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: [...]
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 [...]
We’re evolving.
The premise of his op-ed: the environment is our body.
Take breast cancer. One puzzle has been that most women living in Asia have low rates of breast cancer, but ethnic Asian women born and raised in the United States don’t enjoy that benefit. At the symposium, Dr. Alisan Goldfarb, a surgeon specializing in breast cancer, [...]
Yesterday I leapt from the keyboard and dashed outside to harvest the last of our red and green cabbages (a whole wheelbarrel full!). These babies handle moderate frost, but the forecast confirmed what my skin told me: winter is upon us. Hard frosts are here ’til the end of Feb.
It started snowing while I was [...]
Aldo Leopold wrote:
The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.
Explaining that it’s the job [...]