52 results for author: Dan Barth
WALLS
Robert Frost said it first and clear enough: “Something there is that doesn't love a wall.” His walls were stony ones, upended and broken by frosty, heaving ground. The walls I do not love are stony too, built not on pastureland, though, but in the hearts of men and women. These heart-stone walls, held fast by a mortar mix of fear and a very human bent for being right and those different, dead wrong. We, thus, protect our neat and tidy interior lawns from the invasive and rambunctiously threatening swamps and woods beyond our perimeters. This tangled, messy jungle outside our wall is us, humanity, all eight and a tenth billion of ...
Frog Song, Earth Song and the Rights of Nature
Late in the afternoon, about three months ago my wife and I were given the opportunity to time travel right here in Central Wisconsin, and we took it. Time machines are stashed here and there in these parts, though to most they would look like a pond, or a small wetland, or even the little pockets of water that dot the woods each spring. I had just put away my ax after splitting some of next winter's firewood when we set off down the road. We had barely gone a hundred yards when we unexpectedly stepped through a kind of science fiction portal into a soundscape around two hundred million years old. Our time trip came about compliments of a choir of ...
Earth Day Celebration 2024
The unwavering flame of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson's environmental spirit burns brightly around the world each Earth Day. Alarmed by more and more shores fouled by oil spills, city air darkened by smog, rivers so polluted they caught fire and burned, and farmland tainted by pesticides, Nelson envisioned a world with clean air to breath, clean water to drink and healthy, clean soil to grow our food in. The result was the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, and it unified both Democrats and Republicans, city folk and country folk, rich and poor, business and industry in a common commitment to take better care of planet Earth.
This ...
EV’S THE TRUTH
The groundswell of trash talk around electric cars leaves me, an owner of both a Chevy Volt first, and now a Bolt, mystified, angry, but hardly speechless. Mystified, because the complaints about EV's bear no similarity to my own experience with them over the past six and a half years. Angry, because I'd bet good money that the source of the snow job comes directly from the fossil fuel industry first, and anyone hawking the Infernal Combustion Engine (ICE), second. After almost seven years behind the wheel of an EV here is what I have found.
My entry into the EV world was a Chevy Volt, a plug in hybrid – what they call a PHEV. You plug ...
Genuflecting In The Forest
Bearing witness to the carnage we of the Homo Sapiens lineage inflict on one another sours even the most optimistic of souls. What thoughtful person among us is not dragged inexorably down the dark whirlpool when confronted by yet another mother ravaged by the violent destruction of her dearly beloved, big eyed child? We use the language of hatred, spraying out machine gun words like terrorist, demon, migrant rapist, left wing thugs and countless others to make righteous our own terrorism and salve our night time pangs of guilt with their soothing unguent. Sad indeed, that we continue to beat this age old drum of hatred and bloodletting just as ...
The Gift of Yellow Leaves
If there be wood sprites at play upon this land let them dress up in all the yellows of a late autumn day. Glorious October yellow stands of unruly tamarack, meandering branches that twist and turn like dervishes, sublime with ecstasy, begin our journey across the enchanted north woods. Poplar and birch, both paper and gray, rise up on sturdy, ballet toes, twirl exuberantly yellow beyond compare. Even the few not yet naked maples glint yellow amid a myriad of other colors. You would never call it an explosion of yellow, or accuse the lemon forest of being ablaze. No, the lemon woods is too light, too sweet and far too happy for that. It ...
Looking for Monarch Butterflies
Where my wife and I used to count twenty or more Monarch caterpillars per mile feeding on milkweed along the country road we live on, not so this year. This past summer the most we counted in a one mile stretch was three. Often there have been none. While disappointing, it's not a huge surprise. Monarch numbers are crashing, dropping by 85% in just the last two decades according to The Center for Biological Diversity. There were around a billion of these delightful orange and black pollinators in 1996. Today the Eastern Monarch is considered endangered by the International Union of the Conservation of Nature. The U.S. Fish and ...
Don’t Tread on Me….Big Business!
Down the road whereon our home sits a neighbor flies the flag with a coiled rattlesnake and the words Don't tread on me written above it. I'm sure you've seen one like it. This is a flag with a history reaching to the mid eighteenth century. Back then the original colonies were pretty loosely connected and were facing off against the French and their Native American allies in what historians call the French and Indian War.
My neighbor's flag evolved from a political cartoon image that Benjamin Franklin first published in 1754. It depicted a snake chopped up into separate segments with the words Join or Die written under it and carried a very ...