Let’s start with two facts. First, the human population continues to change in unprecedented ways how the Earth’s systems function. Originally this was called global warming. The realization that changes in the global climate included more than just temperature changes led to use of the term climate change. Now we understand that more in nature […]
I first encountered the idea that the future was something one could study in 1971 from historian Roger Howell Jr. In one way or another, thinking about the future informed much that I have written about since, including here in Stirring the Pot. In my way of thinking about the future, I believe there should […]
The pain and suffering of the residents of coastal Texas and Louisiana fill us all with feelings of empathy and concern for their future. Most of us can only imagine losing all of our physical possessions and having to start over again. Hurricane Harvey brought an unprecedented rainfall event in U.S. weather history. So the […]
The new administration in Washington continues to limit immigration to the U.S.A. with policies questioning the suitability of people from various countries to become Americans. This made me think of immigrants in my own family. In 1913 my grandfather, William Oliver Anderson, immigrated to Massachusetts from Glasgow, Scotland. He made a career in the shade-grown […]
Robert Gordon’s 2016 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth is a comprehensive history of “the U.S. standard of living since the civil war.” Gordon, a Northwestern University economist, details changes in consumption of food, clothing, shelter, and transport during a period when Americans experienced unprecedented improvement in quality of life. From brutally difficult, […]
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a plant ecologist at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. She also is an eloquent writer who makes the natural world shimmer with her descriptions. Her book Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses will make you see moss in a new light. And once you see […]
