55 results for author: Dan Barth
Modern Abolitionists – All
I remember trout fishing in the mountains just east of Salt Lake City when we lived there in the '60s. Beautiful, clear, achingly cold streams in mountain valleys so picturesque you almost didn't care if you caught any fish at all. The prize might well have been just breathing in the view along with the cool, clean air. One hot afternoon I followed a small feeder stream away from the river I had been fishing. About a hundred yards or so up the ravine the small stream literally disappeared under a dark, thick wall of shrubs and scrub oak. I spread some branches apart, almost like a curtain, and peered in, finding a dimly lit, shady glen with ...
Indinawemaaganidog – We are ALL Related
Many Native American tribes have a word meaning "We are ALL related". For the Ojibwe people that word is Indinawemaaganidog. It represents a concept foreign to English speakers in its all-encompassing inclusivity. Not only are all people part of a single family, but so is all of life on this fine planet, including rocks and mountains, rivers and lakes. Knowingly, living in a world full of family is rich with implications. We respect family, we honor and love our family. We are grateful for gifts given, wanting to give something in return. Most importantly, we feel a strong need to protect and care for our family members. Living in ...
November Marsh Marigolds
If not the very first to flower in the Central Wisconsin spring, the radiant yellow Marsh Marigold is by far the most exciting of the spring ephemerals. These perky bouquets love shallow seeps of water, poking their golden heads above a green nest of round edged leaves, and where conditions are favorable, they carpet the wet, leafless spring woods for several glorious weeks in April. My first picture this year is dated April 14th, about the time our Forsythia blooms. This early splash of color in the drab days not long after winter's end is joy incarnate. It demands a trip into the ditch for pictures that get enthusiastically shared broadly ...
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 ...