Art Culture Politics
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Four Sparrow Marsh-opedia
Almost everything you wanted to know about Four Sparrow Marsh, but were afraid to ask: Four Sparrow Marsh is located at the NE intersection of Flatbush and the Shore Parkway (the blue pin). “Four Sparrow Marsh Preserve contains several types of habitats besides salt marsh, including low brush; deciduous forest consisting mainly of cherry, elm,…
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PlanNatureNYC
I hope you don’t need convincing that New York City is full of wildness. And a good thing too, for Thoreau summarized our vital need for the wild when he said that “in wildness is the salvation of the world.” His “wildness” is usually mis-remembered as “wilderness,” but no, he wasn’t talking about the far…
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Some books for the holidays
Ah, the codex! What a marvelous piece of technology the book is: simple, durable, potentially capable of lasting centuries (presuming it’s not a piece of paperback crap), and free from toxic batteries. Books are all I want for the winter festive giving season — I mean, besides peace, love, and understanding. If you know somebody…
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Soiled
“We overcrowd the world. The elements can hardly support us. Our wants increase and our demands are keener, while Nature cannot bear us.” Sound familiar? It sounds like it was stripped from today’s headlines, in the midst of a U.N. conference in Japan (where they’re eating dolphins, whales, and blue fin tuna to death) on…
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Strange Fish
Back in March, I found a perfectly preserved northern pipefish on the coast of Brooklyn. When I found it, I didn’t know what it was, but I thought it looked like a straightened seahorse. It turns out that seahorses and pipefish are related, in the Syngnathidae family along with the seadragons. I’ve never seen a…
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Walking Tour
“To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with fine art works, nine tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. Teach him something of natural history, and you place in his hands a catalogue of those which are worth turning around.”…
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Audubon’s Mammals
While behind the locked doors of the American Museum of Natural History last week, I saw a hidden exhibition of John James Audubon’s mammals. It was an unexpected treat, but too brief. (The exhibit was open to the public between 2007-09 in the renovated Audubon Gallery, but I missed it then.) Nowhere near as famous…
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Trio of Bird Projects
If you don’t hear crows in Brooklyn almost every day, you haven’t been listening carefully enough. This project, Birds of Brooklyn wants you to listen closely, too. Look up at Myrtle & St. Edwards and Myrtle & Carleton for Myrtle Avenue Bird Town. Compared to the butt-ugly highrises recently erected on Myrtle, these bird houses…
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Two Projects of Note
The marvelously named “Friends of The Pleistocene” and Smudge Studio are working on a geological guide to the city’s building materials as a way to show how geological time very much intersects with human time. The work is called Geologic City: A Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York and I’m really looking forward…
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My Thoreau
Reading Henry David Thoreau’s Journal is one of my regular practices. The NYRB condensation of the massive work is my go-to edition: I’ve written about it previously. I find something of value on every page. And, as a whole, this blog, in case you haven’t noticed, has pretensions towards emulating Thoreau’s observations of the world,…
Backyard and Beyond 