For at least 15,000 years, we residents of planet Earth have been living in a relatively stable and warm world. Before that, five ice ages came and went. “Glaciologically speaking,” the BBC’s online Science page tells us, we are experiencing an “interglacial” age, defined as such because the Arctic, Antarctica, and Greenland still exist – […]
Based on information published by the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), 6.3 million companion animals, mostly dogs and cats, enter US shelters every year. Even more sobering, “Each year, approximately 920,000 shelter animals are euthanized (390,000 dogs and 530,000 cats).” These unsettling […]
Reading Frances Palmer’s brilliant Life in the Studio, published in 2020, was for me three parts exhilaration, one part exhaustion. The good kind. It may look like a modestly sized, more-of-same coffee table book, but it emphatically is not. It is a treatise creativity and inspiration as the subtitle announces, a manual on technique, a […]
Anyone who visits Millbrook, NY, will likely notice a series of panels mounted on posts that bring them to a comfortable reading level. Once noticed, they do seem to mushroom. In fact, there are 29 in all, three of which are most accessible by car; otherwise the […]
There is something poetic, almost lyrical about compost, I’ve decided. True, most of the compost-conscious world focuses on prosaic matters like the ratio of nitrogen to carbon, feedstocks, and NYS DEC 360 permits. It elevates creatures that I’m guessing are voracious, called detritivores, and their taste for rotting food to levels that imply they are […]
When coffee beans are picked from the stems of plants and removed from their protective coverings, they are green, tasting something like grass if they have any taste at all, and fibrous. The two species that dominate the coffee market, Arabica (coffea arabica) and Robusta (coffea canephora) did not rise to the top in their […]