Down to Earth: The Ocean Alongside Us
It’s summer, and with these golden months for many of us come trips to the seaside. As much as I love the Pioneer Valley, one of my regrets in choosing this home is its landlocked geography. Out here in Western Massachusetts, the ocean can feel almost infinitely far away. I miss the swash and leap of waves on white boulders. Breathing in a humid hang of pollen, dust, and soot blown north from New York City, I long for the bracing...
Down to Earth: A tree over the river
I sit on the twisted root system of a great tree, a shelf of exposed roots thrust out over the Connecticut River at the edge of the Northampton Meadows. I’m perched 15 feet above the olive water. The muddy bluff has been licked and sucked away under the tree by years of the river’s lapping tongues. Even now in the calm of early summer, the water bites chunks of greenish sediment from the bank. The roots offer a writing nook of romance...
Down to Earth: Sugaring in a warmer world
In the sugaring room of North Hadley Sugar Shack and Market on a recent Saturday, a trio of young farmers manned the massive wood-fired evaporator slowly boiling off water from maple sap. Mahogany-colored product rushed every couple minutes from the spigot. On a smaller corner woodstove, a kielbasa sausage bubbled for their lunch in a pail of sap. I’d just ordered my breakfast of two eggs, bacon, home fries, and – of course – the...
Down to Earth: The Land Through Native Eyes
Two summers ago, I visited the grasslands of southwestern Brazil. I stayed at a fazenda, a farm property offering lodging for tourists on the side. Our pousada or lodge was especially tiny as these properties go – run by a woman and her partner who had rented space on the farm for their small business. We grew friendly with our hosts over the week. Eventually, Mirjam and Wagner invited us to visit a nascent commune they were creating...
Down To Earth: Artistically collaborating with unicellular slime molds
The other day, wandering the back alleys of social media, I discovered a Facebook group to fall instantly in love with: “Slime Mold Identification & Appreciation.” Joining the group, I was amazed to discover that it boasted 5,422 members (today, it’s cracked 6,000). Go figure, I thought to myself – you can find anything on the internet. I composed a post to my Facebook friends. “Who on earth joins a Facebook page called Slime Mold...
Down to Earth: The Assault on Knowledge
Well, Congressional Republicans have passed the tax bill. The only thing remaining before it becomes law is reconciliation between the House and Senate versions of the bill. I’m not the columnist to describe the full span of ways this bill will hurt the middle class. If you haven’t read about that yet, you should — I recommend a great piece written by historian Robert S. McElvaine in the Washington Post...
Opening the Book of the Earth
What do a public library and the great outdoors have in common? Because I write about nature and the environment, I’ve always made use of library books on nature. But it took me a long time to fully realize how closely and intimately libraries and the environment are linked, and to begin to notice and imagine ways they could be still more closely connected. For one thing, libraries “are the number one reuse machine,” says Forbes...
Down to Earth: Are Maples Next On Climate Change’s Chopping Block?
No living being on this Earth symbolizes my childhood and its joys more clearly than the maple. In my backyard as a child, my favorite climbing tree was a slender sugar maple right at the farthest edge of the back woods. I’d shimmy up the branches and feel the tree hold me like a second mother. My dog, a constant companion to me until I was 15, would settle resignedly at its base to wait for me to come down. The tree would sway...
Down to Earth: The Science Is Clear on Climate Change
During the summer 12 years ago, I interned at Science News, a national magazine that reports on science for the public. As a young and inexperienced writer, part of my reporting included visiting the offices of my more experienced colleagues to ask them what good ideas I might fruitfully pursue. “Write about hurricanes and climate change,” said Janet Raloff, a writer I deeply admire to this day who’s now a Science News editor. “I...
One Good Tern Deserves Another; Saving The Birds One Nest At A Time
One favorable consequence of always carrying binoculars in plain view is that they help create an international citizenry of nature lovers. I’ve just returned from a trip to England visiting family. There, we camped in the chilly, Scotland-like region of northeast England called Northumberland – in Latin, the “North Shadows” – an island-pocked coastline of temperamental weather and steep cliffs wedged between rocky and sandy beaches....
Down to Earth: No, The Car Is Not King
We’re in the middle of a national crisis of public life. The idea that we can make life better by sharing our collective wealth (money and natural resources) and brainpower (science, engineering, literature and the arts) is under threat. In a recent article for Salon, Henry A. Giroux called it “the withering of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life and the erosion of any sense of shared...
Down To Earth: The Valley’s Own Dinosaur Tracker
As we struggle with tough questions surrounding science today, we could do worse than look for guidance to the great figures of the past. One such figure, it turns out, belongs to our own Pioneer Valley, and many argue he’s received too little attention: Edward Hitchcock, geologist, botanist, minister, teacher, and president of Amherst College from 1845 to 1854. I first encountered Hitchcock during a field trip as a geology student...
Investigation: Yes, There Is Lead In Pioneer Valley Schools’ Drinking Water
The very schools we depend on to educate our children could be making them less smart. Drinking water in schools across Massachusetts, including here in the Pioneer Valley, has been found to contain lead significantly exceeding safety standards. Lead exposure, experts say, can cause lower IQ, increased attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and other cognitive problems. Yet many parents don’t realize that a great part of the...
Down to Earth: Trump’s cuts to science are a knife to my heart
We tell stories to know who we are. Speaking our own stories, we rediscover ourselves. And by hearing and identifying with one another’s journeys, we discover and reach each other, too. My world — my story — is one of science. I birdwatch. I teach students how to write about science. As a graduate student, I studied geology — the science of the vast, beautiful, complicated earth — then applied it as an environmental consultant helping...
Down to Earth: The Power of Nurture, the Antidote to Fear
Nurturing. It’s so often a feminine term, bringing thoughts of mothers, sisters, daughters; of Gaia, the Mother Earth. For a synonym, my thesaurus gives me “motherly.” It’s a term linked, too, with gentleness and tenderness, which in turn are associated with deference, docility and mildness. But in the past few weeks, I’ve seen nurturing become an act of strength — an act of resistance and assertiveness. And not just for women. On...
Down to Earth: When Life Gives You Lemon Peels, Make Compost
My first container of compostables was beautiful. Inside a repurposed chipped ceramic crockpot lay a smorgasbord of broccoli stems, wilted lettuce, carrot shreddings, sprouted potatoes, onion skins, outer cabbage leaves, asparagus ends, and tomato stems. It looked almost good enough to eat. My second, I admit, was less pleasing. I’d begun broadening my idea of what’s compostable, throwing in chicken bones and soiled napkins and a...
Down to Earth: Hope, the Environment, and the Election
I sometimes startle people by saying I don’t have much hope for the environment. “But you’re an environmentalist!” they stutter. “Surely, you must think we can prevent nature from being destroyed? That taking action is worth it?” The other day, for instance, I chatted with a friend about the recent election and Donald Trump’s anti-environmental stances, like claiming he’ll disband the Environmental Protection Agency and falsely...
Down to Earth: Is the Valley Prepared for Another Flood?
Just across from one of my favorite writing spots — the window counter at Northampton Coffee — I can see a dark mark on the former lumber building: “Flood Level — 1936.” When I walk past, the mark is almost a foot over my head. After writing, I often hop on my bicycle and cross the levee meant to guard the town from rising waters. As I cycle over it, I ponder the 2005 collapse of New Orleans’ levees during Hurricane Katrina and the...
Down to Earth: A Vote for Clinton is a Vote for the Environment
Our natural environment needs us now, and the stakes have never been so stark. I’ve been frustrated this election season at how little attention the environment has gotten. In the first presidential debate, moderator Lester Holt didn’t ask a single question about environmental issues. Just one was asked in the second debate this Sunday. Maybe that’s because only about half of Americans worry “a great deal” about the environment — down...
Down to Earth: Sustainable Farming 101, Five College farms face challenges teaching the next generation about food
I arrive at Book and Plow Farm to find production farmer Tobin Porter-Brown on a tractor, forking a pallet of canvas sacks off a pickup truck. He’s wearing a Book and Plow shirt, khaki shorts and thick boots that will later serve him in better stead than my sandals when we happen across a stretch of poison ivy. Under a nearby awning, dozens of garlic plants are strung up to dry; red onions sprawl on a plastic sheet. Cultivated flowers...
Down to Earth: Go Ahead, Watch That Cat Video, an animal bill of rights may depend on it
Very little seems more like a frivolous waste of time than watching cute animal videos on Facebook. But the more I’ve watched them, the more I’ve thought there’s something important, something vital even, that we’re communicating through critter videos — a shift in cultural perception necessary to human development and to our time. I can hear you scoffing. Oh, come on. Cute animal videos? Necessary to human development? Give me a...
Down to Earth: Saving Honey Bees, One Person at a Time
I’ve always had a thing for creepy crawlies. I was the kid who caught the wasp stuck in the classroom to let it out the window. And I still crouch to move a worm from the sidewalk into the grass. So, when a colleague of mine, Sara Eddy, started her first beehive, I devoured her Facebook posts about the process. And this spring, I had a chance to visit her and the bees. The hive sat pertly in her Amherst backyard, painted lavender and...
Down to Earth: Fair pay for natural treasures – Coke calls Northampton’s water fee a ‘burden’ all the way to the bank
It’s one of the things we need most for survival, yet take most for granted. We need it to drink, to cook, to bathe, to brush our teeth. Water. We’re blessed to live in a zone of abundant rainfall, and the Mill and Connecticut Rivers pour through the Valley. But even here, clean water isn’t a given. Water for our homes and businesses must be treated, tested, pumped, and disposed of — requiring money and infrastructure. To help pay for...