We’ll be comparing this year’s assessments with these, the ones we did last year. All watercourses achieved an status of “exceptional” water quality! We’re also assessing 6 new sites (click to see)! Sodden Brook, in Westhampton, near Hampshire Regional High School: Mill River in Northampton, at Baystate: Mill River in Haydenville, at Brassworks: Upper North [...]
Time to get into the rivers and collect the bugs that live under rocks. They tell us—by their variety and size—how oxygenated (& healthy) our rivers are: an annual “physical,” just like at the doctors’. Here’s a map of our sampling sites:
If you love nature, and would like to know why, you’ll benefit from these four discussions about American Animism. We’ll explore the primary textual sources, and discover the basic concepts of, animism—the belief inherent in all religions that God is alive, in (and sometimes as) nature. My goal is to equip you with a historically-grounded [...]
Harvest time brings yucky stuff like stinky rotten turnips and disgusting blight-black tomatoes; but it also delivers wonderful surprises—like hazel nuts! I ordered three tiny hazel nut (also called filbert) trees a few years ago from Fedco and this year they produced a couple of pounds of nuts. I give them them an A+, because [...]
mountains ask as much of you as you can give which is why you’re weighed & measured & chewed (by yourself & the elements) as you walk them. you can walk slow and not worry about peaks or need that jagged edge in the blue to hold onto. whatever you need the mountain will return [...]
What if there is no such thing as the “environment”? What if the “environment” is a technojargonal term like “credit default swap”? And what if our decades-long focusing of ideas and discussions on this thing called the “environment” deludes us, like “credit default swaps” do? Let’s dump the word “environment,” (b/c all it means is [...]
Thank you, Daily Hampshire Gazette—& campers, & Smith College intern Victoria Dunch (who made it happen!), & Northampton DPW’s David Veleta, who taught us so much about where our waste goes in such a friendly and substantive way. Note: do you know where your garbage goes? Note 2: if garbage is something you throw away, [...]
—because we are far more than we have ever been taught (we are biocitizens); without a change in perspective, it is difficult to understand that: Mountains are great teachers.
It loosed us—this poem by Bryant . (You’ll like it!)
