The Giving Tree

By Biodiversivist | Posted on July 19, 2009

If you have children, you are probably familiar with The Giving Tree. Our version is a Stella cherry tree. My neighbor, Farmer Breakfield, allowed me to plant it on his property in the side yard between our houses way back when my first born was not yet a year old. It was just a stick, barely eight feet high. He was a good neighbor and ate many a cherry from that tree before passing on.

My wife and I were having dinner on our front porch the other day watching the starlings and crows that had descended on Stella (the name given to this tree by my daughters) when suddenly, like a cannon shot going off, a hawk attacked. The birds exploded out of the tree and within a second or so there was dead silence. Over Lake Union the flock of forty or fifty starlings was weaving through the air in an evasive maneuver, looking very much like a school of black fish. The crows had disappeared.

Viva Las Wilderness!

By Chris Clarke | Posted on May 16, 2009

As long as I’m posting videos today — maybe we can make that a Saturday tradition here at The Clade! — here’s a wonderful new promotional piece for the Nevada Wilderness Project. The NWP is fighting to preserve some of the most-threatened landscapes around in one of the most anti-environmental climates around, and they deserve our support.

Even if they didn’t, the video has some great images of places I love. Check it out.

Stop Soot

By Chris Clarke | Posted on April 25, 2009

Recent press coverage of the fact that black carbon may be responsible for almost a fifth of global warming has focused on emissions from smoky Third World cookstoves. But much of the soot causing problems in the Arctic comes from North American and European industrial sources. As this video from Earthjustice’s Stop Soot project shows, those of us in affluent nations can do something besides scold poor people for not using solar box cookers. (Though we should all be using them!)