"By excessive breeding and abuse of the land mankind has backed itself into an ecological trap. By a lopsided use of applied science it has been living on promissory notes. Now, all over the world, the notes are falling due."

It’s late summer and once again the eastern screech owls are singing in our wood every evening--or through the night if there is a full or gibbous moon. Of course, this isn’t the only time of year that screech owls sing, though they are usually quiet between November and January. Moreover, they have a large vocal repertoire. What we are hearing now is called the “descending trill,” which is easily mistaken for the whinny of a horse.

Hearing Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican VP nominee, say she’d start laying more pipeline and expanding oil and gas exploration in January (if elected) was a little surprising. But hearing an entire stadium of people with little red signs chant, “Drill, baby, drill!” afterwards was the real shocker.

To tinker with a line from a terrific baseball movie, “If you ignore them, they will spread.” I mean the spotted jewelweed that has taken over a cool, shady spot below the precariously leaning apple tree in our front yard. It has been a couple of summers since the plants, which grow five feet tall or more and are mostly foliage, have been yanked up. That’s a temporary reprieve, since jewelweed produces so many seeds that it will quickly pop back the next year.

I've read somewhere that the West Virginia town of Bluefield, which sits smack dab on the Virginia state line, was named for the fields of chicory flowers that reflected summer's azure skies way back when the place was a mountain community of a few hundred folks. Well, several acres of one of the most scraggly plants ever brought to these shores by European colonists would certainly be a pretty sight, though they wouldn't rival a sea of native bluebonnets down in Texas.

Be nice to crows and their cacophonous relatives--otherwise, you'll have made yourself a lasting enemy. That's the lesson of a neat study that Michelle Nijhuis reports in this week's Science Times. 

Ahhh, the all-American, all-you-can-eat buffet. Nowhere else do we revel in our own waste with such joy. Overstuffed but determined to sample the cornucopia of desserts, I waited behind a woman at one last weekend. She was scrupulously carving "just a sliver" (as my grandma used to say) from a hefty wedge of chocolate cake. “Take the whole slice and leave the rest on your plate like everyone else,” commented a man nearby. Well, it would make the line move faster, I thought.

It looks like a house in The Shire, straight out of a Tolkien book, but this one's the real thing. It's a green-- literally--home in Wales, the product of four months of "mucking around" by freelance multitasker Simon Dale, his father-in-law, and whoever else happened to have a free moment to help. The point? To have fun. Oh yeah--and to live sustainably.

In my last post, I wrote about Beijing's attempts to go green during this summer's Olympics. Audubon's reporter Jess Leber has also zeroed in on another essential component of the games: The National Stadium, aka "Bird's Nest" stadium. In an Audubon web exclusive, she finds out if the sports complex lives up to its nickname.

Looks like China isn't just going for the gold in athletic events--the host of the 2008 summer Olympics recently received LEED®-Gold certification from the United States Green Building Council for its Olympic Village, the temporary home to 17,000 athletes from around the globe.