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Wildlife
World Prayer Day
While people all over the world / chanted and prayed for a miracle, / we stood in the woods with binoculars / trained on a pair of bluebirds / flitting from branch to branch, / tiny chests puffed out / in the chill morning air.
December 2020January 2021
Featuring Bill McKibben, Rebecca McClanahan, Derrick Jensen, and more.
December 2020Sunbeams
December 2020Even with all our technological accomplishments and urban sophistication, we consider ourselves blessed, healed in some manner, forgiven, and for a moment transported into some other world, when we catch a passing glimpse of an animal in the wild: a deer in some woodland, a fox crossing a field, a butterfly in its dancing flight southward to its wintering region, a hawk soaring in the distant sky.
Maine Escapes
The deckhand helps where he can. He flips a few lobsters right side up. He tucks a stray antenna away from the pinch of the crate’s hinges. The lobsters, when he holds them, emit a faint buzzing noise — sort of like a scream, if you think about it, and the deckhand does.
November 2020
The Only Real Story
I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant’s way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.
November 2020Sunbeams
November 2020In spite of our rather boastful talk about progress, and our pride in the gadgets of civilization, there is, I think, a growing suspicion — indeed, perhaps an uneasy certainty — that we have been sometimes a little too ingenious for our own good. . . . We are beginning to wonder whether our power to change the face of nature should not have been tempered with wisdom for our own good, and with a greater sense of responsibility for the welfare of generations to come.
Tuvalu
Tuvalu is in danger of disappearing due to sea-level rise. The ocean around it is rising about one inch every five years, twice the global average. It’s estimated that an eight- to sixteen-inch increase will be enough to make the country uninhabitable.
November 2020
If I Were God
If I were God, I would make a world just like this one, where everyone comes raw and naked and dependent into it; where everyone enters bloody between the legs or through the cut belly of a woman; where nothing is for certain and there is so much to learn.
October 2020
Not So Different After All
Frans de Waal On Animal Intelligence And Emotions
With the coronavirus we have another interesting issue: how we eat wildlife. Ecologists and conservationists have been saying for fifty years that we shouldn’t be eating everything on the planet.
July 2020
Digging Up The Roots
In this desecrated area, the women searching for firewood must dig up the roots of the trees they have long since cut down to make space for crops.
July 2020
