Seven a.m. The meadow mists are tinged gold by the rising sun. I cross the plank bridge over Queset Brook, skirt the water meadow, then take the higher path through the old orchard.
Ecology
Photo by Autumn Bradley on Unsplash
The Plimouth Plantation living history museum • Photo by Lindsay E. Durant on Unsplash
From the Pilgrims’ axes, an ethic of squander
Sunlight falls through autumn gold of oaks, maples and hickories, onto a green sub-canopy of sassafras and flowering dogwood, spilling at last onto a sandstone slab, the doorstep of a long-vanished house.
Chilabothrus chrysogaster, one of several species of boa found in the Bahamas • Photo by R. G. Reynolds (Public Domain)
The great exterminator
This is a story about extinction — up close and personal.
Ventry harbour, Ireland • Photo by Tom Raymo
The conflicts in preserving a heritage
Stand at the mountain pass between Dunquin and Ventry on the Dingle Peninsula in the west of Ireland and you can see essentially what young Maurice O’Sullivan saw more than 80 years ago.
Detail from ”Saint Francis in Meditation“ by Caravaggio (ca. 1610)
Who was the real St. Francis?
I watched a truly awful movie the other night. Franco Zeffirelli’s “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” a life of St. Francis of Assisi made in 1973, perhaps the silliest movie ever made by a major director.
Photo by Ivan Dostál on Unsplash
The worst weed of all
Here’s one of the most important philosophical questions of our times: What is a weed?
Photo by Elievan Junior on Unsplash
The technomutants are already here
No, I haven’t seen the new big-budget Stallone movie, Judge Dredd. But when my youngest son was living abroad he acquired a voluminous collection of the British comic 2000 A.D., in which the film’s eponymous hero held violent sway.
Photo by Jared Murray on Unsplash
Headlong toward nowhere
This is the sad saga of an American roadway.
Photo by Nam Anh on Unsplash
The day the elephants had had enough
“Elephants always remember,” Peter Finch says to Elizabeth Taylor in the 1954 film Elephant Walk.
Photo by Rémi Müller on Unsplash
Coming to terms with the front lawn from hell
It’s that time of the year and the crabgrass is waiting.