Some of you may remember from Watershed that one of my brothers was developing a method of using native Minnesota bacteria from swamps and Minnesota iron to remove sulfate from water that has been impacted by closed taconite mines. This process is of greater importance to me now since the lake I wrote about, Birch Lake, […]
This piece describes the watershed of my city home, was written for Transition Town – All Saint Anthony Park, and was published in the Park Bugle in March of 2020. Half to three-quarters of your body is water. Of the earth’s surface, about 70% is water. Where did the water in you come from? When […]
“Did your dad tell you about the strawberry birthmark?” my aunt asked. I was driving north with her on 35 in the summer of 1989, an occasional moth splattering plumply against the windshield. “What’s a strawberry birthmark?” I asked, glancing quizzically at Aunt Dorothy in the passenger seat. Her silver hair fanned out along the […]
The story of the strawberry birthmark – and behind that the story of the poisoned berry – intrigued me when Aunt Dorothy told it and has fascinated people I’ve told it to since. But is there more? Is there something darker, something needing to reach awareness, something striving toward justice? I posted the story on […]
“If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” -Percy Bysshe Shelley In the winters of my fortunate childhood, snow gleamed under bright sun. After stormy days, it blanketed the woods and splattered in clumps from fir tree boughs. On the snow surface, tracks marked out paths—generations of voles and moles and mice rising up in […]
I asked a class of Minneapolis College students to find and watch a wild animal (or at least to remember watching one who was wild) and then to write about that being. Many returned with writings about squirrels – not red squirrels, not ground squirrels, not flying squirrels. No. Grey squirrels. City squirrels. I hope […]
Racial justice is essential to climate justice. Ecological activists wonder sometimes why we don’t revolt more strongly against impending climate disaster. It may be that our privilege as white people enables us to feel distant from the climate trauma already devastating many people of color, locally and globally. To look at the privileges that distance […]
