Dear Friends: On Sunday, December 18, 2016, this report on my brief visit to Standing Rock will be featured in the Tallahassee Democrat. I’ll be sharing Part 2 of what I learned at Standing Rock after the holidays. During the first week of December, I traveled with my niece Erin Canter to a snowy, stinging cold North Dakota prairie south of Bismarck, where encampments at Standing Rock have evolved into the longest running protest in modern history. In … Continue
Category Archives: Climate Change
Today, every one of us is trying to figure out how to live with, or through, the results of last night’s election. I am grateful for the wisdom and support of my family and my community in this dark time, as we grieve and regroup. My parents raised me up with the greatest respect for our United States of America. Above all I was taught that our land was a place of refuge for all in need of safety, mercy and … Continue
Last weekend, a series of impressive king tides, swelled by the full moon, rose our Gulf waters a foot or more higher above normal. In south Florida, sea water ran deep in the streets. But along our lightly populated coast, I noticed only submerged docks, from Lanark to Eastpoint. On St. Vincent Island, the king tides carved two long swales and filled them with salt Gulf water. The pool closer to the dunes was deeper, and had apparently entrapped an … Continue
I never expected to see a flock of shorebirds amongst the high peaks of Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness last week. Golden eagles, yes. Elk and mule deer and marmots, yes. Single spotted sandpipers, sure. But there they were, in a synchronous flock, spinning like snowflakes over glacial Dewey Lake, more than 9000 feet above sea level. I don’t carry my excellent binoculars backpacking anymore. In my 60s, I aim to shoulder the lightest possible weight on our seven-day hikes (somewhere in the neighborhood … Continue
This could be a story about the privilege of co-hosting Duke professor Orrin Pilkey as he toured our barrier island coast last month. I could have relayed his urgent and fascinating take on islands like ours, because Dr. Pilkey has visited most of the 2200 barrier islands on our planet. And you would have been interested in his findings, that almost every single one is thinning on both front and back sides. “I have come to think of islands as … Continue
Some years ago, Jeff and I traveled to Iceland to see that amazing island country, with our friends David and Crystal. Part of my desire to visit those glaciers and icebergs was my need to understand and experience the source of the water that is raising the level of our Gulf of Mexico, and all the planet’s seas. I feel so grateful that the story has just been published in Tikkun, a marvelous journal that bills itself as “A … Continue
The light is changing now, do you see it? Each day, the sun moves higher into the architecture of the trees’ bare branches as it travels across the sky. During the brief interval that our deciduous trees are still properly naked, I like to spend time with the unimpeded night sky—Orion sprawls overhead, and brilliant Jupiter rises in the east after sunset. But pure winter, if we ever had it, is nearly over. January brings complicated weather to North Florida. Cold fronts … Continue