By Beth Bader •
October 3, 2008
It’s late in the year; harvest season is upon us. If this year in local food has had a “theme” it would be the victory garden. Growing your own has a new appeal. If you haven’t started your garden yet, maybe it’s a bit late, but it’s not too early to think about sharing the garden experience with your youngest family members next year.
DK Publishing’s resident children’s cooking expert, Jill Bloomfield, just published her own children’s guide to gardening. Grow It, Cook It is a great step-by-step visual guide to how to grow a plant on the first spread of pages, then shows step-by-step how to cook the ingredient on the next.
“Love has no bounds” is an old cliché. Everyone loves “love”–from Valentine’s Day paraphernalia to sappy greeting cards. And environmentalists say they love nature, love the Earth, love a place or animal.
Obviously, nature is often “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson puts it.1 However, nature also has its soft-and-fuzzy side, which provides a wonderful lesson and model for how humans in general and environmentalists in particular can relate to nature. A particularly splendid example of this is animals “adopting” other animals.
I have been watching a pair of cardinals parenting a baby cowbird at my bird feeders recently. Cowbirds (like other birds, such as the cuckoo) will lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and let the foster parents do the dirty work–changing dirty diapers, wiping runny noses, feeding at all hours of the night and day. And so along with the little baby cardinals flapping flopping and squawking like mad, this little cowbird is right there with the rest getting dutifully fed by the cardinals. I am sure all pet owners can recount endless tales of cats adopting dogs, dogs adopting cats, and so on.
By Shane Jordan •
July 25, 2007
You recycle, you drive a fuel efficient car, you buy organic food, you turn the thermostat down at night: in short, you are trying your best to make this world a better place. Your parents however still use incandescent light bulbs, still don’t recycle, and still look at you like an alien every time you suggest they trade in their giant land tank for something more sensible. If this sounds like your
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