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Pascommuck = “bend of the river”
Pascommuck means “bend of the river”
Category: Director’s Notes
Food plants that grow like weeds: Tatsoi
By Kurt Heidinger on Nov 29, 2011 in Director's Notes, aesthetics, deep biotic immersion, ecology, economy, food weeds, imagination, sustainability
AH here we are again, thinking about free food! Take a moment and imagine a world where, if you’re hungry, you go and gather food that is growing conveniently around you—and you eat. Imagine sowing seeds next spring that grow weeds that produce food, plants that self-propagate, that are tough enough to endure the round [...]
Report: Obama “changed more than 80%” of EPA rules for the worse
By Kurt Heidinger on Nov 29, 2011 in Director's Notes, citizenship, consumerism, ecology, economy, evolution, sustainability, time
If you’ve been following the news, you know that global warming is no longer considered a hoax. Even if you haven’t been following the news, you can’t help but notice that our trees are being splintered by vicious and bizarre weather: the Halloween blizzard, the August hurricane, the June tornadoes, the weeks of rain followed [...]
Food plants that grow like weeds: mustard
By Kurt Heidinger on Nov 20, 2011 in Director's Notes, ecology, food weeds, locavore, permaculture, sustainability
Welcome to our new series, just in time for the holidays! Since imagination is key to our survival (it allows us to step outside fixed ways of viewing things, and thereby prepares us to evolve beyond our present condition) let’s imagine taking Johnny Appleseed one step further. Think of the wild raspberry bush, and how [...]
“All ideas come from sensation or reflection.”
“All ideas come from sensation or reflection.” John Locke
Walmart Heir “owns” a Transcendental Masterpiece
By Kurt Heidinger on Nov 08, 2011 in Director's Notes, beauty, citizenship, consumerism, ecology, economy, endosymbiosis, sustainability, time
The “ninth richest person in the world,” Walmart heir Alice Walton has tons of $$$ to consume conspicuously; and one of her prize possessions is the painting we are using in our Transcendentalist Club flyers to show how local heroes William Cullen Bryant and Thomas Cole were our nation’s premier tree-huggers. The AP reports: One [...]
Biocitizen Corps
We are starting a youth group called the Biocitizen Corps that will meet once a month to do good deeds. Faced with severe funding cut-backs, the EPA and its agencies on the state level are unable to handle the multiple tasks that need to be performed. Our Rapid Biotic Assessment river monitoring program is one [...]
Streambed Godzilla: the giant stonefly
By Kurt Heidinger on Oct 20, 2011 in Director's Notes, beauty, citizenship, deep biotic immersion, ecology, sustainability, time
We’re finding that this summer’s floods—caused by the 2nd highest rainfall since records have been kept (h/t Gazette)—have reduced the populations of large benthic macroinvertebrates (water bugs). It came as joyous surprise, then, to find this streambed godzilla, a giant stonefly: We are supposed to kill the bugs we collect (in alcohol) so that we [...]
As you’d expect, Irene drastically altered local river ecology
By Kurt Heidinger on Oct 14, 2011 in Director's Notes, citizenship, deep biotic immersion, ecology, endosymbiosis, sustainability, time
On Weds. afternoon, we teamed with Hilltown Families to do our annual rapid biotic assessment of the Westfield River downstream of the Rt. 143 bridge in W. Chesterfield. Thank you volunteer citizen scientists! Before we began, our hosts Sienna, Jim and Persephone described how scarily high the river rose after Irene. Not only did beautiful [...]
Westfield RBA on Weds!
By Kurt Heidinger on Oct 10, 2011 in Director's Notes, beauty, citizenship, deep biotic immersion, ecology, endosymbiosis, evolution, sustainability, time
We’ll be doing a Rapid Biotic Assessment on the Westfield River with Hilltown Families on Weds. See Sienna Wildfield’s Hilltown Families blog for the details. (Thanks HF)! Today, we did the Upper North Branch of the Manhan River in Westhampton. After our 5th kick (scrambling up the bottom to dislodge toebiters), we noticed how scoured [...]
