Walking through nature with John Palka, a neuroscientist who loves plants and ponders big questions
It was April 20th of this year. We were sitting in our lovely three-season sun porch enjoying the coming of spring, I on the couch and Yvonne, opposite me, in her favorite gliding rocker. All of a sudden she exclaimed, “Look. There’s a duck on our railing!”
Nature’s Depths is dedicated to exploring the natural world, seeking to understand it to an ever greater degree, and cultivating a sense of being an integral part of it. In this post, however, I will explore not so much ways of understanding but rather ways of valuing. As we’ll see, understanding and valuing are closely intertwined.
While the colors of the winter months are mostly muted, spring brings fresh greens, pinks, yellows, and soon the full, vibrant palette of freshly emerged flowers. Where do all those fresh leaves and brilliant flowers come from? The buds.
Among the annual changes that occur in the deciduous forests of the Upper Midwest, the Northeast, and many parts of Canada is the extravagant production of the sweet sap of sugar maples (Acer saccharum, Family Sapindaceae) and a handful of other tree species.
Water is abundant on our Earth and is also essential for all of life as we know it. It is part of our daily experience—we see it, we drink it, we feel it on our skin. But what is water? How does it get the properties that are so familiar to us? Why is it central to the processes of life? Let’s take a look.
Today is the last day of 2017. As we look toward the future, it is a good time to contemplate what we have explored during the year just past and how it helps us grasp the place of our lives in the grand scheme of things.