This Month’s Featured Articles…

The year was 2005, President George W. Bush had begun his second term in office that January. The US’ 11th Circuit Court of Appeals refused – by a vote of 2-1 – to stop the euthanasia of Terri Schiavo, who had been in a vegetative state since 1990, by not ordering the reinsertion of her feeding tube. And the concept of entire websites dedicated to internet videos was born in February when YouTube first went online. By April of that year, across the Hudson Valley, [...]

I love my transfer station, and I’m not the only one. There is something cathartic and freeing about dropping off one’s refuse at a site distant from one’s own house, but not too distant. Most of my life, I lived in places with trash pickup, where the handoff of garbage took place at the end of the driveway and involved nothing more than wheeling a barrel down to the curb on Sunday night. Pretty thoughtless, really. A transfer station recasts that process as a sort [...]

You fell for it, didn’t you? You saw that banner of adorable, impossibly fluffy puppies, and you couldn’t help but read on. Coupled with an enticing title and some nifty rhetoric, you’re now drawn into an article about an animal only a mother could love. “What’s that?” you’re probably wondering, but let’s dwell on the puppies a little longer, because they’re cute. How did that picture work on us? In short, we are hard-wired suckers. According to Natalie Angier of The New York Times, “scientists [...]

Humans have been intertwined with the life cycle of bees for at least 10,000 years. From the interior of Africa, where the very first recorded beekeeping techniques came via pottery containers, to the walls of Egyptian tombs where human and bee interactions are depicted in ancient forms of Egyptian art, humans and bees have been inextricably woven together throughout the vast honeycomb of history for reasons of survival, sustenance, and most recently – economics. Since the introduction of the movable comb hive in the eighteenth [...]

Farming is part of the fabric of the northwest corner of Connecticut, so it’s not surprising that Englishman Dr. James Shepherd and his wife, California-native Katherine (known as “Shrevie”) chose this area to put down roots and fulfill their dream of owning and operating a farm. After eight years in Botswana and Nigeria with James’s work with the Center for Disease Control in the areas of HIV and TB and Shrevie’s as a grants officer for the US State Department, they moved back to the [...]