Sudbury Valley TrusteesConservation, Collaboration, and Community since 1953

The prospect of doing with less fossil fuel makes us writhe, like earthworms on hot asphalt. We really need some great ideas. Here's one I read online: trees that shade streets during the day and turn into street lamps at night. That's one of the improbable genetic engineering notions for the future of bioluminescence.

The experts in this field are insects. Alien, six-legged beasts whose blood isn't red; whose jaws move sideways. Some insects make honey, some make music, and some, when they want to find a girlfriend, light up their bellies.

To keep track of enemies, our vigilant species wants eyes in the sky. If you lacked satellites or airplanes, you’d post a lookout on the highest place around. For Native Americans in the Sudbury Valley, that was a hill they called Penobscot, “the steep rock place.” On its summit they built a stone platform from which, at 600 feet above sea level, they could view broad swaths of countryside in every direction.

If your daily travel includes Route 2 in Concord, you might recall a period of construction that took place a couple of years ago. After rush hour, huge lights illuminated the work site. Among the changes made to improve the highway was the addition of median barriers. Although they improve safety for cars, the barriers make the highway more hazardous for wild animals. Roads isolate natural communities, reducing the vigor of their gene pools and their ability to replenish themselves after catastrophes. And road kill has an impact on slow-reproducing species such as turtles.

I suppose most adults have mixed feelings about snow. Who doesn’t enjoy the quiet as it falls, or relish the transformation of familiar landscapes to purest white? But snow gets in our way, impedes travel, and it often becomes ice, threatening unpleasant surprises for those of us afflicted by gravity.

For my first Boy Scout camp out I was equipped with a down sleeping bag left over from World War II. That long wheezy night led grownups to conclude I was allergic to feathers—but for me the difficult breathing was just part of the overall strangeness of sleeping on hard ground among kids I didn’t know.

At dawn I heard one of my new companions shuffle between the old-fashioned pup tents, pulling up the pegs, removing the tension necessary to give them their shape. Collapsing the tents was a faux-comic ritual with these fellows.

On any morning walk, no matter how early or how cold, I see people outdoors with their dogs. The dogs, far more wide-awake than I, dash across parks in joyous pursuit of tennis balls. People cherish the companionship of their pets. It was sad, last week, to see, on the front page of the MetroWest Daily News, the photograph of the bereaved owners of a small dog that had been killed by a coyote.

Concord’s Natural Resources Commission hosts a Conservation Coffee, a breakfast gathering open to the public. Each monthly session follows a regular format. After announcements and updates from the leader, people take turns introducing themselves and speaking to any topic they choose. As the invisible spotlight works its way around the room, people raise a broad variety of subjects. Recycling. Water conservation. The management of community gardens. Litter.

The intelligence of crows is widely recognized. Some scientists link their smarts to their sociality—crows have to deal with relatives. Or, turned the other way, because crows (and other social animals) can cooperate they gain a survival advantage over solitary animals. For most bird species, families come and go with the seasons. Out from their eggs tumble homely lumps of imperious appetite. After frantic weeks of feeding, the youngsters fly away, family feeling fades, and it’s every bird for herself until next spring.

Have you read Walden lately? I doubt it, because Thoreau’s most famous book is not exactly a page-turner. Knowing that he wrote seven drafts before he published it, died-in-the-wool Thoreauvians regard Walden as a masterful literary performance in which each word has its proper place. That may be so, but plenty of readers find Walden a tough nut.

Taking the book as a whole, I include myself in that group, but I appreciate Thoreau’s way of putting things. Of insect music on warm autumn afternoons, he wrote, “Crickets usher in the evening of the year.”

There are two advantages to walking in the woods at this time of year. First, most insects you run into are kinds you like to see, such as dragonflies and butterflies. Few of the ambience-spoilers, mosquitoes and deer flies, make it past Labor Day. Secondly, these are the weeks when mushrooms look their best.

Earth whirls around the Sun so rapidly that nearly 2% of the circuit is completed every week. In my boyhood, this sense of rushing through the seasons gave me a sinking feeling every August. Freedom’s weeks drained away, their passing marked by the acquisition of uncomfortable garments. Each had to be tried on in the store, with my funny-looking self for the model, inspected by my mother and by random members of the public. To self-conscious, bespectacled me, this was torture.

Here’s a summertime riddle. I chase flies under the lights at Fenway Park. Having no mitt, I shag them with my mouth. I don’t attend day games. What’s my name?