Susan J. Tweit's Posts
Imagine motoring from Hawaii to California through the North Pacific subtropical gyre, an immense region of the ocean where high pressure rules, trade winds fail, and currents trace a circle many hundreds of miles across, corralling anything that floats into a slowly rotating vortex. A few days off Hawaii, you notice something odd about the sea around you: it is laden with a subsurface "soup" of plastic trash, from soccer balls and kayaks to water bottles, snarls of polypropylene rope, and bladder-like shopping bags.
Western bumblebee on scarlet gilia [photo copyright David Inouye]
Last week, on what passes for a warm spring afternoon here in the south-central Rockies, I planted the heirloom tomato starts I've nurtured indoors since early March. As I worked, I scanned my kitchen garden for insects.
On our way across Nevada's Great Basin two weeks ago on U.S. Highway 50, "America's Loneliest Road," my husband Richard and I passed through spring hawk migration. It seemed that golden eagles soared on impossibly long wings over each wide, flat-bottomed valley; red-tailed hawks rode the air over each up-tilted mountain range.
With spring on its way and my garden beckoning, I've been thinking about a conversation with Frances E. Kuo, director of the University of Illinois Landscape and Human Health Laboratory on her research on kids with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and time spent in nature.
Ten years ago, my husband and I moved back to his childhood home, a small town in a deep valley in Colorado's Southern Rocky mountains. Our friends assumed we'd buy some acreage and live out where we could see coyotes, golden eagles, and elk every day. Instead, we moved into a tiny turn-of-the-previous century brick duplex on a postage stamp-sized lot two blocks from downtown, where we could walk to almost everything needed. We rejoiced in rarely starting our car and in getting to know the place the old-fashioned and intimate way--on foot.
A few days before Thanksgiving, the thermometer on our back porch read two degrees at dawn, and I worried about my kitchen garden. When I pulled back the insulating row covers later that morning, I was relieved to see the greens a bit wilted, but still quite alive. I was counting on them for our Thanksgiving meal.
