Earth Matters

Want to save the Earth? Start at home with a land trust

By KRISTIN DEBOER  For the Gazette October 12, 2019 Looking back at last month’s youth-led Global Climate Strikes, and my own family’s growing concern for this planet we call home, I find myself thinking about what “home” means and where we can really make a difference. When the climate and politics of the entire world […]

Like a moth to a flame

By JOSHUA ROSE For the Gazette

We’ve all seen moths swirling around a light on a warm night, so familiar that we have the saying, “like a moth to a flame.” That sight is less common than it used to be. In many places, insects of all kinds are less common: populations are impacted by habitat destruction, lawn chemicals, traffic, exotic species and climate change. Also, individual lights become less attractive to insects as light pollution weakens their visibility.

What ‘men’s work’ has to do with preserving the planet

By Michael Dover

In the past few years, we’ve seen many twists and turns of emotion around gender. Recently there has been an inspiring surge of women stepping forward to assert their dignity and rights, alongside continuing revelations of toxic masculinity in the corridors of power. Simultaneously, the growing environmental justice movement is highlighting the importance of hearing the voices of marginalized groups in matters of the earth and how we live on it. Men have a key role to play in this process as well.

Little brown bats in the barn

By Mary Harrington

They have been coming every summer for as long as I can remember — probably even longer than we have lived in the neighborhood. I’ve never paid much attention to them. Sometimes I noted with appreciation their war against mosquitos, waged near our back patio. Other times I was annoyed by the debris that built up under their home. But in general, we lived near each other and didn’t get involved.

A natural case of apparent conflict of interest

By David Spector

If you sit on a city park bench you’re likely to see birds, especially house sparrows. This species, native to Europe and Asia, was first introduced into North America in 1851 and is now common where farms or cities provide both grain on the ground and nest holes. As such, it provides easy observation opportunities. In breeding season you may observe a common behavior — one sparrow feeding another — that raises interesting evolutionary questions.

Of beech bark, bumps and bears

By Lawrence J. Winship July 19, 2019 The smooth silvery gray bark of beech trees seems to call out, “Write on me!” Or at least those with handy pocket knives may think so (not a good or polite idea, by the way). Some of the thinnest bark of our New England trees, not fire-adapted like […]

A box for birds: Nesting American kestrels

By Reeve Gutsell For the Gazette

I peered through my binoculars at a large wooden nest box. It was perched atop a tall pole in the middle of a grassy field between the Hitchcock Center and the Hampshire College Farm. I was hoping to spy the rusty brown body or sharp black and white facial markings of the nation’s smallest falcon, the American kestrel.

How the English colonists transformed the forests of the Pioneer Valley

By John Sinton

In 1600, the 125,000 Native people who lived in New England had reached a dynamic equilibrium with their forested landscape through thousands of years of manipulation and accommodation. (I described this relationship in Part 1 of this series, published in March.) Then their world fell apart. 

Mission to a vanishing sea-ice landscape, part 3: When your garden melts

By Tom Litwin

After two weeks at sea aboard the U.S. Coast Guard ice breaker Healy examining the effects of climate change on the Bering Sea ecosystem in 2008, I was helicoptered to the Siberian Yupik village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island. Gambell, or Sivuqaq in Yupik, population 700, is on the very northwest tip of the island at the entrance to the Bering Strait and just a short 36 miles from Russia. I went to Gambell to learn how local traditional knowledge was being used to gauge the impact of climate change on the villagers’ daily lives and future. Gambell is dependent on the Bering Sea and its ice to provide food for their families and the village community. Their relationship with the Bering Sea is the bedrock of their culture and fundamental to their survival and well-being.