It has been my privilege for 38 years to walk to work each day through land that belongs to the Natural Resources Trust of Easton. Woods, fields, water meadows, a stream: This gentle countryside has been a source of solace, inspiration and education.
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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
A child’s world is better off wild
My walk back and forth to work each day takes me through land in the care of the Natural Resources Trust of Easton, a delightful landscape of woods, meadows, and streams.
Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash
A necessary evil, a quest for good
In recent days Americans have confronted the problem of evil as never before in our history. Succinctly, the problem can be stated like this: in a universe controlled by an all-powerful, loving god, why do bad things happen to innocent people?
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The new cosmology in tragedy’s wake
All human thought and action is guided by a cosmology, a collectively accepted story for where the world came from and how it works.
Photo by Louis Vest (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Water everywhere — even in space
Years ago, when the big drill rig arrived here to dig our well, the operator jumped out of the cab and marched around with a forked twig, looking for the best place to drill.
Photo by Elisabeth Arnold on Unsplash
Modification part of balanced chain
Plant genetically modified, or GM, crops anywhere in Europe and in a trice you will have a crowd of protesters at your gate waving “Frankenfood” placards and lying down in front of tractors.
NGC 2336 • ESA/Hubble & NASA, V. Antoniou
Even he couldn’t write this script
The noted film director David Lean always felt a bit of a dummy compared to his more academically gifted younger brother.
A tardigrade • Image by Schokraie E, Warnken U, Hotz-Wagenblatt A, Grohme MA, Hengherr S, et al. (CC BY 2.5)
A little reminder of reality’s scale
I have a biologist colleague who knows what a fellow likes. As a retirement gift, she gave me a bottle containing a few ounces of water, some algae, assorted microscopic organisms, and — wonder of wonders! — a few tardigrades.
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo
Will Bobos ever see scientific truth?
Is scientific knowledge true? Or is it just one more made-up story of the world, with no greater claim on truth than any other?
Photo by Wil Stewart on Unsplash
Shedding light on the sky’s secrets
To the untutored eye the sky seems two dimensional — a dome of glittering dots just up there, like the light-flecked ceiling of the terrestrial ballroom. Only now and then, and only to the prepared imagination, does night’s third dimension reveal itself, as during an eclipse of the sun or moon.