Audubon’s Crow
If you have an interest in birds and art and writing and natural history in general, bookmark John J. Audubon’s Birds of America. He did not only seek out (and shoot) and paint a vast number of American birds. He also…
Category Education
THE LAST STRAW of ONE Lifetime
I pledge: to never again use a new plastic straw. I made that commitment–regrettably and only after decades of knowing about the Great Garbage Patch in the Sargasso Sea, and since, about the other floating islands the size of Texas…
Water Matters: Kids Care
I suppose I have been conditioned to expect disappointment when facing the recently-uncommon opportunity to speak to college-aged students. On more than one occasion, the apathy and disrespect of classes at “real colleges” has left me saddened and discouraged, knowing…
Water: the Medium of Life
When we explore other planets and wonder if life could have existed there, it is not carbon or silicon or even amino acids we look for at first. We look for water. Without it, so far as we know, life…
Toxic Economic Assumptions Drive Climate Chaos
You and I can replace our light bulbs and shop local and recycle and reuse and even conserve energy and natural resources like a champ. But if we don’t change the drivers that churn Earth matter into profit as fast…
SustainFloyd Offers the Personal Climate Pledge
SustainFloyd’s Personal Climate Pledge asks YOU to be intentional about what you eat, drive, wear and throw away. I post it here for the couple of Fragments readers who might stop by. Some of you have seen/heard this on Facebook…
Take It to the Limit One More Time
Planet Earth has always operated within limits–almost like an organism. But too there have been “accidents” that overwhelmed natural processes and created eons of disorder. Runaway climate shifts of the past carried the land or sea beyond a state where…
On Not Killing Our Environmental Puppies
Yesterday, your neighbor’s yellow lab gave birth to a litter of puppies. Today, the owner has made up his mind to do one of the following: to turn them outdoors to fend for themselves in the heat and take their…
Yuccas Every Year
They threatened to take over parts of our bit of flat land here in the cleft of the east escarpment that drains Floyd County to the west and north into the Roanoke River. Ann loathes yuccas for their tenaciousness on…
What’s a Forest For?
Part Two of a four-part series on Forests’ Future, published in Floyd Press starting March 30. What goes missing when a clearcut takes everything away from our ridges, slopes or valleys? Extensive and prolonged logging so close to home was…
Flights of Fancy
We will, overriding our former determination to never again leave the ground, fly off in the not too distant future, to a somewhat far-off landscape that is not the mountains. I will have  window -seat neck pain, of course, and this time,…
Sense of Presence: Earth Places
I am one of those former young adult dreamers about far-away places that feels like a dream has come true. It is called Google Maps/Google Earth. It can take me any where, any time. And when (increasingly often) I need…
Where the Rivers Go
I won’t wax poetic with my own AHA realizations from the maps depicted on this page. There was a time when I would have, so count yourselves lucky. Images by  Hungarian cartographer Robert Szucs, depicted at: These may be the prettiest…
Faceless Nature: a Familiar Lament
Some Fragments readers might have read my Facebook post last week, where I expressed no surprise but disappointment that a nature hike was offered at the County Fair, and response was predictably underwhelming. Some might have thought I was whining…