About a mile from my childhood home flowed the Onion River, the water turgid with clay, cow manure and urine. Occasional sections were wooded but much of the wetland near to the river was used as heifer pasture. Abused would be a better word. Over the years much of the trampled riparian zone had been…
Is there a Biblical or theological ‘view’ of play? I think not. Examples come to mind: God’s creation of the platypus, for example, or the kangaroo, or the echidna (God seemed to fool around with Australia an awful lot). The Bible does speak about creation and recreation (as in re-creation). This is tied to the…
Years ago, I remember shopping at Safeway with three of our children and humming, then whistling, and sometimes singing. The children were aghast and suitably embarrassed. What made it worse was that the song stuck in my head was the Genevan tune to Psalm 89: ♫ “Forever I will sing of your great love, O…
Imagine a tree species whose range covered roughly 300,000 square miles from southern Ontario to Alabama, from Maine to Georgia, from Wisconsin to Arkansas. Now imagine that this tree species produced superb, straight-grained wood that was extremely resistant to decay. This tree was used to build houses, make split-rail fences, furniture, shingles, paper and telephone…
I asked a Christian Reformed church member about the size of his former dairy farm, what the land was like – if there was any forest on it? He said that he kept trees in a piece because, well, “we did a lot of clearing and it seemed good to leave a little in forest.”…
Not too far away from my home, logging companies have plans to log the headwaters and mid-reaches of several small creeks. According to laws, they must do a survey to determine if the creeks and rills are fish-bearing. If there are sections of the creeks that don’t have fish, dry up in summer or are…
My week usually begins with three children being delivered to our farm for piano lessons. Each gets about a fifteen-minute lesson. The other two do outdoor chores with Betsey as the payment for their lesson. This particular week didn’t follow the pattern. Due to a prior commitment of mine with some mallard ducks, the lessons…
Full of the zeal of a Grade-9er, I rushed into my science classroom. “Hey, Mr. Pollet, do you. . . ‘’ Mr. interrupted brusquely: “Curt, watch your mouth. No ‘hay’ around here. Straw is cheaper. Grass is free. Now try it again.” “Excuse me, Sir, could I tell you something about our fishing trip.” I…
Heather Looy and John R. Wood’s article “Save the planet; Eat bugs: Why it’s time for the West to embrace edible insects” (CC, Sept. 20) inspired this column. I agree that the Biblical story about Peter and Cornelius and the vision of the lowered sheet is not about clean or unclean foods: it is, as…
I watched a TV show recently about hunting in Miami. Not near Miami, but in Miami. Florida, U.S.A. Most of us have heard about introduced, invasive Burmese pythons wreaking havoc in the Everglades. But this was not the Everglades. The hunters on the TV show were actually boating down canals in the city of Miami…
A commentator from the U.K. says this about our landscapes: “It’s about wildness, whether we’re talking about our gardens or the wider countryside. Nature hates neat. What wildlife needs is often the scruffy patches and the bits around the edge. Across the country, we’re losing a lot of our scruffiness.” A friend of mine (now deceased) used…
Once upon a time, back in the days of St. Arthur of Smithers, a class of very, very young scholars decided to put some duck eggs in an incubator. When the days were accomplished when the shells should be delivered of the ducklings, alas, two eggs did not hatch. Three days later, the scholars consigned…
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