Recently in Environment Category

I just finished a book that I never would have read--or perhaps even come across--had not a friend given it to me for my birthday: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. It's long and dense, all about a topic I have never before thought much about: what makes for a vibrant, safe, interesting, pleasant city?

The short answer is that great cities are diverse, and diversity is created, Jacobs maintains, through four primary conditions:

Here's a link I found way back in July or August on a friend's Facebook page. I saved it to blog about and look how long it has taken me... It seems appropriate to post the link after yesterday's entry on loss, since these images of the Ruin of Detroit all depict great loss. They are gorgeous photographs of tragic and appalling ugliness and waste. I personally HATE tragic and appalling ugliness and waste--I mean, it really, really upsets me.

I have never been anywhere in Detroit except the airport, but I flew in and out of it enough times to thoroughly assimilate the fact that "Detroit is in the eastern time zone" (I could even understand the Chinese version of that announcement) and so developed an affection for the city. Plus it's my friend Jim's hometown. Plus, it became the Motor City only because my old home of Erie turned down Henry Ford's request to build an automobile factory there.

See, Henry Ford wanted to build his factory in a port city very close to the ports of Buffalo and the steel mills of Pittsburgh. And there happens to be a port city almost midway between Buffalo and Pittsburgh, which is--that's right--Erie.

But Erie city fathers told Mr. Ford, no, we don't want your nasty factory. Take it some place else. So he went to the port city on the other side of Lake Erie, which was Detroit.

Erie is solidly in the rust belt and has plenty of urban decay, but it's nothing like Detroit. So perhaps the decision of Erie's city fathers, which seemed very foolish long about 1950, was actually wise in the long run.

As I have mentioned, Lake Erie didn't do all that much for me, except for the part where all the water in it fell over a bunch of rocks and flowed into Lake Ontario. Lakes really aren't my thing.

I now live in a city with the word "Lake" in its name. I haven't spent much time at the Great Salt Lake, I confess, and I didn't make it a priority to visit it when I got here. There have been a few times on visits to SLC in the past when, driving past the lake on the way to the airport, the sulfurous stink of the lake was so unpleasant, that I wondered why anyone would ever visit it at all.

But then, in March, I needed something to do on a pleasant Friday afternoon, so I went to Antelope Island, a state park on an island in the northern part of the Great Salt Lake, reachable by a long causeway.

I love cats. I love little cats, I love big cats. I especially love tigers.

Spike sent me this link to a slide-show of portraits of 18 Bengal tigers. All 18 photos are really cool. I did not know there was ever such a thing as a "golden tabby Bengal tiger," much less than there are a mere 30 of them left in the whole wide world. I'm glad I got to see such amazing portraits of a few of them.

Here, kitty, kitty!

Today has been nasty and rainy--not just a little damp, with occasional sprinkles, like Saturday, but soggy and windy and something you don't want to be out in. The weather people kindly informed us to expect exactly this sort of nastiness today, so I took advantage of yesterday's nice weather and spent a good chunk of the day outside.

I went to Red Butte Gardens, botanical gardens at the north edge of the U of Utah campus. I was attracted by their claim that they have 150,000 daffodils. They were nice, but not as lovely as the gardens I saw Saturday at Temple Square, frankly.

But these gardens have other attractions Temple Square doesn't--like all sorts of plants, stuff for children to play on, and a few big ponds with goldfish of varying sizes.

In one pond, I saw something I'd never seen before: a nesting goose. Her nest was in the pond and fairly exposed, which surprised me at first--I would have thought she'd choose something with more cover. Then it occurred to me that probably the biggest threat to her eggs' safety was people, who were more likely to leave her alone when she was in the middle of the pond. Here's the pond:

and here she is, on her nest:

I plan to go back in a month or so, and hope that I get to see little goslings learning to swim.

You've got to look at this slide show of highly magnified images of rocks and minerals. The images are stunningly beautiful and, in some cases, reminiscent of things we see in the real world--a cliff jutting into a sea, a waterfall. They're really cool.

Sorry I haven't blogged for a while.... Stuff has happened. I was sorta sick and felt crappy for a while. Then my blog got sorta sick and felt crappy for a while: some of you might have noticed that a few days ago there was an entry entitled "Testing" that consisted of the word "testing." That was because things weren't working properly and had to be tested.... But everything seems to be healthy now. (Thanks, Jim.)

Then there was this point where I wasn't really interested in my blog; I was more interested in other people's. So I did a lot of catching up and reading and a little commenting. (If I haven't gotten around to yours yet, well, give me time. I was lazy for a good, long while, and I have plenty of catching up to do.) I think plenty of us feel like that from time to time, which is good, or most of us wouldn't get many comments.

And then there was this other thing that happened, which is that I was fairly happy and busy enjoying my life and appreciating weather that was fabulous in the concrete, but sort of freaked me out in the abstract, because it belonged to another time and place, and is a fairly good indication that global warming ain't going away--and will probably be worse than previously predicted.

In other words, I was totally loving Salt Lake City because its fall weather was almost identical to the weather of my childhood in southern Arizona, 1,000 miles away and 40 years ago. And I was experiencing that weather in more than one visceral way, because the building I live in now is about the same age (80-90 years old) as the building I went to first grade in, and has the same heating system: those old steam radiators that can't be set to a specific temperature, merely turned on and off. They put out LOTS of heat. And in the process, they give off a faint but noticeable and neither pleasant nor unpleasant smell, one that reminds me of being five years old and going to first grade (yes, I went to first grade a year early) and of how much I actually liked first grade, back when I first experienced it in 1969.

When I moved to Utah, I began noticing this strange thing in people's yards: weird plastic containers hung from tree limbs, and full of dead bees. I found them gruesome and strange, never having seen such a thing before, but soon I began noticing them for sale in stores: bee catchers! Yes! For around fifteen bucks, you too can help destroy one of the world's most invaluable AND threatened species, putting all life on this planet at risk!

I don't know why I never saw these dreadful objects before; I'm guessing they can be found elsewhere; perhaps I just never noticed. But they're EVERYWHERE in Utah, particularly in Salt Lake City's (less enlightened and more Mormon) suburbs--one of which is called Fruit Heights. That's right: northern Utah is flush with orchards, producing apples and peaches and plums and pears and god know what all.

And WHY are there all these orchards in Utah? Well, one reason is because there are BEES to pollinate the trees.

If you want peaches every fall, put up with some bees the rest of the year. DO NOT CATCH OR KILL BEES. THEY ARE THREATENED, AND WE NEED THEM. WE REALLY NEED THEM.

In fact, bees were recently named the planet's single most invaluable species. They pollinate a third of the things we eat--including chocolate and coffee--and they are also one of the main polllinators of cotton. In fact, one scientist argues that "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

So I don't care how afraid of bees you are; suck it up and get over it, because the planets needs them.

One of those things I didn't learn while I was still a practicing Mormon is that the opposite of "on the rocks" is "neat," as in, "I'll have a shot of herradura, neat."

Pretty soon, the drink (my favorite term, by far, for the sea) in general might just well be neat. As in, all the ice at the north pole just might melt this summer.

It's one kind of neat, but not another. In fact, this kind of neat in this context SUCKS, literally, in that it sucks heat into a dark liquid ocean and warms the planet up even more.

Yeah. That totally sucks.

"Conventional wisdom holds that you can tell a lot about a man by the way he treats his mother, so why should Mother Earth be any exception?"

Judy Berman, a Broadsheet blogger, in Your fuel efficiency is so hot, commenting on research conducted by General Motors concluding that "88 percent of women would rather meet a guy with a fuel-efficient vehicle than a dude with a sports car."