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Audio Slideshow: Water's Edge
Diane Cook and Len Jenshel are used to going where few people have gone before, photographing everything from glaciers to volcanic hot spots. But for this project, the husband-and-wife team stayed local, photographing the city where they live in a way that few have ever seen it. Hear them discuss their stunning images of the New York City waterfront.
Read author Robert Sullivan's essay about their photos from the Spring 2010 issue of OnEarth.
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Subways Go Submarine: New York City Trains Get New Life as Artificial Reefs
It might look like an environmental nightmare: Dumping old subway cars off a barge to rust away at the bottom of the ocean. But New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority says its artificial reef program creates marine ecosystems where none existed before -- and provides a useful retirement for its aging fleet.
The program has been met with skepticism from some marine biologists and conservationists, who see it as a way for the MTA to dump its old cars while saving millions in disposal costs. But at least some environmental groups have come around to the program as states gather evidence that the subway trains are bringing new life to otherwise barren stretches of the Eastern seaboard.
Sunk alongside decommissioned ships and other large objects along the East Coast, the old subway cars provide hard surfaces for marine organisms to grow on. The sponges, corals and other invertebrates that quickly colonize the man-made debris attract crustaceans and small fish. These smaller...
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Poet Kimiko Hahn on the Voyage Home
Listen above or download. Running time: 6 minutes, 8 seconds.
Poet Kimiko Hahn recites her poem "Bumblebees" and talks with Zachary Sussman about her fascination with insects and the difference between quiescence, acquiescence, and simple stupidity.
Bumblebees
The foraging bee that doesn't make it
back to the hiveand companion warmth
fastens to a leaf.Bumbling-bees?
Or does the nectar so distract
it forgets the cells
called home?The lapse is a cause for concern
the entomologist reports --because its tiny body slows to the stillness of dew.
Is that quiescenceor acquiescence?
Or simple stupidity
one always forgets a day later? -
The Frog with Fifteen Legs: Artist Brandon Ballengée on the Amphibian Crisis
Listen above or download. Running time: 6 minutes, 39 seconds.
Environmental artist Brandon Ballengée talks with Emily Voigt about the sensitivity of amphibians, a global rise in deformed frogs, and his attempt to breed back an extinct strain of African toad.
"DFA 83, Karkinos"
Scanner Photograph of Cleared and Stained Multi-limbed Pacific Tree frog from Aptos, California in Scientific Collaboration with Dr. Stanley K. Sessions. MALAMP titles in collaboration with the poet KuyDelair.
H 47.5 inches x W 35.5 inches
Unique print on watercolor paper 2001/07
Courtesy the Artist and Archibald Arts, NYCMore Info
» Watch Brandon Ballengée at work in a wetland environment -
Green Beyond the Grave
Listen above or download. Running time: 6 minutes, 25 seconds.
Joe Sehee, the executive director of the Green Burial Council, talks with Emily Voigt about conscientious decomposition.
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The Coal Ash Disaster: A Voice from the Ground
Listen above or download. Running time: 6 minutes, 32 seconds.
Matt Landon, a volunteer with United Mountain Defense, talks with Emily Voigt about the magnitude of the coal ash disaster at the Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in Kingston, Tennessee.
Related:
» Read Matt Landon's "Kingston Coal Disaster Diary" on Greenlight, OnEarth's citizen journalism blog -
Lessons of the Buffalo: Author Steven Rinella on a Hunter's Conservation Ethic
Listen above or download. Running time: 6 minutes, 26 seconds.
The author Steven Rinella talks with Emily Voigt about his book "American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon," the tragic history of North America's largest land mammal, and his personal quest to hunt one in the wilds of Alaska.
More info
» Read review of Steven Rinella's "American Buffalo," from OnEarth's Winter 2009 issue -
Poet David Wagoner on the Wilderness Inside Us
Listen above or download. Running time: 7 minutes, 44 seconds.
Poet David Wagoner recites his poems, "Letting the Grass Grow Under Your Feet" and "By A Pond," and talks with Zachary Sussman about finding belonging in a landscape and letting go of anger over environmental ills.
Letting the Grass Grow Under Your Feet
It would rather not
but of course it will.
If you've tried standing on it
long enough, those blades
will insist on a way out
from under and up at last
into the light. You don't
have to let it do that
because it will. No matter how
stubbornly or heavily you bear down,
something inside its cells
doesn't believe in you
and your latent energy,
your postponements of action,
your useless indecision. It will grow
sideways and turn yellow or under pressure
nearly white. It will turn
to an almost all uprooted root for a while,... -
City Girl in the Country: A Conversation with Poet Roberta Swann
Listen above or download. Running time: 10 minutes, 47 seconds.
Poet Roberta Swann reads her poem, “Looking Back,” and talks with Zachary Sussman about weekend naturalists, fashionable insects, and what one may see in a fly's hundred eyes.
Looking Back
You can take a city girl to the country,
and get her to get on with worms,
a plague of caterpillars even,
this year's ladybugs--who doesn't like a ladybug?
But heaps, everywhere?Back on the deck, breaking in another bikini,
she sunbathes, watching hummingbirds chase one another
from the feeder, until a chickadee runs them both
out of town--tourists anyway.He's off
planting heirlooms, while crows hang in pines,
waiting for action. Everything is la di da, until
a neighbor starts shooting off guns and firecrackers.
And flies arrive. Slap. Spray. Pray. Plead. Read labels.
Realize repel and discourage are code for: Good Luck!The only way out is in. So s...
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Thousand Mile Song: Further Adventures in Interspecies Jazz
Listen above or download. Running time: 6 minutes, 10 seconds.
Interspecies musician David Rothenberg talks with Emily Voigt about his book "Thousand Mile Song" and the challenges of playing jazz with whales.
Related
» Read review of David Rothenberg's "Thousand Mile Song," from OnEarth's Summer 2008 issue.
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