Save the Main-Street Forest

By: | June 27, 2018

The Arbor Day Foundation, which I have supported since I became a taxpayer at age 16, has a wonderful program called Tree City USA. To become a Tree City USA, all you have to do is have a tree board, have some kind of community tree ordinance, spend at least $2 per capita on forestry, and celebrate Arbor Day. It’s a good program and an easy one to join, which is why somewhere around 3,400 communities have done so.

But it turns out that being a Tree City USA, or a Tree City Wherever, is also a much more important distinction than you might realize. Urban trees, at least when there are lots of them, can provide as much carbon storage per hectare as a rainforest. Continue reading →

My Two-Decade Sunglasses

By: | June 26, 2018

I’ve been telling myself for a couple of years now that, when my sunglasses turned 20, they were getting their own blog post. Well, that’s sometime around now–my records aren’t too good, but it was definitely 1998 and almost definitely June–so here you go, cheap sunglasses. Thank you for your service. Let’s make it 20 more. 

I used to think of myself as the kind of person who loses things. I still feel guilty about a windbreaker I lost in 10th grade or so. That's why getting prescription sunglasses always seemed like a bad idea. Sunglasses exist to get lost. I got by without them when I was doing field work during the summers in college. Botanist is in focus. Rocky mountains are fuzzy. If I wanted the mountains not to be fuzzy, I went for the double glasses. So uncool. I did this for years. In June 1998 I saw an ad in the newspaper for cheap prescription sunglasses. I went to the store, tried on the frames - there were only two options - and took the plunge. The saleswoman says "Skikkelig Hollywood!" That means "Totally Hollywood!" I was in Norway. The glasses stuck with me. 1998, Sightseeing in Turkey. 2002, finally learning how to drive. 2009, Bering Sea ice. 2018, walking to CVS. I get compliments on them all the time, including this past weekend. My friend says "Nice sunglasses, Helen!" I say "Thanks!" This time it was in English.So here we are. June of 2018. I've had the lenses swapped a few times but the frames keep going. I guess I was wrong about what kind of person I am.

Art: It’s me. All me.

Egg Drop

By: | June 25, 2018

This weekend my oldest son held two brown eggs in his hand. He cradled them gently. Then he threw one on the ground. It bounced, and he laughed. This one was rubber. The other egg he held was a real one.

I’ve never gotten used to the fake egg. Sometimes it appears in egg cartons. Other times, it’s lonely in the corner of the room. But mostly, it gets thrown. It’s the most realistic I’ve ever seen, the perfect oval, the exact mix of brown and a bit of pink. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | June 23, 2018

June 18-22, 2018

This week, Emma writes an Amazon review of her half-dome tent. That is, a review of how it fares through multiple trips through the Amazon—and everywhere else.

Christie reminds herself to apply the base rate principle the next time she sees an ambiguous animal in her motion-triggered game camera.

Michelle transports us to a Dutch Caribbean synagogue whose floor is covered with sand as a reminder of the days when Spanish and Portuguese Jews had to muffle the sounds of their worship.

Erik’s toddler son has clear taste in women, and he’s not alone—babies are seriously lookist. Given that it’s an innate prejudice, says Erik, all the more reason to outgrow it.

The week ended with Jenny’s incredible true story of how hippos nearly ended up calling the Louisiana wetlands home.

 

Photo: Emma Marris

How Did I Not Know About the Hippo Bill?

By: | June 22, 2018

Louisiana wetlands, as many places, are the inadvertent home to some ecosystem-altering invasive species, like fast-spreading aquatic plants called water hyacinth and giant salvinia. But hippos, no. There aren’t any hippos down there.

Oh, what might have been.

I’m not sure how I didn’t discover this earlier, considering how much I’ve been writing about invasive species of late—things like zebra mussels and sea lamprey in the Great Lakes and snakes on Guam and cheat grass in the American West, to name a diverse few. But miss it I did, until recently. Now I know that some people, partly in the name of invasive-species control, once considered bringing hippopotamuses from Africa to Louisiana and setting them free.

It was the early 20th century and it was going to be a great thing, because hippos would offer a tasty new resource for a meat-hungry and fast-growing nation and, bonus, they’d help control those pesky aquatic greens that were swallowing up swaths of wetland that normally support young fish, ducks, and a lot of other desirable creatures. A win-win.

Continue reading →

Easy on the Eyes

By: | June 21, 2018

A while back I took my toddler for a walk in his stroller to the local café in my old neighborhood. I loved it there because I always felt like a rock star. Everyone would be happy to see me and say nice things to me and want to pinch my cheeks. Okay, so, I guess most of that was aimed at the kid but I was with him and so I was still kinda cool. Like an assistant to a rock star or something.

And like a rock star, he was especially popular with young women. And also like a rock star he can sometimes be kind of a jerk about it.

Take the day in question. Three young women came over and started cooing over him and pinching his cheeks. (This being Mexico, nobody thought to ask me if cheek-pinching was okay. Or really anything.) I smiled and told him to fist bump all the nice ladies, as that’s his preferred greeting. He looked up at the first and punched it out while everyone laughed. Then the second woman offered her fist and he blithely obliged, like he was signing an autograph. But when the third put out her fist, he went back to the first woman with fist outstretch and a blank, expectant look.

“He’s just shy,” I said. Moronically, since he obviously wasn’t. “C’mon buddy, say hi to the nice lady. Chocalas,” which is Spanish for “high five” or “hit it.”

But the kid wasn’t having it. He didn’t like the third woman, he liked the first. I could be wrong but the third woman looked genuinely insulted by my child, which seemed appropriate, considering he was being a jerk. I tried to get him to acknowledge her and realized the harder I tried the weirder the situation got. Mercifully, my order was called and I stuffed a croissant in his fat little fingers before he did anything else to embarrass me. Continue reading →

Silence of the Sands

By: | June 20, 2018

On the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao, near the center of the capital city of Willemstad, stands the oldest continuously active synagogue in the Americas. The chunky, high-ceilinged yellow building, which opened its doors in 1732, was built by a congregation of Spanish and Portuguese Jews that was already almost a century old. Many of its earliest members were conversos, who escaped the Spanish Inquisition by practicing their faith in secret until they were able to emigrate—to the Netherlands, in their case, and then to its Caribbean colonies. Though the island’s Jewish community once numbered more than two thousand, the congregation now has barely two hundred members, with the empty seats at services occasionally filled by cruise-ship tourists.

Continue reading →

The Wolverine That Wasn’t

By: | June 19, 2018

Sorting through photos from our motion-triggered game camera reminds me a lot of field work. For every target animal you’re seeking, you end up looking at a lot of deer. So when I recently discovered a creature that I couldn’t immediately identify in our roll of game cam photos, I was thrilled. Continue reading →