A Gardening Manifesto — in Six Words
“Be the kind of person who takes supplements – then skip the supplements.” Michael Pollan, “Food Rules An Eater’s Manual” The rules Michael Pollan devised to guide eating could apply just as well to...
Author: Marina Schauffler
The Costs of Climate Instability
Flooding, tornadoes, droughts, wildfires: the evidence of climate change is not just mounting, it’s barreling down on us – inexorable as a landslide. The cost of U.S. weather and climate disasters last year hit...
Cast Your Ballot for the Planet
“We’re a society of distracted drivers. We’re not paying attention to what matters most.” – Michael Lewis, author (on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Oct. 3, 2018) Lost in the discussion of America’s partisan, gender and...
Cover Crops: A Living Blanket
It’s late September and my garden is literally humming. Whenever I go to harvest vegetables, I hear the pulsing drone of bees, flies and wasps amid buckwheat blossoms. To me, the flowers don’t look...
The Unifying Power of Place
There’s great comfort to being in a place where – even in solitude – you’re not alone. When no other humans are at my extended family’s rustic camp, I’m still surrounded. The picnic table,...
Going Electric
Not all of us can, like the royal couple at their wedding last May, drive a vintage Jaguar modified to be all-electric. Even most Teslas remain beyond reach. Yet while 1 percent of Americans...
The Quest for Shade
Maine, it appears, is no longer exempt from the warming patterns that made five of the last seven years the hottest on record. Two summers ago, I wrote about staying cool without air conditioning...
Shifting Baselines
“Nature has no hope in the absence of history.” Carl Safina in Shifting Baselines: The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries We face a paradoxical bind, needing simultaneously to look backward and...
