Holding the Heat
Winter’s descent returns us to a primordial quest, trying to hold heat – that eternal escape artist – within our homes. In Maine, nearly two-thirds of households depend on heating oil, more than in...
Category: Climate Change/Energy
Buried Treasure: Taking Farm Sustainability to a New Level
“We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot,” Leonardo da Vinci is said to have observed roughly five centuries ago. Sadly, that statement still holds, according to geologist...
Reshaping the Energy Landscape for Resilience
During Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Hoboken, New Jersey “literally became an island,” recalled its mayor at the time, Dawn Zimmer, during a recent talk she gave in Maine. The city was 80 percent submerged,...
Maine in 2040: Can You Imagine It?
Instead of relying solely on models and charts, what if we tried to visualize just how different our lives might be in a climate-altered Maine two decades hence? What follows is an imaginative portrait...
Speaking of Climate
“It’s not climate change – it’s everything change.” – Margaret Atwood, Canadian novelist and poet, in a 2015 essay Rapid. Far-reaching. Unprecedented. When international scientists wrote last fall in a U.N. report of the...
Facing a Reckoning
Ironies, like onions, come in layers and can make you cry. As I stared at a graphic showing an outline of Maine symbolically shifting down the East Coast (see bottom figure), I had an...
Taking a Bird’s-eye View
On Mother’s Day, I received a surprise gift. In the peach tree just outside our kitchen, an eastern bluebird and Baltimore oriole alighted simultaneously. It was approaching dusk, and the departing sun lit up...
‘We Want a Future’
A raw north wind and showers did not keep several hundred students from gathering at the Maine Youth Day of Action rally on Tuesday, standing resolutely outside the Statehouse with handmade signs and voicing...
