An Abstemious Home

By: | June 21, 2012

A Northern engineer once wrote that if you want to build a house in the Arctic, place a window overlooking every direction from which a bear might come and a door on the opposite side. Architecture, due to the immovable nature of its products, should be one of the most locally-attuned disciplines in the professional world. A glance around Fairbanks and Anchorage, however, turns up Ranch-style homes with sliding glass patio walls, New England salt box houses and even colonnaded Southern Colonial mansions.

A change in this thinking becomes pressing long before our energy use is forced to drop — climate change is already melting the permafrost that underlies many of the existing structures — especially those in the taiga where it only takes a couple of degrees to tip the balance toward melting ground.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Reinventing the Wheel

By: | June 20, 2012

I recently visited MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics (RLE) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I heard there was a scientist there, Dr. Yoel Fink, who could make the fibers in our clothing see and hear.  Dr. Fink, the director of RLE, said he had looked down at his clothes one day and wondered, “Why, when everything around us is advancing so rapidly, has clothing lingered behind?”

It was a good question. Continue reading →

To hell with grass

By: | June 19, 2012

TwoGirlsGreenGrass 500x333This is a discussion about an uncomfortable subject—an emotion that everyone has felt, but no one wants to admit. Envy—it’s a four letter word. In the rare instances when we talk about it, we do so in whispers amongst our closest confidants. Mostly, we insist it doesn’t exist, because we don’t like what it says about us–that we’re all savages inside. I’d always felt squeamish about acknowledging my green-eyed monster, until a chance encounter with a renowned poet gave me a new perspective.

The first thing you need to know about Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is that she’s drop-dead gorgeous, articulate, and engaging. Her warmth and grace fill any room and make her irresistibly likable. I met her for the first time at a writing workshop in Telluride five years ago where she greeted me by exclaiming, “Oh Christie Aschwanden, it’s so nice to finally meet you! I wrote a poem about you.”

Before I could react, she began reciting the poem from memory. Continue reading →

Galápagos Monday: Lynn’s Tortoises

By: | June 18, 2012
Ginny meets a tortoise

Every Monday for the next six weeks I’ll be posting about my recent trip to the Galápagos. After a week on a big boat, hopping from one imposing volcanic island to the next, I saw most of the odd creatures that Charles Darwin famously wrote about: century-old tortoises, finches with beaks of all sizes, swimming iguanas. But most of what I learned was new to me — like how the Ecuadorian government hired expert hunters from New Zealand to shoot down thousands of goats by helicopter, or how, in 1954, a massive geological uplift almost instantaneously raised one island’s coast 15 feet, taking with it mounds of coral that have since blackened with dust. Many of the stories converge on what’s, for me, a perplexing theme: that people can be sources of both ecological destruction and impressive restoration. As the climate changes, and population and tourism rates continue to skyrocket, it will be fascinating to see how the economic-political-scientific ecosystem of the Galápagos evolves.

I kick off the series (below, after the jump) with a story about one of my naturalist-guides, Lynn, who has lived on the islands since 1978.

*
Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | June 16, 2012

June 10 – June 15

This week we celebrated Father’s Day, and because LWON has too many ladies and not enough mens, we brought in some hired muscle to create some menspace.

Assuming the role of temporary dude, I started the week wondering about the generational echoes of missing fathers.

Guest poster Greg Hanscom showed us how to be the kind of dad, with the kind of friends, who can raise kids who know how to learn from the snow and the silence and the big open spaces.

Our second guest poster Adam Hinterthuer despaired at the task of making a pink princess punk.

Tom wondered why dads get no respect from children’s books, subtly slipped in the news that he’s going to be a father again, and thought we wouldn’t notice. (We noticed.)

And Richard ended the week with a gorgeous meditation about his father that explained why he was older than the (known) universe. Take this into your weekend: if you died in 1914, your knowledge of the universe was roughly on par with a caveman’s. If you managed to time your birth to coincide with the latter half of the 20th century, you were one of the lucky few humans who can begin to comprehend the geography of the universe.

See you Monday.

Fatherhood: From Here to Eternity

By: | June 15, 2012

“My father,” I would say, “is older than the universe.”

The line has always gotten laughs. It comes at a point in my public talks when I want to convey how comically recent is our current understanding of the universe—so recent that people who were present at the creation still walk among us. I’ve never thought my father would care that I was making a joke at his expense, sort of; I’ve always suspected, instead, that he would thrill to the association. The universe was one of his favorite things.

Continue reading →

The Mystery of the (Not) Missing Fathers

By: | June 14, 2012

There’s a song we all like to sing along to at our house. “Popcorn” by the Barenaked Ladies is uptempo, wistful, and propelled towards an explosive crescendo by an onomatopoetic beat. There’s much to love, in other words, but I always get tripped up a little by the first line of the lyric:

 

Mama put the popcorn kernels in the pot

She turned up the heat

Now the pot is getting hot

 

It’s clear, evocative, and seemingly innocent — for a lie. You see, in our house, I’m the popcorn person. Always have been, long before the idea of kids ever came into it, and will be until the kids ship me off to a no-popping-allowed home. But in kids’ songs and books, it’s always Mama this, Mama that. Spend as much time immersed in preschool arts and letters as I have since our son was born two years ago, and you’ll find yourself asking as I do: Why doesn’t Daddy ever get to put the kernels in the pot? Continue reading →

Fatherhood: Trying to Raise a Tomboy Princess

By: | June 13, 2012

A while back, I was giving my three-year-old daughter, Brynn, a bath when she laid back in the tub and announced, “Look, Daddy, I’m a princess!”

When I asked what that meant, she replied that it was her job to just lounge around until some prince (any prince would do) came along to save her. I suggested she could save herself. Brynn just laughed. She was three and, already, Daddy didn’t get it.

“Crap,” I thought, “She’s three and, already, I’ve failed as a father.”

A future of body image issues and unhealthily dependent relationships and an insanely expensive wedding unspooled in my mind.

Like many of our parental peers here in Madison, we actively policed all gender-specific apparel, entertainment and play for the first year or so of our first-born’s life. Then we’d watched, astonished, as our children became little toddling clichés anyway. Every two-year old boy we knew turned sticks into guns and spent their days literally laughing in the face of death – falling off of ledges, crashing down hills. Each little girl developed an unsettling attraction to the color pink and games that involved rote domestic drudgery – grocery shopping, cooking, shoving dolls around in strollers. Continue reading →