Words, and specifically how they are used, is a topic of amusement in our pages; and occasionally a topic of exasperation (thanks to Sarah M. Brownsberger and The Hedgehog Review):
Stop the Term-Creation Meaning-Kidnap!
When language became searchable.
On our recent return to the United States after a decade away in our other language, my family was struck by a change in American English. Continue reading
Santiago Atitlán Guatemala
The Conversation is “a news organization dedicated to facts and evidence” and with the tag line “Academic rigor, journalistic flair”. Our kind of reading. The graph to the left illustrates this article’s point; the photo below to the right is too composed for rigor:
Brazil’s enormous soy farms mostly produce food for animals, not humans. lourencolf / shutterstock
New food technologies could release 80% of the world’s farmland back to nature
Here’s the basic problem for conservation at a global level: food production, biodiversity and carbon storage in ecosystems are competing for the same land. Continue reading
Savalsang Grasslands, Vijayapura, Karnataka
D. Finnin/© AMNH
Folding paper was a frequent topic for us starting in 2011, but origami specifically has been featured only a few times. This holiday season at the American Museum of Natural History we add to the mentions:
The Making of the Origami Holiday Tree
One 13-Foot Tree, 1,000 Origami Models: A Spectacular Museum Tradition
M. Shanley/© AMNH
Early each year, as the days begin to get a bit longer and the first signs of spring crop up in Central Park, Ros Joyce and Talo Kawasaki, volunteers from OrigamiUSA and the designers of the Museum’s Origami Holiday Tree start planning for the year ahead.
M. Shanley/© AMNH
They begin combing the Museum’s halls in search of inspiration—going from floor to floor to decide on a perfect theme and to find just the right exhibits to re-create as origami models on the tree. Continue reading
Nguila, Cameroon
Just after recently learning that this borough is the greenest, another story clues us in on this innovative program:
Fresh Food from Our Land
The Foodway connects the river area with people, growing food and medicinal plants. Come explore the food forest and relish (hah!) the delight of seeds becoming plants for life.
The Guardian’s Meka Boyle gives another reason why visiting this borough is a worthwhile extension to any visit to New York City:
‘It made my heart sing’: finding herbs and medicine in the Bronx food forest
The Bronx River Foodway, the only legal place to forage in New York, celebrates the end of a season
Foodway team members gathered around a picnic bench at the New York Botanical Garden created by the artist Elizebeth Hamby. Photograph: Courtesy Elizabeth Hamby
Bimwala’s tours are a mix of returning foragers eager to learn more and newcomers, many of whom have lived in the Bronx for decades. Photograph: Courtesy of Nathan Hunter
On a crisp November day in the South Bronx, more than 300 people made their way from Westchester Avenue below the clamor of the 6 train down a tree-lined path leading to Concrete Plant park. This is the home of the Bronx River Foodway, a quarter-acre food forest full of edible, mostly native plants. What looks like a stretch of land dotted with trees appears at first glance to be overrun by weeds, but the wild foliage has been intentionally planted by the Foodway. It is the only legal foraging site in New York City.
Neighbors young and old poured on to the grassy banks of the Bronx River to celebrate the end of the season and the foliage of the Bronx, including an array of snacks made from foraged ingredients: ginkgo cheese and acorn crackers, and pickled mushrooms and herbal ales made at recent four-part cooking series put on by the Foodway over the last two months. Continue reading
Mandala-Phudung Forest, Arunachal Pradesh
Toni Demuro
In a world that is full of climate denial nonsense, where responsibilities to nature are abandoned by many, what harm could possibly come from Icelanders believing their own peculiar sort of nonsense? We will take any help we can get if it helps us and helps our protection of nature:
In “Looking for the Hidden Folk,” Nancy Marie Brown makes a strong case for everyday wonder.
For 70 summers, children have boated to an island in the Adirondack wilderness to seek out a cluster of tiny wooden houses and leave messages for the fairies who are said to live there. Sometimes the fairies write back — on slips of birch bark, tucked into the crevice of a log for children to find and exult over. The adult go-betweens behind the letters can’t resist feeding the children’s faith that the natural world reciprocates their interest.
Of course, they don’t believe in fairies themselves. In “Looking for the Hidden Folk,” the cultural historian Nancy Marie Brown asks: Why not? “Why should disbelief be our default? Why should we deride our sense of wonder? Why do we allow our world to be disenchanted?” Continue reading
Savalsang Grasslands, Vijayapura, Karnataka
Image credits: Alamy; David Guttenfelder for The New York Times; Getty Images; Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times; Michael Probst/Associated Press; Getty Images; NASA
We have been using this terminology already for more than a decade, thinking it was apt enough to be official:
For Planet Earth, This Might Be the Start of a New Age
A panel of experts has spent more than a decade deliberating on how, and whether, to mark a momentous new epoch in geologic time: our own.
The official timeline of Earth’s history — from the oldest rocks to the dinosaurs to the rise of primates, from the Paleozoic to the Jurassic and all points before and since — could soon include the age of nuclear weapons, human-caused climate change and the proliferation of plastics, garbage and concrete across the planet. Continue reading
Davis Mountain Preserve, TX
A rooftop solar installation in Yokohama, near Tokyo. COCREATR VIA FLICKR
Our hats off to Japan’s largest city for this requirement:
Tokyo to Mandate Rooftop Solar Panels on New Homes
Tokyo is mandating that all new homes in the city be built with rooftop solar panels starting in 2025. Continue reading
Nguila, Cameroon
A reason that the breakthrough is causing such hoopla is that it implicitly promises that we could use fusion to run the world in almost its current form. Photograph courtesy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Without the expertise to fully appreciate the science, the hoopla can be overlooked too easily. McKibben’s comment helps clarify:
The Fusion Breakthrough Suggests That Maybe Someday We’ll Have a Second Sun
In the meantime, we need to use the sun we’ve already got.
On Tuesday, the Department of Energy is expected to announce a breakthrough in fusion energy: according to early reports, scientists at the government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, have succeeded for the first time in making their complex and expensive machinery produce more power than it uses, if only for an instant. Continue reading
Vijayapura, Karnataka
The opening plenary of the U.N. biodiversity conference in Montreal. Photograph by Andrej Ivanov / AFP / Getty
We continue, as a species, to document our impact on other species. The warning signs keep getting clearer. It is not pleasant reading, but it is documented for a reason; it is about us. It is about our responsibilities. Our thanks, as always, to Elizabeth Kolbert:
Can the U.N. Save the World from Ecological Collapse?
At this week’s summit, delegates will consider ambitious new conservation targets—even though the old ones have yet to be achieved.
The Red List of Threatened Species might best be described as a lack-of-progress report. Continue reading
Willis Creek Wildlife Area, TX
Big cats at the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park, a private sanctuary featured in the Netflix documentary series Tiger King. FIGHT4ANIMALRIGHTS VIA WIKIPEDIA
Big cats do not belong in cages, and certainly do not deserve to be treated as domestic pets. We assumed there were already clear and strict rules in place:
U.S. to Curb Private Ownership of Big Cats
The U.S. is set to enact a new law that prohibits private citizens from obtaining lions, tigers, jaguars, leopards, and other big cats as pets. Continue reading
Puerta del Cielo, Huehuetenango, Guatemala
Organikos 