When you think of the Middle East you mostly think of it as desert. And that is true, mostly it is that. But there was a time it was different landscape. Dry, yes, but more green than you might have thought. There are the famed cedars of Lebanon – once a deep forest there. And…

If you are like me you don’t think too much of string or rope or cord. You pick it up at the store or get a roll of it delivered on Amazon but cordage is astonishing and one of the most amazing inventions or discoveries made by humans. The first houses were held together with…

‘They thought they were giving us a gift’ he said, ‘but they really took something away from us when they forced those cinderblock houses and corrugated metal roofs onto us. This is the beginning of a story that I heard an older man, Martin Prechtel, from Guatemala speak of when recounting part of his youth…

If you are on top of reading about what is happening to the climate and the impacts it is having on all life it is easy and understandable to be frightened. Properly so. It’s scary. You can go down the line and look at the way the spiraling climate is impacting people and where and…

  For nearly 100 years the Sélune River in Normandy has had two dams installed on it – the Vezins and the La Roche Qui Boit. And just a few weeks ago the first irreperable breach was made in the the Vezins dam kicking off the largest individual dam removal project in Europe ever. The…

  A few months ago near Telluride, Colorado there was a giant landslide and two very large boulders  ended up blocking Highway 154. Nobody got hurt but plenty of inconvenience for many days as workarounds got devised. The smaller of the two boulders weighed about two million pounds and was blown up and carted off…

The patron saint of bridges is St. Bénézet. Bénézet had a dream that an angel commanded him to build a bridge across the Rhone river in his town of Avignon. Nobody believed it was possible but he allegedly lifted a stone that thirty men could not lift and dropped it in the river as the…

Unless your ancestors are from the the south of France you might not have even known that Occitan was a language at all. But for a long time this language was a common tongue across a decent swath of Europe. How have you never heard of it? Maybe you have heard of the The Troubadors,…

There are a lot of you out there reading this and I don’t know much about most of you but I know you and I share some values about where things come from and honoring and supporting those people and traditions. I am lucky in this regard to be connected to you in this way.…

Amna Eliot Abdelmahmoud. That is the name of a little girl born in Canada just a little more than a year ago. Her father Elamin Abdelmahmoud is from Sudan and he and his wife named her together. He wrote to her of their shared last name in a glorious piece: It’s long, and it’s bulky,…