Fragments From Floyd

Good Book

We're ordering a copy. Not that Good Book, but sort of on a related thread of commentary. It's called God's Politics, and it's not what you'd think in the present incarnation of God as Republican.

Jim Wallis of Sojourners doesn't deny the importance of "moral values" as issues of public concern. He does, however, insist we go beyond the hot-button issues of right-to-life and same-sex marriage. And from what I've seen, he is able to bring this discussion to prominence in an even-handed and respectful way. His book and the discussions it is promoting are drawing out of hiding those of us who have become disgusted with the lack of voices from anywhere but the right-most edges of the faith--from those who have their bully pulpit now in this administration. More summary about the book, here.

You can watch Mr. Wallis appearance on the John Stewart show. We heard him also a couple of weeks back on Fresh Air.

Never Knew a Stranger

"The true white of snow gives the lie to colors that seem to be white on snowless days. Against the new snow, our farmhouse, newly painted two years ago, shows a graying in the paint and a dun dusting from the road. We think of it as a white house, but it is rather far off-white on snowy days. And how odd the "yellow" lab dog looks against pure white. Tsuga's markings become conspicuous-- especially the darker places. The back legs above the feet, the tip of his tail and ears--all show red-foxy tones. On the bank behind the house, his darkest parts match the tawny broomsedge standing bent in the snow." ~ Fragment

And leaving the sensory experiences behind, I suppose this is as good a place and time as any for a dog-parent's lament. It's just like with kids: if somebody comes by that you were really anxious to get to know your precious darling, to see how mature and bright they've become since the last visit from said guest, well...you can be sure little Suzie (or Tsuga) will pitch a royal tizzie, putting on their very worst behavior. You just wanna crawl in a hole and die.

"He never acts like this when it's just us here. I don't know what gets into him" we say, explaining away the tantrum as a flaw of nature rather than nurture.

And so, we must offer our apologies to the neighbor who stopped to chat in front of the house last week, only to have the dog insist he MUST put paws on the man's shoulders while the fellow sat there with his engine idling and his car window down. And to the St. Lawrences, who even brought the dog a treat and then to have him become the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil right before their astonished eyes!

Should we ignore his attention-seeking? Try distraction? Time out? Counseling? But then the close encounter with his inner demon passes, the visitors (understandably) move on, and Tsuga reverts to the model best-friend he almost always is to us. Not to suggest he doesn't have his encounters with his inner wolf, even then--for instance, when he digs away the mulch from our blueberrie bushes as he's doing in this picture. He'll do anything for a rodent morsel. Moles and mice are two specific triggers that push his buttons. Hmmm. I wonder: if we had a half dozen field mice frozen in a ziplock bag when the next house guest comes by...

Day in a Blogger's Life

Yep. Blogging has its traps and excesses. But most bloggers do seek a balance between standing out and fitting in; between being heard and listening to other voices; between teaching and learning.

For almost three years now, there have been known and submerged needs met by Fragments from Floyd that make it an essential part of my day and my life, if not quite so central as Clark Kent here in the cartoon. (But then, you'd have to ask Ann about that.)

Soon, someone new to the medium of blogging will be able to see between two covers a hundred reasons to explain why bloggers pour their thoughts, hopes and insights into words each day.

The book, 100 Bloggers, may reach the shelves by sometime in the spring. I will be as anxious as any to see what the overall feel of it is like. I can only tell you for certain that it will contain a chapter with a thread of thought familiar to those who come to this page with any regularity.

For our chapter, I invited Lorianne Disabato of Hoarded Ordinaries. She invited Beth Adams of Cassandra Pages; and Beth invited Tom Montag of MiddleWesterner. I think its safe to say that this "place-based" focus will be just one unique thread in a diverse weave of blogging expertise and points of view.

It will be an adventure to see where this goes and what happens next. There is an unknown alchemy at work. One hundred bloggers spin their words from as many places around the world, and then in this one book, their straw may turn into something altogether unexpected!

Saturday Jots...

* I was in the same room with TWO bloggers yesterday--right in the teeny town of Floyd. Looks like there may be a new kid on the block before long. Doug and I have divided the blogging turf north and south of 221. What will we do if David St. Lawrence (and his blogophilic spouse Gretchen) move to Floyd County? Dave says he'll take the downtown beat, and he's already started moving into the territory with his impromptu photoshoot and interviews at Oddfellas this week. Dave posted the Cafe del Sol segment from that very same internet cafe, creating quite a stir among those who never saw a blog in action before.

* Snow's coming. This can't be right: my wife is off for three days. The way it usually works is she's snowed in at work and I'm stranded with the dog and cat for a three-day blizzard. Good fortune makes me a leetle speecious, Lucy. Tsuga will think he's died and gone to heaven with all the attention he'll get snowed inside a day or so. And for the couple who said they needed a Tsuga-fix, I'll post one later today or tomorrow.

* In the never-ending quest for efficiency and as yet another step in the unending process of filling my hard drive with software, I've downloaded and installed the 1-Click button from Answers.com. Pretty neat. For instance, I wondered what the weather was in Vancouver where my son is now. Wow. Great info about the city, it's history and points of interest--way more focused that shuffling through the 3 million Google hits from typing the city's name.

* Well, thank goodness we're past the Moon Wars for this month. Maybe. Doug has declared the next photo-campaign will be "snow and ice". That's a little closer to my earthy interest and more compatible with my available focal length and experience. Of course, he can also dip into his forty-year archive of images of winters past. I say "Bring it On". Dueling Digitals. Anybody suggest a banjo theme song?

* Duct Tape. Even in the realm of photography, it is indispensable. My Coolpix had a part failure: a three millimeter plastic "clasp" that holds the battery compartment door broke off about two months back. I could see that the part was held in place by tiny screws, and so should be able to be replaced easily and inexpensively. He said. Nikon service sent back an estimate: $235. I paid $10 to have it returned, and a silver strip of the miracle mender now stands boldly against the black camera body. Class. That's what DT gives everything it touches. Character and class. If this is so, I am one classy character.

* Well we have guests coming (if the snow holds off) and so we be doing the YesM'am Shuffle. I gotta go.

Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be

Today I pulled a scrap of paper from the pocket of a pair of pants I hadn't worn since mid-December. My heart sank. The registrar's information printout reminded me that I had been a poor judge of character and probably deserved to never see my loaned books again.

I was honestly quite impressed with the student--older, more mature, obviously sincere and highly motivated to become a lawyer, he said. In a semester almost entirely devoid of a sense of having made any difference at all in the minds and hearts of my students, my hour conversation with T. sent me home feeling that I had helped steer this nice young man toward a better future. I had challenged him, encouraged him, particularly along the lines of his proposed ecology research topic. I so wanted him to get to the meat of the issues that in full confidence, I loaned him four out-of-print books from my personal library. I have honed a keen sense over the years of who to trust, and I could trust this chap. I was sure of that.

Then, I noticed he rarely came to class during the three weeks before the research papers were due. He missed the third test. He didn't hand in his paper. And by the end of the term, in spite of three emails that grew increasingly impatient and threatening, he never came by the office, never called and didn't return my emails. He got an F in the course. And so after exams, I got his home town information from the registrar and stuck that in my pocket. About that time, I got an apologetic email from him promising he would bring the books by my house, mail them to me, whatever I wanted.

I resisted responding with the bitterness of one betrayed and simply told him please just bring them by my office at the very beginning of Spring term (which was two weeks ago now.) I've heard nothing. It seems he has not enrolled for classes this semester.

I just called his hometown address and spoke with his father who did not seem concerned his son had not honored a promise. I have the former enrollee's cell phone number. I want my books back. But mostly, I want my confidence back and my trust. I would have sworn this person held to a higher standard than this episode suggests. I'd like to tell him how disappointed I am, how much hope I once held for his promising future. But I suppose I'll just ask to get back what I gave him. Apparently, that was never as much as I had thought.

Vanishing Point

They remind me of the Monolith in 2001:A Space Odyssey. There is a certain unknowable quality in these massive trunks. But here, there are three, from the same roots--as much tree under my feet as towering-tapering overhead. They were here long before me, and will hold off the decomposers longer than I will. My children can come to this place decades from now and feel mortality and eternity in these favorite tulip poplars up at the head of the valley. My ashes will go just here--in the tight trinity of silent life that seems to reach toward heaven.

Moon Wars

Yeah. War. This is like pigmies attacking the MotherShip with sharp sticks and rocks. Sometimes, they just ain't enough rocks. Okay Doug, this is the best I've got for now. (The full image I cropped for the one earlier this week. I guess that's cheating, but hey...)

There will be a new full moon in February. And even pigmies who start out small can grow a little.

And by the way, thanks for selling me your Nikon hand-me-downs, even if well, compared to some, I am focal-length impaired. Length isn't everything. Nor height, said the pigmy.

ADDENDUM: This just as a way of warning: I finally this morning (duh!) figured out I shouldn't be using the averaging light metering to get moon details. Yeah, it's a crappy image, hand-held at a 50th of a second off the back porch; and the moon was behind something, as it almost always is down here where the sun never shines, and the moon, not often. But I'm figuring this out, Sir Douglas. Be afraid. Be very afraid. (Or at least stop to catch your breath while laughing.)

Slippery Slope: After The Fall

As you may recall, when the first part of this tale ended, the author lay sprawled spread-eagle on the icy brink of disaster. A wrong move-any movement at all-seemed destined to be his last.

I dare not move for fear of taking the same path I'd already seen my briefcase travel some minutes earlier. As I hit the ice, my bags flew out of my hands. I watched helplessly as my satchel slalomed down past the fruit trees, bounced over the moguls in the yard, swooshed past the garden fence and ski-jumped over the lip of the stone wall, airborne into the dark ice-encased forest and out of sight. I didn't want to go there. Oh Lord, make me a bird, so I can fly far; far, far away.

But I dare not just lay there. It had started to rain again. The longer I was still, the wetter I became. My body heat drained away and the internal gears were grinding slower, weaker every moment. All at once, from want of food, from the delusions that come from a chilling brain and from the sheer absurdity of it all, I began to laugh out loud. Surely soon I would wake up from this preposterous winter dream. But no. The quakes of laughter were all it took to break what little traction my wet body held against the lubricated ledge, and I began my spinning, spread-eagle slide down the rest of the slippery slope. A sorry tangle of arms and legs came to rest just short of the rock wall ski jump. I was, at least, spared the agony of that particular defeat.

At the edge of the woods beyond the garden where I came to rest, there were trees to clutch. I managed to grab a small an ice-coated trunk and pull myself unsteadily to my knees. The silhouette of the cabin roof was barely visible against a foreboding, gray-pink sky. I winched my way tree to tree over the ice, back up through the woods and onto the road, exhausted and drenched with sweat even in the frigid cold. At last, I reached the cabin, but my heart sank: the steps had become impassable-an eight-tiered waterfall of ice.

My mental and physical resources were exhausted and there was no humor left. My first impulse was to shake my fist angrily at the heavens. My second thought was to simply sit right down in the ice at the foot of the steps to see if it was true that freezing to death was actually not so bad once you became numb all over and your metabolism reached the point where thought and pain were merely faint shadows. A brilliant white tunnel of light would point to a place warm and safe, with hot vegetable soup waiting in a golden bowl.

In a last twilight of consciousness before total indifference consented to defeat, I was able to reach an old shovel under the steps. I busted through the ice enough to expose enough wood to give a little traction. At the top of the steps, my numb fingers fumbled in the dark with the key in the door lock. It occurred to me in my growing stupor that maybe I was even at the wrong house. The world had obviously been under a New Order for the last few hours, possibly under control of the White Witch of Narnia. I wouldn't know for sure until I got inside this door.

The lock turned in slow motion and the cabin door opened. I entered a dark womb of relative warmth, and began to reinhabit my former limbs digit by digit. About that time, the phone rang. It was Ann in Carolina. She asked casually what I was up to.

"Oh, I had a little trouble getting home today" I slurred. "Listen: how 'bout if I call you back after I've had me a little soup? I can't tell you how badly I need a hot meal." If I had, she wouldn't have believed me.

I kindled the fire in the stove and soon it cast warm flickering light into the cold shadows. With the cat in my lap, I ate my soup cupped in my hands in my favorite bowl. The last thing I remember is crawling under the covers alone, slipping down, down peacefully into a long dreamless winter sleep.

T I M B E R!

Well, the yard between the house and garden looks like the aftermath of Mt. St. Helens. Three large pines, three medium walnuts, and the large walnut being toppled here lie just where they hit the ground the day before the arctic blast and snow came in last Thursday. Winter has a way of changing one's best laid plans, and sometimes, we just accept that parts of our job list are in temporary cryogenic storage.

I am standing on the hillside up above the garden, looking beyond the walnut into the pasture along Nameless Creek. This image is number 6 of 8. With the camera set on "continuous", the first shot shows sawdust flying and the bar just hitting the hinge, but the trunk was still vertical. As the trunk falls left, Craig shifts away to the right. In the last shot, the trunk is still in the air, left foreground, and Craig is following it with his eyes til it hits the ground.

"That's the only drug I do" he told me. "What a rush!"

I brought him in to see his TreeTrimmer Action Shots. I'll put the eight images on a CD and give it to him when he comes back to finish up. He says he'll have to get one of his kids to make it play: "I don't even know how to turn one of those things on."

It is a nice sequence, very like a freeze-frame movie segment. Sorry I can't post all of them for a click-through.

With Crackers

A nursing home resident was celebrating his 100th birthday. A stunning young woman knocked gently on his door. He asked her what she needed. She entered the room, closing the door behind her and said, "Your friends went together and bought you a very special birthday present."

He asked, "Wh-wh-what is it?"

She responded, "Super sex."

After thinking for a few seconds he said, "I think I'll have the soup."

January Moon

What you can't tell from this image is that it was 4 degrees while my bare hands attempted to steady the lens against a front porch column. Talk about your grab shots...

It's All Clear To Me Now

I don't know how this simple tweak got past me for a year and a half since the new XP-loaded machine arrived. I've made more than a few customizations to my system to make it fit what I do and the way I do it. But few things have made such universally and immediately- noticable improvements in the appearance of my desktop applications as improving the sharpness of my fonts--that is, much clearer text in every application that uses words!

If you want background on this first--and customization--go here. If you just want the quick generic fix, it follows:

Right click on a blank area of the Desktop and choose [Properties]
Click on the Appearance Tab; Click Effects
Check the box: Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts
In the drop down box select: Clear Type

Some systems must reboot. I saw the change instantly. Your mileage may vary. But to my eyes, things just got a whole lot clearer.

And speaking of tweaks: I'd be very surprised if you couldn't find something helpful on this great page of tips and tweaks for XP. I have it bookmarked for future reference.

Morning Visitations

I had stepped out onto the back porch to bring in the morning's first bundle of firewood. I glanced at the thermometer on the porch rail: in the dark, I couldn't say for certain, but it was darned close to zero. I remember noticing how, while the cold singed my nose when I breathed in the air, it didn't have the bite that yesterday's 30 mph winds gave it. And then it happened. I wish I could tell you what it was.

Ann thought I'd fallen on the porch or had for some reason dropped a forty-pound load of firewood. I thought a tree had hit the roof, although there was no sharp crack of metal or of breaking. Whatever it was it shook the house, and it seemed to me it came from upstairs--as if someone had dropped a hundred-pound bag of horsefeed flat on the wood floor of the second story just overhead. I met Ann rushing out as I rushed in.

"What da heck?" we both said. I checked the roofline all around; the upstairs porch; the front porch roof; and the Very Back Room where things in storage are prone to fall from their haphazard stacks and piles. Nothing. The water still flows. No broken bones show through the siding of the house and its exterior angles all seem plumb. The floors still seem as level as the ever weren't.

We've lived in old houses that creaked and moaned in the cold. If that's what this was, it must have been some deep visceral pain the old house was telling us about. But then, we may never know what things go THUMP in the night.

UPDATE: We were just upstairs, now that it's good and light, looking for an explanation to our morning mystery. Ann called from the 'red room': Fred! Look-- a fox!" We both watched through the window as a large dark-phase red fox loped cross the creek and moved away, down the middle of the snow-covered road to disappear behind the pines. Just then Ann said "There's another one!" and a smaller, very red and svelt fox followed in the tracks of the first. These were the first and second foxes (female, then male?) we've seen here in five years. It's been an interesting morning!

Snowbirds

Snowbirds leap for tiny seeds of broomsedge. Their cold feet leave cuneiform slits and wedges in the soft snow, like crop circles that appear out of nowhere. There is play in their work, tiny swingers of birches. Their antics in a motionless world are reason enough to have hope for spring. Meanwhile, I will try to think kindly of winter. ~ Fragments, 11 Dec 2002

I wrote that two winters ago after watching the scene I describe, and I'm not sure I've seen such avian acrobatics since. This morning in preparing the 'winter' part of my upcoming presentation, I read this part of the script and scrawled in the margins "Watch for Snowbirds out kitchen window. Need this shot." Not half an hour later I glanced outside and there they were, close enough for a fair image and a keeper to include in my talk.

Tethered

A soft sifted snow fell overnight, each flake falling tethered to an invisible line, lowered from heaven, not falling, really--lowered into place, just so, predestined, piling up white against every dark angle.

Power(less)Point

Maybe subconsciously I've used it as an excuse to avoid doing a hard thing. I've told myself that getting the desired effect for slide transitions in PowerPoint was something I needed help to do; it must be easy and I'm making it unnecessarily hard. But now, after consulting the experts, it's not me, it's you. The problem lies in the fact that this MS software is not a tool of artistic expression but rather a bullet-maker that's a bit fancier than it needs to be for that pragmatic and utilitarian business function.

Windows MovieMaker would be just the ticket if all I wanted was to view it on a computer monitor or TV screen. But for projecting images across space, the compressed images just don't hang together. "You should be doing this on a MAC" was the underlying message at the Media Center on Thursday.

But it is amazing how liberating it is to know your bridges have been burned. I got more done yesterday than in any previous week, knowing it was my way or the highway. Giving up on the ideal, I hunkered down and worked on the real, and it is coming along. It won't be as polished as I'd hoped, but I'm probably the only one who'll know that.

I learned what building and room my presentation (on March 19) will be in and am meeting with the systems manager for that building next week to trial some sample images on the very machine they will ultimately be projected from. I have the name of the artist I'll be sharing the hour with and will call today to see what he can tell me about what his part of our program will be like. (I'm designated as the 'convener' of the hour so suppose I have to give a brief overview.)

With not quite two months to go, I guess I'm in pretty good shape. But I'd best be working more and talking less. I gotta go.

Aldered States

In the monochrome of our first snow, catkins of the alders along Nameless Creek offer the rare alternative to white. No one else could tell it, but the inverted Oreo of black and white in the background is our barn.

Countin' Flowers On the Wall

I am enduring meteorologically-induced bachelorhood this weekend. Nannette of the North Subarued out of here at noon today in three inches of snow and I expect her back about this time (dark-thirty) on Sunday. A winter storm, you ask? No, a mere "winter weather advisory", meaning "it's coming and it won't be pretty." Sleet, freezing drizzle and winds up to 55 mph are expected over the next 24 hours. And T-dog and I will enjoy it together, just the two of us guys. I just fixed leftover rice and chicken for supper, after a lunch of chicken and rice. We WILL clean out the leftovers from the freezer in the next two days, won't we Tsuga buddy?

As for the dog, he had forgotten that he experienced one winter already, though admittedly as a youngish pup. So when the flakes started falling yesterday, he was mesmerized. It started after dark, and since it was our first snowfall of the season, we were mesmerized too. Ann and I and stepped out onto the back porch to watch the flakes fall in the light of the floods on the corner of the house. Well the dog went bonkers! It took us a minute to figure out what he was up to, running this way and that, stopping, pouncing, digging.

Tsuga's world is not like the one we humans live in, you see. In the summertime, the butterflies tormented him. Well, no, not the butterflies themselves, but their shadows. He chased their shadows frantically on sunny days, never looking up to see the creature that made them. And when and where he lost track of any given shadow, he began digging furiously, knowing the thing had burrowed into the earth just there. And it's the same with that darned snow. The shadows of the flakes falling last night were disappearing all around him, and he was going in after them!

Later, before bedtime, we took a walk down the road with the snow falling. There is a quiet unique to falling snow. And the creek, running under ice, has a sound altogether different to its summer self. Visual memory: the dog in his motion-activated collar of flashing red lights. Ann and her catalog finds. This one, I'll have to say, makes for some psychedelic walks at night, especially against the falling red snow! Dude!

And while we're on the subject of wifely catalog purchases: she wanted a powerful light so we could see the deer in the pasture at night. Came in the mail last week. Is a million candle-power strong enough for you? This is true! Yes, you need a shoulder harness to carry the thing, but it flat throws a light. By spring, I expect all of the wildlife that ventures within a quarter mile of this death ray will suffer retinal burns. Once zapped by this ray-gun, blinded squirrels will jump from limbs into nothing but empty space. Rabbits will leap into solid sod, unable to tell it from a whole in the ground. Deer will run full speed into large oak trees and owls will fly into the side of the barn. We'll be excommunicated for sure from the Friends of Wildlife.

Meanwhile, for some odd reason, the old Statler Brother's song keeps looping in my head.

Countin' flowers on the wall That don't bother me at all Playin' solitaire till dawn with a deck of fifty-one Smokin' cigarettes and watchin' Captain Kangaroo Now don't tell me I've nothin' to do

Yawn. It's gonna be a long winter.

The Monster Tree of Goose Creek

We hadn't planned originally to take out the biggest walnut--just to take out the big fork in it with the weak crotch left of Craig, the Treeman here. But it turns out, there was a reason the red squirrels liked that tree so much: there was rot in the center of it just above Craig's head. And if we intended to expand our garden (now that we had more access to summer sky with the smaller walnuts removed) the big one would have to go too. As you may know, walnut parts (including roots) contain a compound that is toxic and inhibits the growth of competing plants (like Silver Queen, BetterBoy and Kentucky Wonder!)

Craig and Bill are coming back in a couple of days to carry away the largest pieces. Bill makes custom furniture and capitalizes on the odd forks, irregularities and gnarled qualities of larger, older, imperfect trees. He has a five foot saw (that he brings to the site) that will plank right through the crotch of this one to make a Y-shaped solid wood table top with this tree's wizened grain and character. Wish we could afford to buy it when it's made, or even had a place for such in this smallish house. Instead, I'll barter him the wood for one of his Adirondack chairs--out of locust, if he has it--so it will take the weather should I leave it out under the stars.

It was a big job. But Craig was just happy I didn't want to take out the gargantuan maple behind him! Can you imagine how big a saw THAT would take!?

(I grinned when I first saw this image yesterday. Because of the way the picture was taken, the viewer has no idea of how much distance is between the two trees; the eye puts them on the same plane relative to the viewer and judges size based on known objects like Craig and the ladder. Yep, now that's a tree!)

...And I in My Cap

Meteorology and the logistics of our long yesterday conspired to make last night the coldest indoor sleeping we've been exposed to since last winter--or maybe since the winter before that. This wild fluctuation in our thermal comfort zone is the downside of wood heat when you're not home to tend the fires.

As the only body part not covered by four blankets, my head gets cold when it's fifty-something overnight. It brings to mind nights under the stars in a tent on the cold ground. Pulling the covers over my face brings on dreams of suffocating confinement in small places. There has got to be a better way. I'm sure I am not alone in this wish for a warm noggin in the wee hours of a cold night.

So you'd think the catologs would be full of night-time headgear--and perhaps they are. But even if there was an entire website devoted to sleepware for the manly head, I am too cheap to spend money for such. And besides, how are you supposed to keep one of those long-pointy tassled nightcaps in place as you toss and turn and dream of evil-icy fingers poking at your ears?

Pragmatist that I am, I think Ma has the better idea when she settles down for a long winter's nap: a kerchief. Tied under the neck. Swaddles the tender earpans, stays in place with a simple square knot. There you have it. I have a soft scarf in a masculine heather brown (although a camo-pattern would be even better) that will go in the drawer right next to my silk long johns. So tonight, my ears will sleep snuggily under fleece. And forget it: this is not a fashion statement and there will not be a picture of me modeling my winter headgear. Ever. Probably.

The Slippery Slope of Winter ~ Part One

Since few readers of the Floyd Press are also Fragments readers, I've taken the liberty to revise some pre-existing stories and such for the "Roads Less Traveled" column. Today in the weekly paper, the second part will appear. To bring you up to speed, here's Part One of "The Slippery Slope of Winter"...a Fragments rerun, but new, perhaps, for some. Part Two soon to follow.

---

There was just me and the cat that year, living alone in a cabin on Walnut Knob. Only two of the dozen homes beyond ours were occupied over winter. The isolation was profound and ominous when fog roosted against the Blue Ridge for weeks on end. And with the fog in winter came the ice. There was one evil ice storm I remember especially-a day when the White Witch almost claimed me for good.

It was nearly dark that ice-foggy January afternoon. I groped along the icy road toward home in four-wheel-drive, creeping along from one fence post to the next as each came into view in the dim frozen mist. "Stay in the center of the road; don't brake or change direction suddenly. Get as close to the cabin as you can before abandoning ship" I repeated aloud to boost my courage. At least the freezing rain had stopped, but already a good inch of ice coated the wire of the pasture fence beside the road-my only visible guide toward home in the white fog.

Then at last, all the tension melted away like an April snow as the truck slid sideways off the road to the top of my driveway. I let go my death-grip on the steering wheel and breathed a prolonged sigh of relief, thanking a merciful God for the angels in ice cleats who had managed to keep me out of two miles of frozen ditch. Already I was thinking about the big crock-pot of vegetable soup waiting for me inside the dark, cold little cabin. I could imagine the salty fragrance when I opened the door; I could almost feel the soothing heat radiating from the woodstove and see myself inside, curled up, warm cat in lap, contentedly watching Seinfeld. I was home! But it turned out that I was more than an hour away yet, with miles to go before I slept.

I eased my city shoes onto the glassy driveway, and by holding onto the truck door was able to stand while I tucked my briefcase under one arm, a sack of groceries from Farmers Foods under the other. I turned to kick the door closed with my foot in habitual fashion, and about here is where the story began to go, well, down hill. I had parked at the top of the drive where my intended path would take me a level fifty feet to the porch steps. The other ice-covered lane descended steeply down the north-facing slope a hundred feet to the garden.

Alas, the inertia as I kicked the door shut combined with the icy absence of friction sent me sprawling backwards, spread-eagle on the ice, to my horror trending in the direction of the road less traveled, downhill, toward the garden, and I was utterly and completely helpless. I might as well have had my skeleton removed (like Gary Larsen's boneless chickens) so futile were my efforts to rise even to my hands and knees. I lay their motionless. Think brain, think. If I began to slide farther downhill at this point, I would most certainly build momentum along the garden path until I came to a jolting stop jack-knifed around or straddling a fence post.

Each attempt to stand only drew me inches closer to the point of no return. Resistance was futile. In the end, I reasoned that, like the drunk found uninjured asleep in the mangled car who escaped death by virtue of his highly relaxed condition, I must relinquish control and let gravity and fate carry me where they would-a sledding bug on the icy windshield of life.

Will our human bobsled ever be united with his warm cat and salty soup? Will his wife drive up from Carolina the following weekend and find Fred an object of frozen yard art? Tune in again next time for the final installment of "The Slippery Slope of Winter."

Fragments Frozen Phalanges

Yowzers. Four degrees out there in the dark. "Never stick your tongue on a a frozen keyboard" comes to mind (apologies to Garrison.) My fingers are not happy. There is not enough hot coffee in the county to warm up my typing hands this morning. That's just as well. Long day: leave by 8, lab 9 til noon, class 2 til 4, home in time to stoke the woodstove, walk the dog, scarf down a quick bite and leave again for a meeting. Home finally by 10.

So, instead of a thousand words, let me direct you to ten thousand words-worth of pictures just added to the gallery last night. (The last ten are new entries.) Back in the saddle tomorrow. See you then.

A Surplus of Shade

We have summer shade to give away. More light, though, we have to buy.

Last year was a terrible gardening year. Wasn't so for everybody, but certainly for us. Our neighbors got "right many mayters, taters and beans" since there was neither too much rain (like '03) or too little (like '02). But we barely made a meal of what came from our vegetable patch this year. Our problem was a very local matter: our ground never got warm because the sun never reached it. We have a surplus of shade.

I remember the pleasant light of a summer day silhouetting their branches against the bright sky on cool early June mornings. I often stood in awe of the slanting shafts dappled through the feathery filter of their leaves. To the south and east of the garden, the walnuts grew until they reached such fullness and height that they blocked what little light we get on the valley floor. No light, no heat. Seeds rotted without sprouting. Seeds that took root never bore fruit. What should have been ripe in July barely matured by the end of August. If we are going to be serious about growing and canning produce, we would have to sacrifice that beautiful light and drop the trees.

Their trunks were too big for my saw, and for all of them, the best place to bring them down was right across the gravel road. I called the local tree man to make short work of getting them down and the trunks out of the road. Now the rest--clearing brush, cutting limbs to poles and trunks into 14" rounds for stovewood--will take me a few days to deal with. A couple of the larger boles I'll offer to a local furniture maker. That, and a cord of firewood we'll have when the job is done will offset the cost of paying for the felling.

And in the end, there is no price too high for Silver Queen picked fresh in August. We'll expand our garden now that the trees are gone--maybe put a few fruit trees in the relatively deer-free confines of the electric fence. But I can already tell you that standing in unobstructed sunlight in a warm garden in July, I'm going to recall the beautiful shade and coolness cast by fronds of walnut. I'll miss the flutter of their yellow leaflets in September. And next winter as I sit reading by the woodstove watching walnut wood turn to hot coals, I'll remember that I'm feeling the warmth of summer sun that, once upon a time, was stolen from my garden.

Through a Glass, Dimly

Written then retraced in my student notebook for Ecology 206, I remember these words clearly: "You can never do only ONE THING."

In an interlocking web of cause and effect and feedback/feedfoward loops, when confronting the workings of ecosystems, every action has more than the desired or anticipated consequences. This kind of ecological understanding should engender a way of looking at the world that is contrary to the simplistic, mechanical clockwork explanation for how our actions impact the rest of the living world. And yet, almost forty years later, we still tend to think in a linear way about the biosphere (if we regard it at all) and one solution will almost inevitably bring about residual problems and an infinite regression of unforseen consequences. Fix one thing, break another. Our understanding is cloudy at best.

And now, it is not merely the existance of a single species or habitat that can be broken by our ignorance, indifference or bull-headedness. As human population continues to grow and our impact on the biosphere extends into a new century of unprecedented conversion of matter into heat and gas and floating specks of airborne dust, we've made a mess of things. Our best intentions (and we have too few of them) often are our worst enemies. Consider the case of "Global Dimming" from a recent BBC Science program:

...the most alarming aspect of global dimming is that it may have led scientists to underestimate the true power of the greenhouse effect. They know how much extra energy is being trapped in the Earth's atmosphere by the extra carbon dioxide (CO2) we have placed there. What has been surprising is that this extra energy has so far resulted in a temperature rise of just 0.6 degrees C.

This has led many scientists to conclude that the present-day climate is less sensitive to the effects of carbon dioxide than it was, say, during the ice age, when a similar rise in CO2 led to a temperature rise of 6 degrees C. But it now appears the warming from greenhouse gases has been offset by a strong cooling effect from dimming - in effect two of our pollutants have been cancelling each other out. This means that the climate may in fact be more sensitive to the greenhouse effect than thought.

...Even the most pessimistic forecasts of global warming may now have to be drastically revised upwards. That means a temperature rise of 10 degrees C by 2100 could be on the cards, giving the UK a climate like that of North Africa, and rendering many parts of the world uninhabitable. That is unless we act urgently to curb our emissions of greenhouse gases.

Addendum: I didn't realise how current a broadcast Global Dimming is. Andy from the UK has just added his perspective after viewing the program. He points out some of the damned-if-we-do/don't conundrums inherent in rejecting or accepting this new mass of data.

Noble Savage

It says in our contract that, for every goofy picture of Himself that I might post here, there must be at the very least ONE image that is much more flattering to present him in a noble and flattering light (as he appears on this frosty morning jog.)

I can understand his insistence that this be written into our agreement. But I have also insisted that for his part, for every time his behavior makes it seem that he is smarter than I am, he has to feign "just a dumb animal" so I can maintain my illusion of superiority. Not a bad deal, don't you think?

Monuments

I know these boulders, massive and anchored by gravity, are a long way from where they were born. They seem permanent, but like me, these silent monuments are merely passing through. Larger than a man, these motionless stones are every bit as moveable now as the day a thousand years ago when they were dropped at the edge of what we now call 'our creek'.

In raging torrents of snow melt from a long-vanished mountaintop thousands of feet above where they stand, each stone bounced and jostled downstream over the millenia as if it were nothing more than a child's rubber duck spinning and lurching along the spring branch.

Boulders resting at the edge of our creek are not fixed. Nor am I. We both hold the illusions of immortality, my frailing body and these falsely immutable stones. ~ fragment

Blogging: The Book

Well this has been brewing for a month now and finally it's okay to tell you about it.

Some of your blogging acquaintances will have a "chapter" in a forthcoming book written by bloggers and about--what else?--the not-quite-mainstream realm of the weblog.

The project has taken several twists and turns since its first inception, and all for the better. The plan now is to take as the starting point the first twenty-five bloggers who said yes to an offer to participate. Each of the 25 will link their chapter to another blogger-kindred-spirit, who will do the same, and the third in this line will link to a fourth. So: twenty-five bloggers and their blog progeny, leading to the book name (tentative): 100 Bloggers: An Introduction & Invitation to Blogging.

You can take a look at the list on Jon Strande's blog where the project originated. Yup. I squeezed in at #24, and when first offered this opportunity, after looking at each of the weblogs already in the list before me, I wrote Jon and offered genuinely that I thought there had been some mistake. Fragments hardly meshes with the predominant theme of the other 24 (mostly business/communications/marketing-related) bloggers in the list (with the possible exception of Chris Corrigan, whose Bowen Island Journal was one of the first "Place blogs" I became aware of three years ago.) I told Jon I felt like a fish on a bicycle. He encouraged me to stay on. And as it turns out, I am very glad I did, because...

I've tapped my first bloglink partner and she's enthusiastically agreed to continue the thread that Fragments begins in the book. Lorianne, of Hoarded Ordinaries will take her own spin on the world through blogging (about place, about interior space, in her own unique way) and pass the quill pen and ink on to... Well, we have the rest of the little place-blogger side-branch almost in place, but I'll let you know when it's official. I think you'll be happy to see some faces familiar to many of you who visit Fragments from time to time. This should be fun!

Joy To The World

I can't give this as much thought as I'd like to this morning; I can only give it to you for thought.

I can't tease out all the reasons the quotation below seems right for this moment. But it is tied up with my pondering about grief in the world of late, and it occurs to me that its opposite is not pleasure; it comes perhaps from being among college students again, seeing their plenty, but knowing there's no ultimate satisfaction in all of one's things.

I've been thinking about what drives us as a people and where that seems to be taking us. American pop culture puts such a high value on the transient commodities of happiness and pleasure that come from what we own and none toward the laying down through our lives of a lasting foundation of relationships, values and purpose directed beyond ourselves toward the illusive property that CS Lewis calls Joy.

And the final straw was that, for some reason when I woke up this morning, a Christmas song was running through my head.

It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, 'in another dimension' . . . an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from happiness and from pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is. CS Lewis, Surprised by Joy

What th' Hay

I need to get this bio to Nantahala pretty soon. I've looked at the contributors' page to get an idea of content and length. Here's what I've cobbled together. If you read it and have emergency sirens go off, give me a holler. I'm not married to it. Just engaged. It's all one paragraph because that is the format they seem to follow.

Fred First is an Alabama native who has followed a trail across three southern Appalachian states and through as many careers to find a perfect fit in the Virginia Blue Ridge county of Floyd--a county with a single traffic light that Fred says "offers progressive living in the Slow Lane." After teaching biology for twelve years, then caring for patients as a physical therapist for as many years, his third calling is leading him toward discovery of place and belonging. He credits his weblog, Fragments from Floyd, for the motivation to write (and post his photographs) daily. Out of these photo-journal entries have come more than a dozen essays on the Roanoke NPR station as well as pieces in GreenPrints, Birmingham Arts Journal, Blue Ridge Country Magazine, and elsewhere. He contributes a bimonthly column, The Road Less Traveled, to the local Floyd Press. Fred has come full circle, returning recently to adjunct faculty status at Radford University while he continues to pursue his passion of collecting images in words and pixels from the ordinary beauties near home. He feels confident that someday out of all this, he will decide what he's going to do when he grows up.

Teamwork

Tom, Elizabeth, and Trish: It's been a while--almost a year--since you so kindly agreed to do some editing for me on the "eagle" piece. Your help was offered without making me feel uneasy for asking and your suggestions made it a stronger piece. I'd actually forgotten that I'd sent it off--back in May when I was just getting over the impulse to publish--and would not have thought another thing about it.

But then yesterday, out of the blue, I received word that On Eagle Wings has been accepted for publication. And I am most happy that, even though it is a very fine online journal that perhaps not many outside our part of the country are aware of, the Nantahala Review is high on the list of places I'd hoped to place something. NR has seen fit to include me in their list of contributors in the Winter-Spring 2005 edition. There are names well-known to me among the Appalachian authors and poets there--Wendell Berry, Ron Rash, Silas House--and I'll be happy to have my digital bytes hang out with theirs on the same screen.

So thanks, kind editor-friends, for your contribution to this small writerly success. And thanks, Fragments readers, for lending me your ears and giving me a reason to write out this little bit of memoir in the early months of blogging two years ago. I never would have bothered talking if you had not been there to listen. I mean it.

Goblets and Goblins

Ice forms along the creek, clear as crystal glass, blue-green as a glacier. Fluted. Filigreed. Lacey. Cancellous. How granular and rough it is here at the top of a rocky ledge; and just there in the shadow of the bluff, a smooth, flat sheet protects itself by reflecting the pale pastel light of a weak winter sun. Ice buttons and balls, goblets and goblins form on the drab grasses at water's edge, trimming the stream with bright translucent ornaments that are different each day. Air bubbles crawl downstream rodent-like under thin sheets of ice in a warren of liquid and crystal. From the cold mid-winter of 2003

I could have driven to the house where it was warm. Instead, I followed the shaft of light that spilled through bare branches onto the creek bed beside the road a mile from home. There, as fate would have it, I discovered the Ice Goblin nursery. You can never see them very well, and this is why few people know of them. They grow in unreachable places at the most intemperate of seasons, out of view. But I did manage to get this one shot of four half-formed Ice Goblins, with their broad, flat feet (that help them walk on soft snow) and their stocky legs and knobby knees. When I stopped the next day at the very same place, they had been birthed--fully formed and stalking the cold shadows of Goose Creek. The next week of warm December, they returned to the green-flowing waters.

But they'll be back soon and you'll know it. When, in an utter calm beside the fire, a shiver comes of a sudden, you've an Ice Goblin near by.

Crystal Candelabra

The two weeks before Christmas brought us had an unbroken stretch of mornings with temps in the single digits. Muddy ruts in the road were frozen sharp and hard; ice creeped in from the edges of the creeks, soon to hide their babble and flow for the long, cold winter.

Driving home from the post office one of those days, I was tempted to stop and take a few pictures of the ice formations. Nah. I could just as well come back tomorrow, I thought. But then I remembered my own best advice to myself: never think you'll come this way again. What is now may not be then. I'm glad I stopped that day.

We're into our third week now of unseasonably warm weather. The ice has long since melted and the surface frosting turned to pudding of mud over frozen earth underneath. Our January thaw started in late December. Who knows how long it will last. Maybe I've taken all the ice images I'm going to take for the season. If it stays this warm for long, I'll be photographing Bloodroot in February.

Therapeutic Attraction: Magnets for Pain?

I've confessed here before that I know more than I understand about many things. One of these areas where I can't explain what I know has to do with the controversial, oft-disclaimed, alternative medicine phenomenon of using magnets for pain. There is currently not a good explanation of how they might work, and IF they have anything more than a placebo effect also is unclear. I know that for me, for a certain kind of recurring muscle pain (myofascial pain), a half-dollar-sized magnet taped over the spot (usually upper back) has a significant effect on that particular kind of pain. I wouldn't have believed it, and as a health professional, I was loathe to confess it.

Last month the British Medical Journal published an article titled "Randomised controlled trial of magnetic bracelets for relieving pain in osteoarthritis of the hip and knee." The results suggested there may be something going on. And here, a magnetic wrist bracelet was worn for its effects on hip and knee arthritic pain--sites some distance from the magnet. Maybe some day, if there is a biological effect, we'll understand it better, and like acupuncture, the mechanism will reveal something about how the body operates that we would never have guessed.

YooHoo, YaHoo

I got my class roster by email this morning. Sigh. I have real students (a mere 24 vs last semester's 70) who will be expecting to start getting their money's worth on Tuesday. (Well, no, that isn't exactly right. As I told my class attendees from last term: students seem to be the only consumer population who want to know how LITTLE they can get for their money. Oh please give us half a can of creamed corn and let us go home early!)

So, I'm putting feet on my intentions--one of which was to trial the use of an Instant Messenger for discussion and such. I've decided to tolerate YaHoo's IM and I have to put it to work before I pretend to be able to answer their questions about it.

My username is fred1st (at Yahoo dot com) and if a few of you own this little program, send me a wee message so I can start my way up the learning curve. It's been quite a while since I was one of the early adopters of ICQ--whose message alert--a heart-stopping UH-OH!!--resulted in spilled coffee more than once.

Salamander Falls

There is a story that goes with this image. I'm still trying to decide if it's a blog post, a Floyd Press column, a radio essay, or none of the above. I'll let you know.

The Usual Friday Soup

Things I wish I'd seen in my front yard: Doug's eagle

Things I wish I hadn't seen: The crowd of oriental folk who seem about to be swept away by a tsunami (image posted here on Jan05.) Not. We've been duped yet again. The oriental folk pictured running from the "tsunami" aren't. Different place, different excess of water, save your tears--at least for these particular watchers. Thanks, Jon, for pointing us to Snopes for the real scoop. And to carry this deception to a deeper foundational level about what is real, Jon points us to The Numbing of the American Mind. How many different flavors of "real" do you see?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...some loose ends from last Friday's blahblahblog post:

Thanks to a couple of helpful reader-friends who own the Epson 2200, I've been able to decide I can live without it at just this point in my photographic life. I ordered the Canon PIXMA 5000. If I need archival quality or bigger than 8 x 10, I'll hire my favorite local printer.

I do appreciate the thoughts pro-and-con re starting a second blog for the purpose of more pundit-oid posts than Fragments would accommodate. Most commenters opted for keeping everything in the same odd basket, and that is what I will do for now. And so mostly (but not purely) in the future as in the past, posts will continue to come from what I know, see and feel--subjects on which I am the sole expert and for which I do not need research or supporting documentation. The urge to write from the gut is equally compelling for me, particularly at this point in our cultural and political history, and I think my points of view are not altogether unfounded. But argument and debate is an energy-sucker and a time-parasite I don't need to foster just now. I'll try to find that elusive middle ground here, to share both what meets my eye and what vexes my heart and mind.

A new photoessay (old to Fragments readers) has been posted to Floyd Virginia Online. Somehow, readers from the oddest, far-off places seem to find these little vignettes from our tiny corner of the planet. I appreciate FVO hosting these greeting cards from Goose Creek.

Favorite word of the week: bloviate--to speak or write verbosely and windily.

Favorite quote: Anon: "A blank page is God's way of showing you how hard it is to be God."

And finally, here's one I meant to post the week before Christmas, but it got lost in the turkey and cranberry sauce. I would have encouraged you to participate in Buy Nothing Day. New to Adbusters? Here's a favorite.

Crichton and the Wages of Sin

I am on a new schedule as I mentioned a few days ago. Blogging will come at odd times, sometimes not at all as I put the Anatomy and Physiology class prep first, even during my usual blogging time between 4:30 and 7:00 in the mornings. But I wanted to follow up while I still could on some loose threads from recent posts.

First, I appreciate the link from Feste to Michael Crichton's Press Club speech, because I wondered if what a few commenters had said was indeed true. "Crichton's writing fiction, it's spin is to sell books" implying that the obvious bias of the book against "the environmental movement" was just a construct to promote controversy and book sales.

I suggest you read the speech. In it, Crichton does make some interesting comparisons between environmentalism and religion. I'll let you read his analogies and see how he lays the mantle of the Judeo-Christian faith over the shoulders of modern-day environmentalists. Some of this fits a certain segment of "believers" who long for an illusory Eden of environmental bliss. But he paints with too broad a brush and only exposes the large human story of error by omission and commission (sin), regret (conviction of guilt) over the consequences of our mistakes (repentance) and an effort to make right the damage we've caused (conversion followed by evangelism). This is too universal a human story, and in this, I think his metaphor loses a good bit of its sting.

[Aside: My head is still trying to reconcile the paradoxes of this liberal-conservative, for-and-against dichotomy implied by the author's interpretation. In his blanket summation of the "delusion" of the environmentalists, it is the liberal leftish types who are spreading the environmental save-the-earth "faith" (not fact, according to Crichton) while the conservative Christian right are the agnostic "lost" and fail to see the light of Truth, distrustful of the gospel (climate models), insisting "show me the scars" (the Arctic glacial melt lapping at their ankles.) It is a crazy quilt of loose threads I dare not start plucking now.]

It's an interesting way of looking at the problem, but I'm afraid Crichton can't pull this off by claiming that global warming and the potential for climate change is a myth. Yet in this same speech, he tells us that HE knows: DDT wasn't harmful and shouldn't have been banned. He tells us that HE knows that second hand smoke is not harmful, scientists knew this, and passed restrictive laws anyway. And there is more that he knows that he probably shouldn't have told us in this Press Club speech.

Before I end this post and this particular thread of discussion and get on with my day job, if you're inclined, there is a point by point discussion of Crighton's characters, plot and accuracy at RealClimate--a blog by those doing the work, complete with copious comments from both sides of the fence. In this kind of exchange, even if his point was to sell books or discredit environmentalists as deluded religious zealots, Crighton may have started a helpful dialogue.

---

Addendum/Additional reading: "After Tomorrow" in Orion Magazine is written by Peter Demenocal, an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University, where he conducts research at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He serves on scientific steering committees for the National Science Foundation, American Geophysical Union, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Defiance

Dogs can be so child-like. Maybe that is part of the reason we become so attached to them. They come as puppies, then they grow up and stay childlike, but never ask for the keys to the car.

Tsuga knows that if he goes down to the bottom of the second step, he will be on the Forbidden Carpet and get a scolding; or worse, a tepid threatening with a limply-folder newspaper.

So. What does he do? Poised acrobatically like this with his front feet on the sofa hovering over the carpet and back legs on the hardwood, he whines pitifully at the injustice of the law. Like a defiant child, he bends the rule as you see here, by being "in" the off-limits room, but without technically violating any of the stupid rules about the carpet.

Don't you ever tell him, but I really sort of admire his spirit and his ingenuity. Is it a sin that he so wants to be where we are that he would stand precariously over the hot lava of disapproval?

There, But for...

I would have been right there watching the awesome power of nature, could not have resisted finding the best shot from the top of a car parked along the boardwalk. And when the curious waves turned hostile, I would have doubted my first fears. I would have hesitated just a bit. And even when I ran, like these lost souls, I would have been smiling.

What's All the Fuss?

The earth's climate appears to be in a state of change. Not everyone agrees why. Few earth scientists contest that global temperature is rising or that CO2 levels have increased along a very regular gradient for the past dozen decades. Some scientists--most, perhaps--attribute the CO2 level to burning of the carbon reserves stored in "fossil fuels" since the beginning of the industrial revolution; rates of CO2 injection increase each year. (There are other greenhouse gases as well.) A growing consensus of those who study such phenomena are concerned about the possible long-term effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

I am among the lay-public who thinks this perturbation has the potential to bring about drastic disruption to natural ecosystems and human communities. I recently frowned upon Michael Crichton's trivialization of the threat of climate change and his demonization of the scientists who look at the data and conclude there is room for concern in the mounting evidence. I've recently been called a nut-case for my position on this issue.

So I set off to see what the global-warming-is-a-hoax crowd uses for data to support their point of view. It seems that one very web-conspicuous clearinghouse that cheers the do-nothing approach is the Greening Earth Society. What a nice planet-friendly name. They even have a cute little pine cone for their symbol. Well let's see here. This organization hosts an informative article called "In Defense of Carbon Dioxide" that seems not to dispute the rising CO2 levels. Indeed, it goes on to tell us how, in many ways, this is a beneficial and helpful global change that we should be happy about. Very interesting. So, not only should we not curtail our energy consumption and CO2 production, we should feel really good about making MORE by burning more fuel!

I wonder if there are any economic or political factors that color their interpretation of the data? What can I find out about Greening Earth scientists and their unique and very positive perspective on what most would consider a potential threat to the biological status quo?

Okay. Here we