Category Education

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…