Cast Your Ballot for the Planet
“We’re a society of distracted drivers. We’re not paying attention to what matters most.” – Michael Lewis, author (on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Oct. 3, 2018) Lost in the discussion of America’s partisan, gender and...
Category: Sustainable Practices
Cover Crops: A Living Blanket
It’s late September and my garden is literally humming. Whenever I go to harvest vegetables, I hear the pulsing drone of bees, flies and wasps amid buckwheat blossoms. To me, the flowers don’t look...
Going Electric
Not all of us can, like the royal couple at their wedding last May, drive a vintage Jaguar modified to be all-electric. Even most Teslas remain beyond reach. Yet while 1 percent of Americans...
The Quest for Shade
Maine, it appears, is no longer exempt from the warming patterns that made five of the last seven years the hottest on record. Two summers ago, I wrote about staying cool without air conditioning...
Shifting Baselines
“Nature has no hope in the absence of history.” Carl Safina in Shifting Baselines: The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries We face a paradoxical bind, needing simultaneously to look backward and...
Grounded
It’s been seven years since I set foot on a plane. I have not missed flying: not the sock-footed security drill, the shrinking seats or the fumes lingering in lungs and luggage. Now, it...
Pointless Pollution, Maddening Noise
It’s a gorgeous summer morning, fragrant with the scents of lilac and abelia, but my office windows are shut. A swarm of leaf blowers has descended just down the road, generating plumes of dust...
Field-grown Perennials?
Shopping didn’t used to require a glossary. But now there’s a profusion of labels like “pasture butter” and “field-grown perennial” that require translation. Consider the latter term: what portion of the plant’s life is...
