Wild Life
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 suggest could...
Click image to enlarge
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 of that treatment that...
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 total coverage to it.)...
This summer I fired a couple shots across the bow of fellow writer and environmentalist Derrick Jensen. It was bad form no doubt, and in times like these we greenies should all stick together, but there was something about his language, his insistence that we are all doomed (his best-known essay is called "Beyond Hope"), that seemed somewhat hysterical and also seemed to demand that someone -- me -- give him a good shake. This was my shake. And...
I’ve spewed a lot of words in the last few months as I’ve run around the country talking about (and reading from) my new books. When you read something out loud, or just say it out loud, you can get a fairly quick sense of the audience’s reaction. I think it’s fair to say that the biggest reaction I’ve gotten, overall, comes when I read the words spoken by Dan Driscoll, the Boston environmental planner who has spent the last twenty years fighting to green the banks of the Charles River.
I originally wrote about Dan for OnEarth in the article "Riding the Wild Charles," which I expanded into the...
This list of the sexiest nature writers of all time is also posted at the writing blog I share with Bill Roorbach, which we call Bill and Dave's Cocktail Hour. Naturally, we felt it only fair to exclude ourselves from the competition.
NUMBER 10: JOHN MUIR
It wasn't all mountains and trees at Yosemite. (Here's the link to where this photo orginally appeared.)...
Like any sane person, I am fond of dolphins. For the last seven years or so, since I moved south, we have been on neighborly terms. I remember my first New Year’s Day in the South, eight years ago, when I kayaked over to Masonboro Island. Escorted by a squad of pelicans, I paddled across the channel thinking of birds and looking to the sky, until, suddenly, something rose out of the water. A dorsal fin. Then three more, close by. I’d like to say that I reacted immediately with sheer delight at the wonder of nature,...
While I was in Concord last week I took a tour of some writers’ homes, a thrown-together affair that included staring up at Louisa May Alcott’s place, tromping on the hill behind Hawthorne’s, walking Thoreau’s backyard, and, finally, taking the official tour of Emerson’s. That last was remarkable for the fact that I took the tour with just two other people and that one of them looked remarkably familiar. He was tall, with a long prow of a nose that almost perfectly matched the bust in the upstairs landing, and sure enough it turned out he was Ralph Waldo’s great-great grandson.
My home tour continued, less formally, in East Dennis, where I walked out to the bluff that faces Cape Cod Bay, a body of water that is as close as I’ll...
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...