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.

One summer I found myself assistant director of a YMCA overnight camp, a thousand miles from my friends. The authority of that role, trivial in the real world, isolated me at camp. Besides, I was a Yankee, and this was deepest Texas. I didn't know it, but it was a lucky circumstance, because the social vacuum made me, at 28, truly notice birds for the first time

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.

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.

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.