As a newcomer to the Roanoke Valley, I will not be convinced that winter is finally behind us until I hear the wood thrush sing. For me, the wood thrush is the declarative voice of the forest, a harbinger of a green and fragrant woods, the archetypal neotropical migrant just back from Panama to mate [...]
In part 1 of this essay, I began my exploration of our modern-day calendar, especially how it relates to the great religious observances of Passover and Easter. I even hinted that that calendar is somewhat controversial. Here’s the conclusion for my essay. I guess just about everyone knows that Passover and Easter do not fall [...]
For us scientists, time is an important part of our general work. For example, how long is a particular chemical reaction? What’s the time required for the flowering of a rare orchid? How much time does it take to travel to the Moon and back again to Earth? What’s the gestation period for elephants? How [...]
Today I’m angry. During my 10-minute drive to work this morning, I watched no less than three individuals flick their still-smoking cigarette butts out of their car windows – separately, two men and one woman who carried out their criminal acts with the indifference of a toad gulping a fly. I got the attention of [...]
Back a few years ago, I was invited to participate in two national conferences: a speaker at a conference hosted by George Mason University outside Washington, DC entitled “Gaia Theory: Model and Metaphor for the 21st Century” and a panelist at the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans [...]
Have you ever felt like the heavens have conspired against you? I have, and I’m not too happy about it. Let me provide you some seemingly compelling evidence for this divine intervention in my life by tracking backwards in my career. Let’s begin with the recent snowstorms in Virginia. National Public Radio labeled our recent [...]
Years ago, as a collector of antiquarian natural history books, I made a wonderful discovery in an old bookshop in Washington, DC. I found a 1953 copy of Homo sapiens auduboniensis secreted in the back of a dusty shelf and forgotten for decades. I think I paid $1.00 for it – probably the original cost [...]
One of my all-time favorite film scenes is from the 1991 adventure, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starring Kevin Costner and Morgan Freeman. In this high-quality moment, a little English peasant girl approaches a battle-hardened Moor called Azeem, played by Freeman, and asks politely but inquisitively, “Did God paint you?” The Moor laughs and acknowledges [...]
Just before the December holiday break, I asked the students in my environmental studies course how many had kept up with the news from the first week of the Copenhagen climate summit: more than 15,000 delegates from nearly 200 countries; 900 people arrested; the tiny nation of Tuvalu nearly shutting down the conference on two [...]
Early in the academic year, I led my junior-level biology students into the forest behind North Cross School to identify some of the native flora and fauna on the campus. At one point, I picked up a wriggling daddy-longlegs, or harvestman as they’re more properly called, and showed it to my young scholars, using the [...]
