Two Associated Press (AP) news-wire stories that appeared this first week of 2011 captured the dilemma that faces the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and residents of the Susquehanna-Chesapeake watershed this year. The headline of the first, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal and other papers (including Sunbury’s Daily Item) Jan. 3, rang like an alarm [...]
Growing up in a big-city agnostic Unitarian household with a fondness for Emerson and Thoreau and farm-family connections, Thanksgiving was always my special holiday, carrying with it a link between a vague but overarching spirituality and nature, in its aspects of harvest-time at the winding down of the old year. I can remember as a [...]
Historical and ecological conservation overlap in the work of many land conservancies and allied efforts. Sometimes an issue comes up that challenges the values behind that vital connection in a particularly sharp way. Such an issue in the news again is whether to build a casino at Gettysburg, antithetical as such a proposal is to [...]
So on Sunday we were in Beaverland in Snyder County, first at an Orthodox house-church service in Beavertown where our oldest Nick afterward gave a rendition of the story of Joseph during coffee hour dressed in a coat of many colors he had made at Bible camp–and including a conversation with the kids about whether [...]
” ‘…Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?’ ‘A man may do both,’ said Aragorn. ‘For not we but those who come after us will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the [...]
Wendell Berry writes about family and marriage ecologically: “We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one’s partiality. But to encapsulate these partial relationships is to entrap and condemn them in their partiality… They are enlivened and given the possibilty of renewal by the double [...]
Last night I filled in for my colleague Katie Faull at a presentation to the Wyalusing Community Develop Corp., talking about the proposal to the National Park Service for a Susquehanna national historic trail linked to the John Smith Chesapeake Trail (Katie’s mother just died, may her memory be eternal). It was a great group [...]
Curt E. Brennan, a forest maintenance staffer in Tioga County, begins his book “Rattler Tales from Northcentral Pennsylvania” with a description of an area in the northern tier known as the Big Woods and the Black Forest, which the book shows superimposed on a map of counties (one historian working on a project about local [...]
The meaning of this season of Lent in early English is simply “spring.” Paradoxically, Fr. Dan Kovalak, who lives on a small creek running into the Susquehanna in Faxon, recently described the season to a group of children in this way (you must imagine his deep James-Earl-Jones-style baritone tempered by singing with the Don Cossacks): [...]
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