Seeing The Forest, Losing Sight Of The Trees

August 20, 2010

A tall, handsome white ash tree shades the east side of our Vermont home. Its golden-brown autumn foliage contrasts with the reds of the sugar maples around it. Its ramrod-straight trunk reminds me of a favorite baseball bat, also ash, that I swung as a boy. This tree should outlive me by many years, but it probably won’t. Every ash tree in eastern North America — an estimated 7.5 billion …

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Undoing Great Projects Of The Past

September 11, 2009

On June 26, 1959, Queen Elizabeth II and President Dwight D. Eisenhower boarded the Royal Yacht Brittania and floated through the gates of the St. Lawrence Seaway, declaring the series of locks and canals officially open. The seaway, which was jointly financed by the United States and Canada, cost $470 million to build, and the construction took five years to complete. While British explorers never found the Northwest Passage that …

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Resisting Invasion

August 6, 2009

In the autumn of 2001, while on a cross-country car trip, I bought a small bundle of firewood in Lake Tahoe, California, and drove it to my home in suburban New York City. Though it burned nicely in our fireplace that winter, carrying that wood across the country was a dumb thing to do. America is besieged by invasive species that threaten our forests, fields and waterways. These species travel …

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