Once again, I’m taking the easy way out. I’m happy to share–need to, even–lest I finally accept the eddys are good enough and just hush. So nothing fancy. No eye candy. Just the facts, m’am. Not surprisingly, it is the…
Last night at the Floyd Country Store (and more at a new venue perhaps next year) we viewed the 38th movie in six and a half years of this SustainFloyd program of information-sharing (not to mention Pot Luck Suppers). Some…
There are some things about surface waters that are always true: They only flows downhill. Gravity decides the course. They cut through soft rock faster than harder rock. They carry with them what they flow through: soil, sand, pig poop,…
…Brazil has elected a new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who favors abolishing protected indigenous lands. He has promised to scale back enforcement of environmental laws, calling them an impediment to economic growth, and has made his intentions for the Amazon…
No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory…
…or a liberal hoax after all. Granted, human memory can be a leaky sieve and the tendency to make things markedly WORSE or BETTER “when I was a boy” is pretty common. But here is a way to put facts…
Where are we headed in the love-hate relationship of HumanKind with Nature (that is: the biotic and abiotic parts of the only planet we have from which all our resources are drawn)? Â It can’t be much farther in the…
Labor Day for many marks (or used to mark) the end of summer and the return of the kids to school. By that time, Floyd County students will have been in sweltering classrooms for almost a month. But that is…
I recently had the opportunity to ask one of the most knowledgeable botanists I know as many pertinent questions out of my confused and confusing plants folder as I could tastefully work into the conversation. “Have you run across Giant…
Neither of these words in the title are likely too familiar, and less so in these parts the tree that sometimes goes by that common name. Balm of course is a soothing ointment, and Gilead is in Israel. There is…
They look awful, and seem to threaten the forest with ultimate consumption–the fall web worms whose unsightly tents of silk tatter the margins of roadways and fields in autumn. What many people don’t realize is that, in the end, the…
I am reading the NYT special called “Losing Earth. The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.” If you want a video summary, here is an interview with the author, Nathaniel Rich, on Democracy Now. It portrays the choices we once…
The intricate design of the Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia) was a marvel for me in 1970 when I was a student on a field trip to the Smokies from Auburn University. Systematic Botany was a wake-up call to a budding…
As if I knew this beauty–or even did the work to key it out for myself. I’d never seen it, and failing in a five-minute scroll of Google and Bing images of North American caterpillars, I resorted to a kind…