Art Culture Politics
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Digestif
I recently reread Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, in a new annotated edition from The Belknap Press of Harvard. This reprints the original 1818 edition, with samples from the 1831 edition, and MWS’s introduction to that later version. In this intro, she tells the famous genesis of the story, reaching back to…
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Election Day.
It’s a pretty clear choice between reaction and moderation today. If you know a nature lover who isn’t planning to vote — like tens of millions of Americans, tragically — perhaps you can convince him or her to go to the polls today? Chances are extremely good that they are not Romney fans. The Romney-Ryan-Rove…
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Trick or Treat Fungus Among Us
Inexplicably, there will be few fungus costumes today, just as in Halloweens past. And that’s a shame. Fascinating, ubiquitous, vitally important in the plant’s interconnected systems, fungi are a high-level rank of life, a kingdom, up there with plants, animals, and bacteria. It’s important to remember that fungi are not plants, or even much like…
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Explorers
Holly Sears‘s art on this Poetry in Motion poster caught me by surprise the other day. These are elephants, but with the series title “Hudson River Explorers” and the sturgeon, I immediately thought of other giants, the mastodons and the mammoths. Those big creatures used to roam North America; Jefferson even charged Lewis and Clark…
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Stamps
I’ve been away from my post here nearly two weeks, during which I barely had any time to get out and about. But I did find this handsome stamp. The tits of GB and Ireland are, ahem, equivalent to our chickadees. Birds do lend themselves to stamp designs. Here are some of the first class…
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No pipeline in Jamaica Bay
There is a petition against the plan to put a natural gas pipeline through Gateway National Recreation Area, with a large metering facility at Floyd Bennett Field. These kinds of things do not belong in a place that was set up, to quote the original Congressional legislation, “to preserve and protect for the use and…
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Geothermal Well
I’d like one of these. At the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s new Visitor Center, “Twenty-eight geothermal wells will heat and cool the building; they will be supplemented by the utility grid only as needed. The building is also nestled into the surrounding hillside, which helps provide insulation.”
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In Maria’s Basement
I’ve mentioned the Maria Mitchell Association on Nantucket in my previous posts without explaining much anything about it. In four decades connection with the island, I’ve been to their observatory, science center, and library many times. A friend of the family wrote the most recent biography. So I naturally assume that everybody knows who Nantucket-born…
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Friends In Need
The city and federal government are teaming up to work on Jamaica Bay together. Note especially this graf: “The new partnership also calls for the creation of a conservancy or friends group dedicated to the bay, to encourage philanthropy. Similar conservancies have helped other large parks in New York City, including Central Park in Manhattan…
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The Grossly Ironic Visitor Center
A post in honor of Le quatorze juillet: One might think that conservation and conservatism have much in common, but not in this country, where conservatism is a perverse amalgam of the defense of privilege, corporate oligarchy, talibany fundamentalism, racism, and misplaced class resentment. A U.S. Congressman, with no public input, is attempting to change…
Backyard and Beyond 