Art Culture Politics
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Pitcher Plant
One of the Sarracenia pitcher plants at NYBG; they’ve at least 7 American species in the Native Garden, though only one, S. purpurea, is native to New York. Something’s blocking the tube here, but this moth still can’t seem to get out. No, this isn’t a metaphor for the times. But, speaking of natives: my people came to…
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Picnic, Lightning
Junk food lives beyond the jaws.God-damned balloons kill and maim animals. Even good environmentalists I know continue to buy these things for their kids. Stop it, already. Your kids don’t want to choke turtles and strangle birds to death, do they?
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Nothing Against Mars Per Se, But Earth First!
The technological cheerleaders, much the same crowd who have facilitated the increase in inequality, diminishment of democracy, and general all-around debasement of society, are awfully excited by prince Elon Musk’s plan to remake human civilization… on Mars. Frankly, it looks as optimistic as a Popular Science cover from the 1970s, but publicity is the key…
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McCarthy on the Roof, With Wildflowers
Tomorrow night, Michael McCarthy will be speaking at Kingsland Wildflower Roof in Greenpoint, right next to the egg-shaped digesters of the sewer facility. McCarthy’s The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy is just out from NYRB. I intend to write further about the book soon, but suffice for now to say that it is a most…
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The Trouble With Tibbles
Tibbles is right up there in the roll of famous cats, along with Hodge, who has a statue in Gough Square; Mrs. Chippy; and Unsinkable Sam, originally Oskar, who abruptly abandoned the Kriegsmarine for the Royal Navy and then proceeded to survive two more ships going down. Tibbles was the pet of Lyall the lighthouse keeper…
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Perception
This is a detail of a volcanic rock I picked up in Iceland a few years ago. Do you see what I see? The chocolate brown portions look like they are above the darker blue-black portions. They look like hills. But they’re actually the subsurface part of the rock, the pits. Twice now I’ve experienced…
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Crane
Rowhouses are damned dark! With windows only on the short ends (and skylights on the top floor), the late 19th century brownstones Park Slope, Brooklyn, make for a gloomy weekend. The one we were recently house-sitting in had some amazing original details, like the door knobs, but boy were they a challenge to photograph in…
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The Nature of the Beast
Last Sunday, I discussed the enemy. Shall we call it capitalism? In his short book Extinction: A Radical History, Ashley Dawson certainly does. “Our economic system is destroying the planetary life support system upon which we depend.” Is this a controversial idea? I don’t think so, but I suppose it will be met with resistance…
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The Real War
The great Bill McKibben is urging us to declare war on climate change, mobilizing like Americans did in the Second World War against the enemy. But is his enemy the right one? We know how stunningly disruptive climate change is, and how much faster it is all happening, and how quickly the bad news piles up. But…
Backyard and Beyond 