Art Culture Politics
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Park-ing
Did you know the verb parking originally meant setting up strips of park, often with trees, in the center or the edges of roads? Then those trees along the road were roped into being used to tie up horses. The meaning of parking thus changed: it became what you did to your horse. From there…
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BBG Treehouse Razed
It’s evil tidings Tuesday, evidently. Yesterday, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden removed the last of a beloved London Plane tree. Most of the giant old tree had been cut down earlier. Left until yesterday was a viable, hollowed-out stump, continuously, gloriously sprouting at the top. It was known as “the treehouse,” a quirky landmark that quickly…
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Pesticide Terminal
What is the Parks Department thinking here just above the salt-water marsh?According to this, they’re applying Triclopyr by “hand placement” for the control of Cottonwood (Populus deltoides). But if they’re doing it by hand, why don’t they physically weed out the potential trees instead of putting another biocide down? Yeah, Cottonwood is a bear: a…
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Three Books: Paths Not Taken
“One could be an environmentalist, or a social activist, but not both, and the recent rise of environmental justice helps underscore just how little justice has historically meant to environmentalism.” Daegan Miller’s vital This Radical Land: The Natural History of Dissent explores the paths not taken since Henry David Thoreau mixed it all up. Thoreau…
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201 Years Young
Happy birthday, Henry David Thoreau! Here are some delicate yet immensely strong lacewing eggs suspended from swamp milkweed bespangled with aphids. A perfect posy for you! Now, it’s hard not to feel despair as kleptocratic-fundamentalist fascism runs rampant over the land. But don’t let the bastards get you down. They’re counting on our acquiescence and…
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The Big Lie
The headline, one of many examples now, reads “Trump blames rising German crime rate on immigrants.” Yes, that’s what he said, so in that sense that is the “news.” Now his legions of the night will repeat it ad infinitum. But the facts are quite different, as is so often the case with the President…
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Go Forth This Fourth
There have been, on occasion, squawks of outrage in the comments here by people upset that I bring politics into the mix along with pretty pictures of nature. How anyone can separate the two is beyond my understanding. This is the Anthropocene: humans are geosystem engineers on an unprecedented level, transforming the planet as we…
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Olof Rudbeck
Some plates from den svenska ornitologins fader. Olof Rudbeck the Younger (1660-1740), sometimes Latinized as Olaus Rudbeckius junior, is considered the father of Swedish ornithology. He was also one of Linnaeus’s teachers (whence Rudbeckia). While visiting Sverige recently, I was gifted a sumptuous reprint of Rudbeck d.y.’s Svenska fâglar. It’s a wondrous tome; I’m struggling…
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Infamy
Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on a Muslim travel ban was a truly horrible day for our nation. So was the decision to allow continued lying at fake women’s health centers. Kennedy warned of authoritarianism in the latter, but said we’ll have to trust Trump on the former! I know these Republican injustices weren’t put there…
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We Interrupt This Blog
I accidentally launched two blog posts yesterday morning. The times are out of joint. So: here’s a break down of the lies perpetuated by the Republicans about their concentration camps for children. There were more than a dozen contradictory statements by Trump and officials in the last week, including my favorite from the Orange Shitstain…
Backyard and Beyond 