I’ll be on “spring break” in Japan with my family from March 4-21, assisting my wife, Robbie, as she makes the most of our Japan Rail passes—visiting important galleries of ancient and contemporary Japanese ceramics. My assigned task is to find the best noodle shops and yakitori stands in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Nara. I [...]
If your child is bored with school, under-achieving, or has trouble remembering what they’ve studied in science, English and history classes, they will benefit from “Our Place,” Biocitizen’s 5-day field environmental philosophy camp.
An excellent article in the New York Times explains:
In a recent study, Marc Berman, a researcher in cognitive psychology and industrial engineering at [...]
One very useful way of understanding our environmental impact is to think of “inhabitation.” They are the same thing, for the way we inhabit the earth determines our impact upon its dynamic, living systems.
Perhaps you are keeping your thermostat down in an effort to save some $$. This change in your “inhabitation” reduces the pollution [...]
Happy Blue Moon Year! Time, perhaps, to make a resolution or two about what you eat?
The industrial meat-producing techniques used by factory-farms are accelerating evolutionary transformations in sickness-causing bacteria and viruses: think Swine Flu. The more the factory-farms use pharmaceutical drugs to prevent disease outbreaks, the more drug-resistant bacteria and viruses are being generated: [...]
June
7-11 high schoolers
14-18 high schoolers
21-25 middle schoolers
28- July 2 middle schoolers
July
5-9 high schoolers
12-16 high schoolers
19-23 middle schoolers
26-30 high schoolers
Aug
2-6 high schoolers
9-13 high [...]
Our Place costs $250.00 for five 8:30am-4:00pm, M-F days. Drop-off and pick-up are at the Brushworks classroom in Florence.
Students carry backpacks with reading and writing materials, appropriate clothing, food and a water bottle.
The curriculum for Our Place is also the itinerary:
Day One: Walking Westhampton
- introduction to Thoreau’s essay Walking
- streamwalking
- the colonial roads of Mt. Tob
Day Two: Southern Nonotuck
- the dinosaurs of Holyoke
- the microclimates, and unique ecological communities, of Mt. Tom
- the view from Mt. Nonotuck
Day Three: Into the Western Hills
- visiting the William Cullen Bryant [...]
Tis the season to be jolly—and buy European or organic cosmetics.
Our Food and Drug Administration allows cosmetics to be sold and consumed that are not tested for toxicity. In the FDA’s own words:
FDA’s legal authority over cosmetics is different from other products regulated by the agency, such as drugs, biologics, and medical devices. Cosmetic products [...]
On Tuesday, I dug up the leeks we grew this summer, and marveled at the earthworms wriggling in the hairy roots. Beneath the three inch crust of snow, a subterranean world was writhing with biotic activity—
a fact that made me think of “chernozem,” a word I first encountered in Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac:
What is [...]
Longest night of the year—give it a chance…
Tomorrow, winter. No turning back.