Awari Indigenous community in Limón, Costa Rica. EZEQUIEL BECERRA / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

We are proud of the country we call home, and where our work us based. But even as I celebrate it from time to time, I never mistake it for perfect. There is always more work to be done. Thanks to Fred Pearce, as always, for the details we need to know:

Lauded as Green Model, Costa Rica Faces Unrest in Its Forests

Indigenous park ranger Osvaldo Martinez tours the Nairi Awari indigenous community in Limon, Costa Rica on November 9, 2021. – The indigenous people of this community are payed for caring for the environment, as part of a program awarded by the British royalty. (Photo by Ezequiel BECERRA / AFP) (Photo by EZEQUIEL BECERRA/AFP via Getty Images)

Costa Rica has won international acclaim for its initiatives to restore its forests. But those successes are now jeopardized by conflicts over the government’s failure to return traditional lands to the Indigenous people who are regarded as the best forest stewards.

Costa Rica has a green halo. In recent decades, the small Central American nation has transformed itself from a notorious hotspot for deforestation into a beacon of reforestation that is the envy of the world. Many of its more than 12,000 species of plants, 1,200 butterflies, 800 birds, and 650 mammals, reptiles, and amphibians have gone from bust to boom, and eco-tourists are savoring the spectacle. Continue reading →

Caterpillars, Among Other Insects, More Appreciated

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Some scientists warn of an insect apocalypse. The flying-insect community has been “decimated,” a research paper said. Illustration by Jochen Gerner

Insects were among the first regular features in these pages, thanks to Milo’s camera and personal interest. There were more when Seth worked in Costa Rica, followed by plenty of articles and editorials of various types, as well as my own discoveries while working outside. Looking back over those, I notice that caterpillars were featured only once, in a post on integrated pest management. So the following is a welcome addition to the mix:

The Little-Known World of Caterpillars

An entomologist races to find them before they disappear.

The Devils River, in southwestern Texas, runs, mirage-like, along the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, through some of the most barren countryside in the United States. Access to the river is limited; unless you’re in a kayak, the only way to travel upstream is along a skein of rutted dirt roads. It was on one of these roads that, a few years ago, David Wagner noticed a shrub that seemed to him peculiarly filled with promise. Continue reading →