Other
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Where the buffalo roam
From an old school spring-rolled wall map that looked like it dated to the mid-1960s, seen in a loft on Washington Avenue in Wallabout on the Clinton Hill House Tour this past Sunday. The American buffalo, actually a bison, once did roam in the eastern woodlands, along with their megafauna cousins.
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Phylloxera
As a miniscule part of the complex life-system of the planet, I understand that everything comes back to the nature that surrounds me and is me. Most of the invasive species that have crossed the oceans have come from Eurasia. The Americas, long separated from the planet’s largest continent, were sitting ducks for viruses, bacteria,…
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Save the dates
May 1 The Listening Tour. I will be leading a Proteus Gowanus event on May Day at 6:00 a.m., as part of the interdisciplinary gallery and reading room’s Paradise exhibition. We will meet at the Grand Army Plaza entrance to Prospect Park. Then we’ll SILENTLY walk through Prospect Park at the crack of dawn to…
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Coney Island’s Endemic Species
You have to be a certain age to remember when Coney Island Whitefish teemed off of Brooklyn’s shores in such massive schools that beach-goers wouldn’t dare go into the water. Today, however, they’re a rare sight. Although sometimes mistaken for the pallid Manhattan eel (Mentula brevus), the Coney Island Whitefish is a unique species. Sitts coneius…
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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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Natural Object: Paleontological Find
Brooklyn, which is located at the mouth of what Walt Whitman called “fish-shaped Paumanok,” using a Native American word for what we now call Long Island, is, geologically speaking, loosey-goosey. We are sitting on glacial till, the rubble (sands, clays, gravels, erratics, etc.) pushed down here during the Pleistocene by the ice. (There was…
Backyard and Beyond 