At first, you might hear the term “food desert” and assume it has more to do with the environment’s ability to support crop growth. Not to worry, humans have made an impressive commitment to growing produce and livestock in unlikely places – often to the detriment of said environment.
Continue reading Do You Know What a Food Desert is?Category Archives: Nature & Garden
Maryland Lakes
Did you know that Maryland does not have any natural lakes? In fact, it is the ONLY U.S. State without any natural lakes! That is only possible, I suppose, due to arbitrary boundary lines; however, the lines do exist, so now we have this fun factoid. The reason for there being no natural lakes (we have over 100 man-made bodies of water) has to do with multiple factors.
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The Art in Death (Part One)
It was a cloudy day when my friend and I agreed to meet up. I had asked her if she would sit and chat with me about her artwork. Unfortunately, just after we grabbed our pastries and coffee, it began to sprinkle and we decided to head back to my house. Although I recorded our conversation, my dogs decided to be a handful – either trying to swipe our pastries, force us to play ball, or bark at imaginary invaders. This, amongst other things, made for a terrible recording, but still…a thoughtful, albeit distracting, conversation.
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Dark Winter Walks
We walk a regular set of paths everyday. One of our girls is reactive towards other dogs while on a leash. She’s a gentle girl, but suffers from a lot of anxiety, especially since we moved her away from her home in Germany. I’ve seen a similar response in my son. They were even the same chronological age. We moved him away and he simply fell out of sorts in the unfamiliar spaces in which he found himself.
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Decolonizing the Mind
Imagine spending a thousand lifetimes caring for these lands only for billionaires to exploit them in an instant – the same way colonists exploited the people.
Health and Wellness v. Medicine
There is a great deal of conversation happening these days surrounding health and medicine, thanks to a new faction of influencers who have rooted themselves in the MAHA movement (a Trumpian health campaign, Make America Healthy Again). Much like the MAGA movement, it is fueled by misinformation and emotions. As someone who believes in the power of blending eastern and western medicine together, I find someone like RFK Jr. to be a danger, as he seems to prefer blending science with pseudoscience to sell his ideas, so…let’s talk about some of these spaces of health and wellness (and since it is a bit longer of a post, I’ll break it out into four sections).
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A One Health Take on Halloween
This is a reboot of a post I made a year ago when I first started my blog. It is no less relevant today – maybe even more so with our current political leadership obstinately ignoring environmental health concerns and families struggling with a government shutdown. That said, here is a piece on Halloween!
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Travel: A Giant Rock and a Mix of Cultures, but also Monkeys
Did you know there is a British territory, a peninsula, connected to Spain via a sandy isthmus (which mostly holds an airport)? It is known as Gibraltar (Arabic: Jabal Tariq) and the bulk of the terrain is a giant rock, aptly named “the rock of Gibraltar”, with a smaller area of low, flat land surrounding the rock, which is where most of the houses, hotels, shops, and restaurants are, as well as the ports, obviously. Gibraltar generates most of its revenue through the UK military, tourism, as well as the shipping industry that brings in exports and such – but I’m not an economist, so this is the least interesting thing about Gibraltar to me.
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Silence of the Swallowtail
“It’s easier to run down the mountain than to walk it!” my partner shouted to me as we were descending Humpback Rock. Except, he wasn’t the one carrying the backpack with our waters and half-eaten charcuterie box from the day before (precariously wrapped in a cup and some napkins).
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After Virtue, After Invasion
Continue reading After Virtue, After Invasion“Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed. Finally a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists.”
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