A drum found on the edge of the Delaware Bay. Grace God, I know nothing, my sense is all nonsense, And fear of You begins intelligence; Does it end there? For sexual love, for food, For books and birch trees I claim gratitude, But when I grieve over the unripe dead My grief festers, corrupted into dread, And I know nothing. Give us our daily ...

The Science Goddess recently wrote a powerful post pointing out that we're not going to get far with the wolves running the show unless we put on some wolf's clothing. I save that kind of entertainment for Bleeker Street late October. I got snowpeas to harvest, clams to rake. But she makes a good point. What we're doing isn't going to work. If ...

Miners die for our sins. That they get paid reasonably well to do this does not disconnect us from our responsibility to them. Miners' lives are cheap, so coal can remain cheap. Cheap as in dollars. Cheap as in life. We mostly lead cheap lives. If we thought about what we do moment to moment, thought about the consequences to our neighbors, to ...

The back bay's warming up--the quahogs are feeding again. The sun's rays are no longer just glancing off the Earth around here--we're warming up. Algae grow, fusing carbon dioxide and water into sugars, bound by sunlight. A bed of clams lies just under Richardson Sound, a few of them tossed back by my hand last summer, eating the algae. Eating ...

Leslie and I took a walk along the edge of our world, as we do most Saturdays. The tide was out. At the edge of our universe, we witness miracles. Today we saw a 1'' horseshoe crab the color of sand, not quite a yearling, making the universal horseshoe crab tracking pattern. I rescued an older one, at least a decade old, flipped upside down, a ...

We are awash in strings of vague capital letters--and it's easy, so easy, to gloss over them like names in a Russian novel. BPAs, PCBs, PBDEs--yawn.... The PBDEs get the stage this week--flame retardants found in just about everything. Now while I am (mostly) rational, and while I frown on babies in flaming pajamas, seems that the PBDEs designed ...