By Katie Koerten
Recently the Hitchcock Center hosted an eye-opening talk called “Balanced and Barefoot” by Angela Hanscom, author of a recent book by the same name. Hanscom is a pediatric occupational therapist whose work with children led her to create a popular international outdoor play program called Timbernook.Throughout her career, Hanscom made troubling observations in her work at schools, hospitals and outpatient clinics. She noticed that children had decreased strength and balance, poor attention and increased fidgeting. Kids in the 2000s had a fraction of the physical abilities of children thirty years earlier. At the same time, they were spending less and less time outdoors, as school recess times were shortened and more time was spent indoors, often sedentary. Hanscom connected the two trends and saw the solution: giving more opportunities for kids to play outdoors in unrestricted, unstructured ways.
By Ted Watt
It has happened every year since the glaciers melted and forests returned to New England. And it will happen again this year, from now to mid-April in our area.When the snow is largely melted in the woods and it starts to rain during the day, keep your eye on the temperature. If the rain continues and it remains above 40 degrees as darkness descends, it’s Big Night for the Pioneer Valley’s spotted salamanders.
By John Sinton For the GazetteM
A great, thick-waisted rock maple, maybe 150 years old, marks the corner of our property, healthy and with plenty of room inside for squirrels and other creatures. I think of it as ageless, even though it’s only twice as old as I am. Our maple, in fact, is a metronome that marks the tempo of change in the forests of the Pioneer Valley. We live not in the temperate, multi-millennial redwood forests of the West Coast, but in the Eastern Woodlands, which fire, hurricanes, high winds, insects and disease transform every few hundred years. Our forests are a mix of trees that can live anywhere from thirty to several hundred years.
By Jessica Schultz
The modern environmental movement began with Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” about widespread contamination of land and water by DDT and other long-lasting pesticides. Developed in the 1940s, these chemicals went into wide use after World War II. But evidence mounted that they persisted in the environment and accumulated in animal and human tissue; as a result, DDT and most related pesticides have been phased out in the U.S. and elsewhere.However, another class of toxic compounds that were developed around the same time — perfluorinated alkylated substances (PFAS), with some of the same environmental and health concerns — continue to be used in a host of consumer products and building materials. They are now found in the bodies of virtually all humans and are considered to be ubiquitous throughout the web of life.When we think about what materials to incorporate into the construction of the places where we live and work, do we really want to use any product containing toxic, persistent chemicals?
By Ted Watt
When I think of oaks, images of statuesque trees arise — standing alone in a pasture or reaching strongly for the sun in a deciduous forest. I’m sure many of us carry similar pictures either from here in New England or from almost any other place on the continent. Botanists classify oaks in their own genus — Quercus, the ancient Roman name for oak.
By David Spector
Snowflakes here have an extra meaning: “Snowflake” is an old name for the bird that’s better known today as the snow bunting, one that we can see this time of year. This bird moves south for the winter from its arctic nesting range to relatively warm and sunny regions, including here in New England.
By Lawrence J. Winship
As we move deeper into winter, once again it becomes evident that living at 42 degrees north latitude has one certain consequence: We trade the bright long days of summer for the short, dark days of winter. Lower sun angles, later dawns and earlier sunsets are all caused by the tilt of our planet’s axis away from the sun. We spin at an angle of 23.5 degrees relative to our orbital plane around old Sol. Facing towards the light and then away in a perpetual annual cycle, we don’t turn our backs completely on the sun, as they do above the Arctic Circle — but it does get pretty dim! Season in and season out, Earth continuously radiates heat energy back to the cosmos, so the reduced solar input in winter throws our soils, forests and lakes into negative heat energy balance and they freeze — water like a stone.
By Reeve Gutsell
Farming is hard. Ask any local farmer, and they’ll tell you the same thing: From wrangling with the vagaries of weather to struggling with pests and diseases, farming is hard on the body, the mind and the finances. Unfortunately, climate change is making life even more challenging.
By TOM LITWIN For the Gazette December 14, 2018 Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series. Part 1 was published on December 1. Three days out of Dutch Harbor, the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy was coming into position about 75 miles off the southwest coast of St. Lawrence […]
By TOM LITWIN For the Gazette December 3, 2018 Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series. Part 2 will be published on December 15. Ten years ago, I was part of a team of international scientists lined up along the railing of the 420-foot U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy as we prepared […]
Hitchcock Center for the Environment
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