Simplify, Simplify

By: | February 16, 2016

I’ve owned only one copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and I’ve owned it since high school. It’s a 1980 Signet Classic paperback, original price $1.75. Inside the creased front cover, in ballpoint pen, a long-ago student has scrawled, “I want to go to sleep. I’ll never last 1 hr + 20 min reading!”

I wasn’t that student—I swear!—but I could have been. I love Thoreau like I love certain smart, cantankerous elderly relatives: I respect his brilliance, his mischief-making, and his preternatural foresight. I appreciate his sometimes obscure humor. I make allowances for the years between us. But even so, I sometimes have to stifle a yawn. I mean, the guy does go on.

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With the Grain

By: | February 15, 2016

177718874_bfa2b98848_zThere is a blue velour–covered box in my house marked with the face of a pirate and the word “Plunder.” Like any piratical treasure trove, there are golden coins inside. There are also marbles, leftover buttons, and crow feathers. Sometimes, I’m not quite sure what makes some of the things inside the box so valuable. But there are a few small bits of colored glass in there that give me the itchy fingers a pirate might have had when discovering a map with a large X on it and a promise of doubloons.

Sea glass comes from shards of glass—from bottles, from jars, from shipwrecks—that have been tumbled by waves, sanded by stone, and corroded by saltwater. Seeing a piece of glass on the shore feels like a kind of luck. Here’s something that the sea has worked so long to create (it may take 30 years or more). And it’s a journey completed: the glass in my hand was made with silica, the main ingredient of the sand to which it returned, in a different form. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | February 13, 2016

Still life: Bright green lichen on dark brown bark.February 8 – 12, 2016

C’mon, Hollywood, get real, says Erik.  Even a 12-year old can get out of those rope knots, let alone some grownup damsel on the railroad tracks, let alone Indiana Jones.

New era, new climate, so we need some new words.  Michelle makes up some of such quality that they rival “subnivium;” she also wins Title of the Week: Antevernals in the Anthropocene.

Helen’s got the first runner-up for Title of the Week: Part 3 of the 2-part series on urban lichens.  She just couldn’t let her go of her obsession, and now I do find myself looking closely at the neighboring trees.

Heard the claim of that our own immune systems can defeat our own cancers once too often?  This time, says Jenny, it’s got a shot at being true.

Bride and groom plan destination wedding in the Domincan Republic.  Zika virus shows up.  What should bride and groom tell guests?  Bride and groom learn risk analysis.

 

Love in the Time of Zika

By: | February 12, 2016

beachLast fall, Krista Hall and her fiancé decided on a destination wedding in the Dominican Republic. Planning a wedding can be a monumental task. Flowers must be chosen, food ordered, cakes tasted, dresses fitted, vows written, music selected . . . the list goes on and on and on. That’s why Hall hired a wedding planner. A couple of weeks ago, however, a problem arose that is beyond the purview of most wedding planners. On January 23rd, the Dominican Republic reported its first cases of Zika infection. Hall had to think of her own health, of course, but also the health of the seventy or so family and friends she hoped would be there on the big day. Continue reading →

Can We Defend Ourselves Against Brain Tumors?

By: | February 11, 2016

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Eleven years ago this week, my 67-year-old mother died from a brain tumor. It was Glioblastoma multiforme, an insidious fourth-stage cancer that, without treatment, usually kills within three months. Treatment options are miserable for the patient and not terribly effective; for those who opt for surgery and radiation/chemo, the cancer almost always returns within a year or so. We chose hospice care, and my mom died at home two months and 13 days after her diagnosis, voiceless and shrunken, a husk of the woman she’d been. (I’ve posted about her on LWON before.)

The same cancer killed a 49-year-old friend of my husband’s and mine in 2014. This gentle and much beloved man spent his final months beaten down by two surgeries and hopped up on steroids, fighting for access to an experimental drug under the FDA’s compassionate use policy. (He had “flunked out” of the clinical trail for various reasons, but the drug had by that time been formulated for him.) With an inept doctor as his advocate, approval was slow and, by the time permission came to begin the infusions, our friend was already dying. We can’t help but wonder whether the drug might have saved him if administered months earlier.

With all that behind me, whenever I see “brain cancer” or “glioblastoma” in a headline, I can’t help but read on, skimming ahead in search of good news. Sometimes I think maybe, just maybe, researchers are actually going to find a way to wrestle this life-sucking monster to the ground. Continue reading →

Urban Lichens, Part 3 of 2: Lichen Beauty Everywhere

By: | February 10, 2016

Still life: Bright green lichen on dark brown bark.

Ever since I learned that lichen lives in the city, I can’t stop seeing it.

I wrote about lichen two weeks ago in this space—about learning that some lichen thrives in the city and that there are many, many more types of lichen than I’d realized. Since my first phone call with a guy who knew things about lichens, I can’t stop seeing them.

One day in December, as I wrote, I spent more than an hour on the street with my nose to the bark of various trees in the company of lichenologist Manuela Dal Forno. At one point, a teenage girl stopped to ask us what we were doing. Dal Forno explained about lichens, and challenged her to find a tree without lichens.

I’ve been watching the trees ever since. I do sometimes fail to find any lichens, but I think there’s a good chance that I’m just not seeing them. After all, Dal Forno told me that what I thought was bark color on some of the trees was actually just dark brown lichen. The bark was underneath.

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Antevernals in the Anthropocene

By: | February 9, 2016

13877079975_42f67b5671_zOver the past twenty years, naturalist David Lukas has hiked thousands of miles of trails in the Sierra Nevada, most of them accompanied by a slim, sturdy little book called Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms. Lukas likes nature and he likes words, and he especially likes to know the history and meaning of our words about nature, from Abies magnifica to Zzyzx Springs. As he learned Latin and Greek roots on the hoof, he began to wonder how new words, especially new nature words, enter the language. Scientific binomials are approved by international committees, but what about common words? How do they form, and why do they survive?

So began a four-year, mostly self-directed study of the processes of word-making in the English language, resulting in an unusual and delightful book called Language Making Nature: A Handbook for Artists, Writers, and Thinkers. It’s part etymological field guide, part potted history of English, and part how-to manual for creating new words to describe natural places and phenomena. “If the language we use to speak of the natural world is not innovative and engaging,” Lukas asks, “then is it any wonder that few young people get excited about nature?”

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Debunking Hollywood: The Gordian Knot

By: | February 8, 2016

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I’ve often wondered who was the first person to tie a knot. Who was that ancient ancestor 10, 20, 100 thousand years ago who first wrapped a strip of animal skin – or maybe some fibrous vine – around itself and realized that it could hold itself together, even hold a person’s weight.

Or hell, after seeing the incredible skill Nemo the orangutan demonstrated building her own hammock, maybe it was a lot earlier than that. But whoever or whatever it was, they struck on one of the great unsung innovations of our species.  Continue reading →