This week’s essay takes its inspiration from Dinty Moore’s “Google Maps” form.
To interact with and read the story, in any order you choose, please click through the markers on the map.
An Update from the Author
As Eco Stories enters its fourth week, I am taking a moment to step back and reflect on the mission of the site. I have decided that posting one essay every two weeks will allow for more thoroughly researched content –trips to the archives, to research sites, etc –to allow you a deeper peek into the local environment.
So, look for the next post in a week. In the meantime, thank you for reading and sharing!
The making of a green city
At few millennia ago, Italy’s forests lay nearly bare –stripped down to the bones for the extravagant heating and building needs of some 60 million Romans at the height of the empire. Desperate for fresh supplies, the Romans looked up for a more frugal answer: the sun.
Mapping a community’s air
The word volatile has many meanings.
It can, for example, convey the violently responsive and on-edge –as in, a volatile person, or a volatile situation to avoid. Volatile can describe an object that is elusive, or one that can’t be held down. It can mean a thing that flies, as in the Spanish volador. Or it can mean, in the most scientific and precise terms, a chemical substance that is poised to evaporate at normal temperatures.
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The moon garden
All the moon’s light is borrowed: a gift from the sun, which alone illuminates our way through the solar system. For every 400,000 photons of sunlight that make the eight-minute trip to earth, exactly one will bounce off the moon on its way to us. This is because the moon is as fine a mirror… Continue reading The moon garden
Welcome to the Eco Storybook
In my college introduction to botany, the first thing we were asked to remember was not a complex chemical equation, or the scientific name of a plant, or the many, many steps of photosynthesis. In fact, it had nothing to do with our textbooks at all…
