Wild Life
My daughter and I saw a bear in the woods last weekend. We hadn’t expected to see a bear; it was actually wolves we had come to see. We had driven five hours north from our coastal North Carolina home to the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, which, along with the surrounding counties, is the only place left in the world where red wolves roam wild. My daughter is eight and wolf-obsessed and is planning her coming birthday party with a wolf theme, though we have tried to dissuade her from her plan to tell the partygoers that she will be the alpha...
With all due respect to resource depletion, global warming, and over-population, I have come to believe that the greatest environmental threat on the planet is our own minds. They are hungry little fuckers, these brains of ours. “We humans are an elsewhere,” wrote my friend Reg Saner, and boy are we ever. Walk across a college campus these days, as I do every day, and it’s a good bet you...
During the height of the BP oil spill, I wrote -- first in my blog for this magazine and then in my book -- that everywhere I looked I saw an even greater source of energy than oil: self-interest. I described not just the fearful bristling of the BP militia, but the men who had signed on to captain the Vessels of Opportunity (the fine Orwellian term used for the fleet of boats sent out to clean up the spill), and the occasional...
This morning a Carolina wren is sitting deep in a nest made of pine needles above the window inside the writing shack where I am typing this. A hundred feet in front of me a mute swan has built a much larger nest. Meanwhile yesterday I heard (but did not see) a painted bunting, a bird aflame with color that has come back from points south far too early.
“Phenology,” writes Jack Turner, “is the study of the mature naturalist.” And what is phenology...
What is Titan? Well, Titans were mythical figures who were overthrown by the younger Olympian gods.
But Titan is also a cement company that wants to come in from Greece and set up shop in my adopted hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina. It is trying to build a plant on our river (the Cape Fear) that will produce a million or so tons of cement.
The trouble is, the plant will also produce mercury that recent health studies...
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Twenty-one years ago this month, when I was twenty-nine, I learned that I had testicular cancer. As it happened I had recently returned to live in Worcester, Massachusetts, my hometown, and I joked to friends that I didn’t know what was worse, cancer or Worcester.
It was in Worcester that I underwent an operation to remove the malignancy and then endured a month of radiation treatment. And it was in the middle...
How good of New York Times columnist Joe Nocera to let us know that BP has made amends and that all is well in the Gulf of Mexico. Last week the Times printed Nocera’s op-ed "BP Makes Amends," a piece of pure propaganda that makes BP’s cheery commercials look downbeat in comparison.
“The beaches are sparkling,” Nocera says in the piece. I say otherwise in a segment on NPR’s “Here and Now.” You can decide whom you want to believe, but...
I’ve done some environmental equivocating in my most recent posts. Not this week. This week I’m pissed off.
Why? Because I continue to be astounded by the lack of coverage of the consequences of the BP oil spill. Let me be clear about this: Yes, there was coverage galore of the spill itself. (As I mentioned here before, at the spill’s peak CNN was devoting 44 percent of its...
When I agreed to do this blog on a weekly basis, I vowed that it wouldn’t be all rage and grumble. I wanted to mix in a little delight, too, to remember...