If every one of us did this one thing, how much impact could we have?
Read MoreAll articles filed in environment
The Everyday Environmentalist
With Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris agreement yesterday, those of us who are passionate about care of the earth are, if not surprised, still frustrated. What we are not is powerless. If the data in this chart, or this one is accurate (and as I’ve been hearing variations on this theme a…
Read MoreIn Which I Visit A Wind Farm and Alex Rolls His Eyes Repeatedly
What shall I say about wind turbines? The way Alex geeks out about Percy Jackson and Star Wars is the way I geek out about wind farms. I think they are really cool. (Alex says I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, geek out about wind farms. He says I don’t know anything about…
Read MoreWhy was I excited for the papal encyclical? The challenge of Laudato Si (Reblog)
I’ve been following blogger Margaret Felice for quite some time, and when I read the following post late last week, I felt as if it was written just for me. I admit I have not had time to dig into Laudato Si yet, but I officially downloaded it onto my computer for an upcoming road trip. In…
Read MoreWhere Have The Fireflies Gone?
I miss fireflies. When I was little, the fireflies were everywhere. I remember trekking through the tall grass north of the house to the pond with my cousin and catching one to bring back and put in a jar, where we watched it all night. Apparently as a child I wasn’t as creeped out by…
Read MoreHow Our Family Practices Environmental Stewardship
Every so often it occurs to me that to many people it might sound hypocritical for a person who chose to have four children to say she values conservation of resources. In this day and age, it’s sort of assumed that more people automatically converts to greater strain on the environment. Well, we had many…
Read MoreWhat’s YOUR Problem?
Life is unpredictable, but over the past several years I’ve learned there’s one thing I can count on with absolute certainty: somewhere between one week and two days before university graduation, I will lose my voice. It happens virtually every semester, just before I join the platform party at honors convocation as the official singer…
Read MoreItching For A Fight (a 7QT post)
___1___ It began Tuesday morning, when I pulled into a spot at the public library twenty minutes before it opened. I let Michael get in the driver’s seat and play with all those fun controls while we waited. We were not the only people killing time between school dropoff and library opening time. There were…
Read MoreA Farm Story
Growing up on the farm is on a short list of things that define who I am. My memories are filled with gigantic, buttery harvest moons rising through the jagged tips of cornstalks, of leaf piles reduced to pulsing embers that mirrored the night sky, of glittering frosty dawns and mist hanging over the woods,…
Read MoreLiving Mindfully
I think most of us, most of the time, don’t think about what we’re doing. I think we live our lives on inertia, nudged by forces we’re not even aware of in directions whose validity we never question. Most of what we do is done on autopilot, a series of habits we’re not even aware…
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Kathleen M. Basi 