I’m not a very good nature tour guide. For one thing, I don’t know much about nature. For another, I walk very quickly; I have to keep reminding myself to slow down. Despite my shortcomings; however, two days before Halloween 2019, I take my English Composition class on a walk to a nearby greenspace, a short walk from our community college campus in Queens. Greenspace. It’s such a recent compound that Word autocorrects it into two.
Memories are translations. We gather much and miss more. I originally compiled this archive in spring of 2022 for a final project in a course on environmental histories and values. I did it mostly for myself. I wanted to attend to what I had picked up throughout the pandemic — people, places, poems, photographs. These fragments are re-memories of ecosystems and relational nests.
Today’s itinerary: visit Earth Room, where a layer of soil, two feet thick, has occupied a gallery in SoHo since 1977.
When we moved back to Michigan, we bought an old farmhouse on five acres. I was still married then, with three young daughters and soon two more. After we had settled in, I planted an apple orchard. The farmhouse was a white Greek Revival with four bedrooms and an old lilac out front. It stood on a barely perceptible rise […]
People often avoid the elephant in the room, but it’s time we talk about the cow in the room. She is a ruminant, after all, and can no longer be ignored. Indeed, the room is getting increasingly crowded and stinky. Let’s ruminate together and use our cowmon sense, so we can replace ignorance and crisis with science and solutions. It’s […]
Sure Thing It is that with which the wind blows And the snowflakes carry from the skies The mountains echo in their deep crevasses The sky possesses in her blue, graceful expanse The child has in her smile The earth in her soil The dog in my arms. It is that with which spreads the smell of rain The mist […]
I’ve dropped my broom
One of my favorite photographs hangs in my bathroom. At its center is a wheelbarrow, with wooden handles, braces, and legs. The ten-spoke wheel is iron. Cow chips – dry dung – are stacked two feet high in the tray. They also litter the grassy landscape, which is over-exposed and unending. In black and white, each chip looks like a […]
This piece was originally written as part of a larger poetry and prose project that explored the author’s relationship with his family’s farm in Tennessee. Over a month-long span, he reflected daily on the lessons that the place and its people have taught him. The piece has been adapted for publication here. Two Decembers ago, we cut up a few […]
Angelina stood on the solid, familiar earth and looked up. The cliff extended high into the sky, until the sun broke just over its edge. With trepidation, she lifted one foot off the ground and placed it tenderly onto a rocky surface. She breathed in and out. Leaning her weight forward and onto her toes, she pushed up and away […]
he bones of deceased Guaraní shamans used to decorate forest pockets in pre-colonial times, when Mata Atlântica, “The Atlantic Forest,” still stretched out its arms across South America. From modern-day northeastern Argentina to the southern Brazilian coast, the “Atlantic Forest” provided the continent’s First Nations with a lush diversity of ecoregions to explore, to wander and live in. When seventeenth-century […]
An indigenous people dislocated by conservation and development in Southwest China.