Art Culture Politics
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Some Books
Francis Hallé’s Atlas of Poetic Botany is delightful. It’s a botanist’s record of encounters with remarkable life forms, tropical plants that walk, listen, mimic (like a chameleon, yes), among other things. I hadn’t known that rubber trees were native to the New World. However, they can’t be grown plantation-style in the Amazon because if they’re…
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Sunday Sermon
“Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They’re allowed to take only a knapsack and a little cash with them, and even then, they’re robbed of these possessions on the way. Families are torn apart; men, women, and children are…
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Of Whales and Melville
Herman Melvill was born on this day two hundred years ago on the narrow southern tip of Manhattan. The family added an “e” to the name later. In the grand “Grand Armada” chapter of Moby Dick, which moves from slaughter to tranquility to frenzy, he writes “there is no folly of the beasts of the…
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Wind At The Back
Just next month, a new edition of Lyall Watson’s Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind. The title is iffy and I question its dependence on the Gaia hypothesis for its overarching theme. This seems par for course of Watson, who was a prolific popularizer of science who verged into the paranormal and New…
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Two Degrees
“What happens if one changes a systems’s parameters — the temperature, the weather, the climate? What will collapse and what will endure? Who will live and who will die?” A two-degree rise in global mean temperature, which now sounds optimistically low for the results of global warming this century, may be compared with effects of…
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“As you know, this is not a new issue.”
Recently, I cited this April 1979 report, The Long Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate, from the Jasons to the DOE. That same year saw the publication of Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment, by the Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate. It’s conclusion: “It appears that the warming…
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July 4, 2019
Fox News, the blackjack of Rupert Murdoch’s assault on America, recently stated that the three least “patriotic” states were New Jersey, New York, and California, in that order. Ha! My first thought was: come on New York, we can be number one! The faux patriotism of Fox — with its mendacity, Trump-worship, white nationalism, and…
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Whose Future?
What a filthy week it has been: The bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria in the Rio Grande, who fled the savage violence in their homeland, caused in no small part by the United States’ long and terrible interference there, only to die at the unforgiving “Trump Wall” of white…
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Topography
“Brooklyn with its hills.” “The ample hills of Brooklyn.” The view from the morainal hill. Here’s Whitman again, talking of the borough I’ve lived in for a quarter century. Hills? You ask quizzically if you’ve never walked up Union Street from Carroll Gardens across the Gowanus Canal up to Grand Army Plaza. Whitman was a…
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A Specimen Day
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. Walt Whitman was born this day 200 years ago, “starting from fish-shape Paumanok” or Long Island as…
Backyard and Beyond 