Totally Freaked
thusspakezuska | May 16, 2010The last week or so I've been reading that classic of naturalist writing, The Outermost House by Henry Beston, as the last of this year's selections for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Book Club.
The book is a delight to read for those who love language - it is essentially one long prose poem. But at the same time, it is sweetly painful, as one takes the measure of all the glory that must have been lost in the time since Beston wrote.
Nothing quite prepared me, however, for encountering the following passage about halfway through the book, in the chapter titled "Winter Visitors".…
thusspakezuska | January 14, 2010I've been reading a lot of Casaubon's Book lately. I usually come away from it feeling like I ought to convince Mr. Z to move back to southwestern PA with me so the two of us can become gentleman farmers and live sustainably after peak oil - maybe we can live out our days in mom's house and garden in the backyard, as my grandfather used to, or buy some nice cheap land out in the countryside in Greene County, and I'll raise chickens, and maybe we'll even have goats, or...
I think FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!!!!!!! we are all so fucking SCREWED!!!!!!!!! Even those crazy ass folks who are moving out…
thusspakezuska | October 15, 2007So, it's Blog Action Day, and we're all supposed to post something related to the environment. Science Woman has a very hopeful post about how "having a daughter has brought the idea of intergenerational responsibility into much sharper focus" for her.
What shall I tell you? I spent a good part of this afternoon clearing out a neglected, overgrown flower bed in the backyard. It was a beautiful day to be out working in the yard, warm and sunny. We're going to be in the low to mid-70s the rest of the week. That's 15 to 20 degrees warmer than average for this time of year.
It was a very…
thusspakezuska | August 9, 2007I read this article in the LA Times about Russians racing to claim the seabed under the Arctic ice as their territory, other nations fussing that it's really theirs, and everybody ignoring that the only way they can even have this argument is because the damn ice is melting away. Only it's even worse than I realized. Because it isn't just the ice melting away.
Now the permafrost is thawing on land and along the seabeds. If it occurs in the presence of oxygen on land, the decomposing of organic matter leads to the production of CO2. If the permafrost thaws along lake shelves, in the…