Mushrooming is more than a passion. It’s an obsession, and after two poor seasons in a row, we are finally experiencing some fungus among us in Colorado. Which means that it has become very difficult for me to go hiking or running or biking, because as soon as my mushroom eyes catch glimpse of a […]
Month: July 2021
The first thing I learned about Seattle is that there are entire hillsides held up by blackberries.
Early on in the pandemic, a few days before Switzerland’s first lockdown, participants in an international colloquium arrived in Basel and immediately started to flounder as they tried to navigate new norms for social interaction: “Hey,” said one conference-goer to another, waving. “Are you doing the elbow thing? Or are you doing the other thing?” […]
Canada’s politics are stable enough that I can afford to be, more or less, a single-issue voter. Six years ago, I wrote to the incoming member of parliament for my riding – a candidate for whom I did not vote. “Dear Ms. McKenna: Congratulations on your new position as our Member of Parliament. My parents […]
Earlier this month, I was walking along the beach in an sunrise fog when I saw a perfect sand dollar on the sand. I held it in my palm for a moment, debating: would I crush it between here and home? By taking it off the beach, would I bring some other misfortune, to someone […]
Earlier this summer I went on a bee hunt. I’m talking about native bees, not honeybees. In the words of Sam Droege, the guy leading the bee hunt, “If your model of ‘bee’ is the honeybee, you need to forget nearly everything you know about bees.” Droege works at the USGS Native Bee Inventory and […]
On the roadside the ground squirrel snacked The remains of a lunch, he attacked Now he’s developed a taste For anthropogenic food waste Beware, lest you be rodent carjacked.
I have some unfinished business with an article I wrote. It was about grief, and it got a lot of questions and comments and though I’ve answered some already, I need to answer one more. The answer turns out to need a science metaphor. Science, which goes about its orderly business of sorting out the […]