Posts by Dave Bonta
May 27, 2009
Shit Creek
By Dave Bonta | Posted on May 27, 2009
For what it’s worth, this is a true story. You can’t make this shit up.
May 23, 2009
Driving to Sinai
By Dave Bonta | Posted on May 23, 2009
“A way in the wilderness,” promises the prophet Isaiah. Though environmentalists might wish to believe otherwise, visions of roads in the midst of nature still resonate for many Americans. When was the last time you saw an ad for an SUV that showed it stuck in traffic or parked at the mall? Indeed, it almost seems as if we build roads not to destroy nature (though that may be the inevitable result), but to get closer to it. Driving the Blue Ridge Parkway was for decades considered a virtual wilderness experience, and highway planners continue to play upon this romantic notion, bestowing labels like North Star Way (U.S. Route 219) and the Appalachian Thruway (Rt. 220/I-99), and designing logos for transportation study projects that depict four empty lanes arcing toward a vanishing point among shapely hills.
May 18, 2009
Ramifications
By Dave Bonta | Posted on May 18, 2009
The bottle is the message
the river sends to the sea:
Aquafina.
May 15, 2009
The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife
By Dave Bonta | Posted on May 15, 2009
Long johns in the morning, shorts in the afternoon. It’s trout season, pale bellies peeking from the creel.
May 15, 2009
Proposed wind plant could harm federally endangered species
By Dave Bonta | Posted on May 15, 2009
Just in time for Endangered Species Day comes the news that, for the first time, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Army Corps of Engineers will review a wind plant proposal to see whether its impacts on bats and migratory birds would violate the Endangered Species Act. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (whose environmental reporting, by the way, is second to none in Pennsylvania) has the story.
May 11, 2009
Sleeping with Places
By Dave Bonta | Posted on May 11, 2009
To sleep somewhere, to surrender our unconscious bodies to a strange bed or a spot on the ground while our minds go wandering — how is it that we feel we haven’t really visited a place until we’ve done this? It is not enough merely to have looked, to have listened, to have smelt and touched and tasted, though all these things matter too.
May 5, 2009
Finding: why wind turbines kill bats
By Dave Bonta | Posted on May 5, 2009
Wind Turbines Give Bats the “Bends,” Study Finds
Half of the dead bats that lie like jetsam
around the tall masts of wind turbines
appear unharmed, wingbones unbroken,
their ears’ stiff calipers still cocked.
May 1, 2009
Questions About Birds
By Dave Bonta | Posted on May 1, 2009
What made the stork ancestor of New World vultures forsake its obstretrics practice for the morgue?
Where does the wood thrush store its silver bells when it flies south for the winter?
Did the old trout learn how to lurk from studying ospreys?
Is it the excess of sky following a clearcut that gives cerulean warblers the blues?