Forest Gardening: the Basis of a Local Economy of Life
Today, our Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decided 5 to 4 that there’s no limit to the $$ consumers of politicians can spend to buy them. I don’t think the word has been invented that describes our present form...
View ArticleForest Gardening: the Basis of a Local Economy of Life, part 2
Neoliberalism will destroy everything including itself, but that doesn’t mean the human species will become extinct. I write this, prematurely, to the survivors (& please, may our grandkids be...
View ArticleAbout That Little Bit of the Dead Branch Brook In Westhampton That Is Home to...
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of meeting some folks who are interested in learning about the little bit of the Dead Branch Brook in Westhampton that is home to endangered species. Thinking it might be...
View ArticleEarth Day Gift: A Properly Darwinian Religion
Allow me to give you an Earth Day gift I’ve been trying to wrap up ever since I studied under an eminent Thoreau scholar who, in his first lecture, handed it to me—by saying: “For Thoreau, nature was a...
View ArticleWhat to think when your epistemology collapses…
“Epistemology” is a word that describes a system of knowledge and values. Every culture has an epistemology, as we find when we travel internationally and/or compare, say, Holland and Saudi Arabia....
View ArticleDon’t Be Afraid
Alan Lightman, of the physics & creative writing departments at MIT, has published an essay in the NYTs that expresses his fear of “nature” and of dying. It is wonderfully naive, and a perfect...
View Article“Placing” Northampton’s Bridge Street School
from Charles C. Mann’s book, 1491 Town Farm shad bones below Turner’s Falls dam, July 2012 from Charles C. Mann’s book, 1491
View ArticleOn the Issue of “Race”: A Biocitizen’s Perspective
And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to...
View ArticleDeep Biotic Immersion: What it is
Deep biotic immersion is the experience of fully participating in the physical dynamisms of our living planet: or, more simply, it’s a spirit-rebooting experience of being alive. We are always “one...
View ArticleBiocitizen Corps—it’s Rapid Biotic Assessment time!
Biocitizens—it’s rapid biotic assessment time! Which means: time to get into the rivers and collect the bugs that live under rocks. Biocitizen Corps in action on the Dead Branch—collecting benthic...
View ArticleRapid Biotic Assessments 2014
If you know what bugs live in a river, you can gauge its health. IDing river bugs, Mill River below Baystate, Northampton So, every year just as Summer slips into Fall, the Biocitizen Corps ventures...
View ArticleOn the Issue of “Race”: A Biocitizen’s Perspective of the Obama Presidency
In part 1, we learned that there is no scientific basis for “race” and “racism” and, therefore, both are “cultural constructs”—myths invented and used for centuries by European marauders to justify...
View ArticleHolyoke Needs Love: A Public Art Project by Biocitizen, HCC Art Professor...
Aesthetic value is a keystone of environmental philosophy. We love, and take care of, things we find beautiful. Biocitizen and HCC professor John Calhoun have made a commitment to work together for a...
View ArticleAnd Let the Dams Come Down
This month’s Ripple cross-posted from Hilltown Families: Life Will Return to Our Rivers! The challenge we (who value these nonhuman lives) face is to turn the immense powers we have to obstruct life...
View ArticleOur Bodies of Water
From this month’s Ripple: Stories about Western Mass Rivers, cross posted from Hilltown Families Biokids at Holyoke Dam The land is an organism, wrote Aldo Leopold, the Yale-trained game management...
View ArticleThe Importance of River Walking
A note on learning and teaching the wild The wild is contrasted to the cultured, a contrast echoed in the difference between giant hogweed and carrots (both of the family Apiaceae), mountaineers and...
View ArticleRapid Biotic Assessments 2015
The Biocitizen Corps was up to its knees in chilly flowing water again this Fall, catching and inventory the bugs who live in the substrates of our rivers and brooks. River bugs that trout love to eat,...
View ArticleBiocitizen’s comments on the USFWS’s Silvio Conte National Fish & Wildlife...
I do get excited about maps like this one, which shows new areas in Chesterfield and Westhampton the USFWS is proposing for conservation. Here are the comments I sent USFWS, supporting “CCP...
View ArticleThe Life Riparian
The Life Riparian (Cross-posted from Hilltown Families) Riparian is a strange sounding word that denotes “river bank”: the meeting point of river and land. We enter the “riparian zone” when we get...
View ArticleBiocitizen joins the Punta de Lobos Conservation Initiative
Happy! Biocitizen School is teaming with Superfun Chile to run Now Voyager, an 11-day field environmental philosophy (FEP) expedición for college students who want to learn to teach FEP. Departing from...
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