Introduction

For most of my life I have been immersed in the natural world.  My early memories are of mud, water, ferns, tide-pools, insects, birds, amphibians, and trees to climb.  Nature surrounds us, enfolds us, and directs our lives in ways we often fail to realize.

5ys old in a coastal live oak, my natural habitat

Despite our reliance on computers, cars, oil, and all the rest, and the damage our irresponsible use of these things has done to our planet and ourselves, these things all derive from nature.  The location of oil deposits are a relic of past distributions of plant and microbial life. Distribution of plants, animals, and other resources such as iron, gold, and bauxite deposits are a product of geology, which in turn is a result of solar system formation.  At each step we can look a little further back and deeper into the picture and see more of nature and how it affects us physically and socially.

Gold comes from supernovae, thus, indirectly, the Spanish conquering of Central and South America was, in part, due to the interaction of gravity, nuclear fusion, and the age of the universe.  Stars that become supernova are a result of the specific balance of elementary forces in our universe.

Tools are made in the shapes they are due to the evolutionary forces that shaped our bodies, which in turn are a result of the same elementary forces that lead to supernovae and the creation of gold.  Toast more often lands butter-side down because of the height of our tables.  The height of our tables is determined by our height, which is limited by the physical constraints imposed by the molecular bonds that hold the component pieces of our bodies together under the influence of one standard Earth gravity.  Toast falls butter-side down because of the strength of our bones.

This is nature, just as much as the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a Monarch butterfly, and the many thousand mile migration of those butterflies to a forest in northern Mexico.

There is not just a whole world to explore, there is a whole universe to explore, perhaps more than one.  In this blog I intend to explore those bits I can reach, physically or mentally.

I hope you enjoy what emerges on these pages.

Autumn in a post glacial landscape – Bristol Pond, Vermont