Just as the deep snow here had melted to half-gone and I’d broken usable trails through the month-old snowpack remaining, a new storm blew in, dropped another five or six inches, and undid my hope for a winter thaw. Two more storms over the next three days are expected to fluff things up even more. [...]
Saturday night, my husband and I made a last minute run to the only grocery store within 22 miles before it closed at 9 p.m. On the return trip, I drove with the SUV’s highbeams on, because we live on a country road whereon we’re likely to come across animals on the pavement, everything from [...]
I love stories like this.
The “Wow-ee!” response of the scientists involved would make for an interesting study, as well as the “maybe it’s the first example of invertebrate tool use but maybe it isn’t” facet of the story.
Everything is smarter than we think and has the prospect of becoming smarter, including us, if we could [...]
June 2, 2009. I hiked into Crossfire Canyon via Coyote Way. The morning had a warmth to it I didn’t feel while I walked topside through currents of wind blustering north out of some rise of weather. But as I followed the trail down into the canyon the breezes thinned. Then holes formed in them, [...]
Last Saturday I attended a meeting of SE Utah writers that the Utah Arts Council held in Moab. This meeting followed a reading that the Moab Poets and Writers—a group specializing in nature writing—sponsored the night before, a reading in which yours truly participated. It was a pleasant and interesting series of events all around, but something happened during [...]
Saturday, June 13. As I was coming up out of Crossfire I heard voices. Much has happened lately in our small, southeast Utah town, so I was curious about who might be coming into the canyon. I saw a woman on the rocks above me, well off the trail, turning back in response to a [...]
[Greenfrog, aka Sean, is a piquant concoction of Mormonism, Buddhism, and Lawyerism living in the Denver, Colorado area. He describes himself as an amphibious creature who "breathes Mormon air and swims Buddhist waters, both quite happily." I became acquainted with him through his comments on posts at A Motley Vision. Field notes he contributed to some of my posts (see here, and here, scroll [...]
I’ve been thinking about shaming language, rhetoric meant to motivate others to action by attempting to arouse feelings of guilt, unworthiness, or disgrace —how unhealthy it is, not just for people’s psychological well-being but also for the environment. So I thought I’d run a couple of posts about how using guilt to motivate folks to change their behavior toward the earth and its natural [...]
From time to time, someone asks why I don’t write about the meaner, nastier side of nature, especially the predator-prey drama. Until I go on that man-eating African lion-hunting trip or bag me an Alaskan grizzly or happen to be on hand when a puma takes down a mule deer buck, I just don’t have much to offer on [...]
The Ellen Meloy Fund has awarded their grant of $2000 to Amy Irvine, author of Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, to support her work on her upcoming book, Terra Firma. This is the fund’s fourth annual grant.
She competed for this grant last year, too, when the award went to Joe Wilkins.
Since then, [...]