- topics: nature
Does scaring people about climate change do more harm than good?
An op-ed piece in the NYTimes (4/9/14) by Nordhaus and Shellenberger, the chairman and president of an environmental research firm, argues that it does. Perhaps ...
- topics: nature
How adding the biology changes the equation
Daniel Jones, the editor of the NY Times' Sunday, Modern Love column, had a lead article in the Style Section on Feb 1, ...
- topics: nature
Some faint hope for the Monarchs
The Associated Press reported on 2/10/15 that the US government had pledged $3.2 million toward the effort to preserve Monarch habitat. Two million will go ...
Why do we fall in love with the person we do?
I've always assumed that I fell in love with my German boyfriend because he was so unacceptable to my parents, whom I wanted to punish ...
- topics: nature
Is continued sexual passion even possible in long-term love?
Fisher argues that romantic passion is time-limited and exists to get us to choose a partner with whom we can conceive a child. Usually, passion ...
- topics: nature
Why doesn’t romantic passion last?
Because human beings are not programmed for it to last. Fisher's basic premise is that lust evolved to insure procreation and the continuance of the ...
- topics: nature
Sad news on the monarchs
The figures in a 2/10/15 Associated Press report give the sad news that the 2014 Monarch migration numbers were, along with those of 2013, the ...
- topics: nature
Threads connect: Monarchs and climate change
   Barbara Kingsolver has a new book out, Flight Behavior, that brings together two threads I've been pursuing. The theme of the book is climate ...
- topics: nature
Geo-engineering: Yea or Nay?
Hurricane Sandy seems to have clinched the national debate on whether climate change is real and perilous. Now we have to find the political ...
After Sandy: a shortened updated version of the essay, A Matter of Time
With the so-called Mayan doomsday due tomorrow, apocalypse is on many minds. But here in America, global catastrophe is the stuff of science ...
- topics: nature
Vanishing Coastlines
An article in the Sunday, NY Times (11/25/12) presents maps of New York, Boston, San Francisco, Miami, and Virginia Beach were the ocean to rise ...
If optimism is hard-wired, what do we do when it imperils us?
Al Gore and many others who are spearheading the fight against climate change emphasize that it is not too late. They try not to engage ...
‘Butterfly’ as linguistic anomaly: why?
The most interesting essay on the subject comes from William O. Beeman, of the Dept of Anthropolgy, Brown University, 2000: The Elusive Butterfly. He notes ...
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topics: art, culture, nature
What is the imaginative lure of the jungle?
Henri Rousseau was a tax collector and self-taught painter who never left Paris and never saw a jungle, taking inspiration instead from Paris’ hothouse ...
