Thoreau Farm

“In my walks I would fain return to my senses.”
-Thoreau, “Walking”

I managed to get out for a much-needed walk this morning, over to a nearby conservation area in Wayland, where I live. At the heart of it is a big, open swamp, a quarter-mile wide, surrounded by thickly wooded slopes, a pond at one end. The air was surprisingly cold. The water up a bit after last week’s rains. The geese were out with their young ones. Clear sky.

“I enter a swamp as a sacred place — a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength — the marrow of Nature.”

That’s also from “Walking.” (And yes, I have a thing about that essay.)

Yesterday morning I was a guest speaker, along with two of my fellow initiators of Transition Wayland, at the historic First Parish (Unitarian Universalist) in Wayland center. I’m posting my talk here (you can read the others here). It’s not an exact transcript of my remarks (there was some ad libbing), but it’s pretty close. If you’ve been following this blog, some of it will sound familiar. The interviews and exchanges I’ve posted here in recent weeks were very much on my mind. Continue reading →

A conversation with journalist Mark Hertsgaard, author of Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth

Mark Hertsgaard, an accomplished global-environmental reporter, wants you to remember the first Earth Day, how it really started, 42 years ago, on April 22, 1970. He wants to remind you of the far-reaching change it brought about — under a conservative Republican president, no less.

In an editorial in this week’s issue of The Nation, Hertsgaard notes that here in the U.S., as Earth Day has become “a bland, tired ritual that polluters and politicians have learned to ignore or co-opt,” there are environmentalists who are ready to get rid of it altogether. But rather than do that, he writes: Continue reading →