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Mushroom Casket for Humans

September 11, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: The Optimist Daily.
Website the Optimist Daily says, “Mushroom caskets offer an earth-friendly goodbye in North America’s first burial of its kind.”

Blogger Will McMillan at A Musical Life on Planet Earth gave me the lead for today’s story. And because my husband and I just recently entertained two mushroom enthusiasts from a recent conference, I decided today was a good day to tell you how some folks take their love of mushrooms to the end — and beyond.

“Traditional burials,” writes the Optimist Daily, “though deeply meaningful, often come at a steep environmental cost. The chemicals, hardwood, and land use involved can have long-term ecological impacts. But a quiet revolution in burial traditions is beginning to bloom and its roots are made of mushrooms.

“In a first for North America, a burial using a fully biodegradable mushroom casket took place on a serene hillside in rural Maine. The Loop Living Cocoon, developed by Dutch company Loop Biotech, is made entirely from mycelium, the intricate root system of fungi. The casket is grown in just one week, naturally breaks down within 45 days, and enriches the soil it returns to.

“ ‘My father always told me that he wanted to be buried in the woods on the property that he loved so much,’ said Marsya Ancker, whose father Mark C. Ancker was laid to rest in the pioneering casket. ‘He wanted his final resting place to nourish the land and plants he cherished.’ …

“Though this was a first for North America, Loop Biotech has already facilitated more than 2,500 burials across Europe using mushroom caskets. Green burials are an alternative that avoids embalming fluids, hardwood caskets, and steel-reinforced concrete vaults, and they’ve been steadily growing in popularity since the 1990s.

“ ‘Since 2005, the Green Burial Council has certified over 250 providers and recorded 400+ green cemeteries across the U.S. and Canada: a clear sign of growing demand for environmentally conscious end-of-life choices,’ said Sam Perry, president of the Green Burial Council.

“The statistics are striking. According to the Council, conventional U.S. burials consume roughly 20 million board feet of wood, 4.3 million gallons of embalming fluid, and 1.6 million tons of concrete each year.

“Bob Hendrikx, founder of Loop Biotech, believes funerals can be more than a final goodbye. ‘We created the Loop Living Cocoon to offer a way for humans to enrich nature after death. It’s about leaving the world better than we found it.’

“The Global Green Burial Alliance, founded in 2022, is helping reshape global perspectives on death. Entirely volunteer-run, the organization connects families with green providers and empowers people to reclaim their voice in end-of-life decisions. …

“Ed Bixby, founder of the Global Green Burial Alliance, believes these choices create a legacy of compassion. … ‘To embrace the living with our death becomes the final act of kindness we can bestow upon our planet.’

“With innovations like the mushroom casket and a groundswell of interest in sustainable options, a cultural shift appears to be underway. It asks that we reimagine death not as an ending, but as a way to nourish new life.”

So there’s that.

Sometime I’ll tell you about our mycologist visitors. Theirs is a whole different world. And when you live in a retirement community and are in danger of too much sameness, “different” is especially welcome.

Consider for example, how we learned from these guys that truffles are actually all over the world but buried very deep. And how they might even have been the “manna” in the desert described in the Bible. They do grow in desert places like Saudi Arabia.

So says the CEO of MycoSymbiotics, William Padilla-Brown, who, we learned, was a speaker at the conference. His bio describes him as a “Multidisciplinary Citizen Scientist practicing social science, mycology, phycology, molecular biology, and additive manufacturing. William founded MycoSymbiotics in 2015, and has since developed it into the innovative practical applied biological science business it is today. William holds permaculture design certificates acquired through Susquehanna Permaculture and NGOZI, and a certificate from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in algal culturing techniques. He has published the first English-language books on cultivating the cordyceps mushroom and regularly leads courses on their cultivation. William’s research has been sponsored by several organizations and his work has been featured in multiple publications, including Fantastic Fungi and VICE. He also founded and manages MycoFest, an annual mushroom and arts festival, now on its eleventh year.”

So many unusual pursuits in this world! I am not knowledgeable enough to recommend the ideas of any mycologists or herbalists, nor am I planning a mushroom burial, but I sure am a sucker for anything interesting.

Doesn’t curiosity keep us all going?

More at the Optimist, here.

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Hollywood’s Unsustainable Ways

September 10, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Tracy Nguyen for NPR.
In general, Hollywood cares little for the “circular economy,” but this helicopter at Beachwood Services, originally used in Black Hawk Down, has been repurposed in Terminator 4, Suicide Squad and The A Team, among other movies and TV shows.

As I was working on a post in which actor Benedict Cumberbatch bemoaned the wastefulness of Hollywood, I ran across a contrary example. Apparently, some folks in that world care about the environment or maybe just see a buck to be made by repurposing sets.

A big part of Hollywood’s problem relates to being in a hurry and taking the easy way out.

First Cumberbatch at the Guardian.

Catherine Shoard writes, “Benedict Cumberbatch has called the Hollywood film industry ‘grossly wasteful,’ taking particular issue with its squandering of resources in the aid of set building, lighting – and bulking up physiques for blockbusters.

“ ‘It’s horrific eating beyond your appetite,’ Cumberbatch told Ruth Rogers on her food-focused podcast, Ruthie’s Table 4, adding that when he was shooting Marvel’s Doctor Strange, he would eat five meals a day. In addition, he would snack on boiled eggs, almonds and cheese, in order to try to ingest enough protein to transform his body.

“ ‘Going back to responsibility and resourcefulness and sustainability, it’s just like, “What am I doing? I could feed a family with the amount I’m eating,” ‘ Cumberbatch said.

“ ‘It’s a grossly wasteful industry,’ he continued. ‘Think about set builds that aren’t recycled, think about transport, think about food, think about housing, but also light and energy. The amount of wattage you need to create daylight and consistent light in a studio environment. It’s a lot of energy.’ “

So there’s that.

On the other hand, according to National Public Radio, “Beachwood Services, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, rents out sets and props for reuse that were originally built for its own productions.”

That spark of hope was reported by Chloe Veltman.

“For decades,” she says, “it was standard practice in Hollywood for art departments to build sets for movies and TV shows from scratch, and then break them down at the end of production and haul the pieces off to the landfill.

” ‘The dumpsters just line up at the end of the show,’ said veteran Hollywood art director Karen Steward of many productions she worked on, from the 1988 high school comedy Johnny Be Good, to the 2013 political action thriller Olympus Has Fallen. ‘And there’s no talking about it, because it’s time to get off the soundstage.’

“Steward is part of a group of like-minded Art Directors Guild members who have been pushing for more sustainable practices for years, along with other allies. At first, she said, it was hard at first to get much traction. ‘We’re all about not wasting time, and hurry up, and get it done, and time is money.’

“But Steward said things are becoming easier, as the industry is gradually coming to grips with its impact on human caused climate change. …

” ‘To find a true circular solution, a true zero waste idea, is what we’re working toward,’ she said.

“According to Earth Angel, an agency that helps productions in the U.S. and around the globe reduce their carbon footprints, the average TV show or movie in 2022 created about 240 tons of waste, with an estimated half of that amount coming from the disposal of props and sets.

” ‘There are definitely more innovative, efficient ways of working,’ said Earth Angel founder and CEO Emellie O’Brien. ‘

‘We often just don’t give people the space and the breathing room to uncover those solutions.’

“One such solution is to reuse old sets rather than always building new ones. Beachwood Services, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, rents out sets and props for reuse that were originally built for its own productions. Located in Santa Clarita, north of Los Angeles, its warehouses are packed with scenic gems. …

“Art directors sometimes resist the idea of reusing old sets, because they want to realize their own creative vision. But Sondra Garcia, Beachwood’s director of scenic operations, said the service allows them to alter what they rent to suit their needs.

” We tell people, “You’re going to put your own spin on it. You’re going to paint it. You’re going to reconfigure it. And then it is your design,” ‘ said Garcia. ‘The most important thing to remember is to recycle stuff because it’s less wasteful, and producers like it because it saves money.’

“And when those sets get too old to rent out to big-budget productions, they often wind up at places like EcoSet. Productions pay for the Los Angeles-based company to haul away their unwanted sets, props and construction materials. Instead of going to landfills, those treasures are then donated to whoever wants them. …

“But these solutions to Hollywood’s chronic waste problem only go so far.

“Ecoset’s owners don’t know what happens to all of the free stuff the business gives out — whether it’s recycled again or thrown away. Also, many warehouses around the region that used to keep old sets and props in circulation have downsized — Sony’s Beachwood Services formerly had five warehouses and now there are two — or have shuttered in the past couple of years, owing to rising real estate costs. …

” ‘I don’t think anyone in our industry would shy away from really hard challenges or else we wouldn’t be in our industry,’ said Everything Everywhere All at Once producer and sustainability champion Jonathan Wang. ‘But I do think it’s tricky.’

“Wang said despite people’s best intentions, a lot of materials still get thrown out in the rush to meet hectic production deadlines — including on his own sets.

” ‘I think it’s important to just acknowledge that we’re all figuring it out,’ Wang said. ‘We’re trying to do it better.’ “

More at NPR, here, and at the Guardian, here. No firewalls, but both those outlets need our support.

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Baseball for the Blind

September 9, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: John Lykowski.
Alex Gamino of the Chicago Comets takes a turn at bat at the 2024 Beep Baseball World Series in St. Charles, Missouri.

In an unusual story at the Christian Science Monitor, Jay Copp reports that “baseball for the blind” doesn’t mean listening to games on the radio but actually playing baseball in spite of a disability. The sport is called Beep Baseball. It has a ball that beeps, perhaps reminding Harry Potter fans of those airborne snitches with a mind of their own.

“Clad in a stylish red uniform with blue trim, Rich Schultz fiercely swings at the pitch and dashes toward the base. Mr. Schultz, a teacher, is one of more than 100 weekend warriors playing baseball on a recent Saturday morning at a sprawling park in a Chicago suburb. Eight teams from six states competed in the two-day tournament, in its 24th year.

“The Chicago Comets, Mr. Schultz’s team, won two and lost two. The camaraderie was more important than winning. ‘There’s a real sense of community – not only the guys on your team but the other teams,’ says Mr. Schultz. …

“The players are blind. The teams belong to the nationwide 24-team National Beep Baseball Association (NBBA), formed in 1976.

“Beep baseball is a modified version of the national pastime. The 16-inch ball has a noisemaker that beeps. A teammate, a sighted volunteer, serves as the pitcher. There are just two bases, 4-foot-tall padded cylinders. One of them will buzz when the batter strikes the ball. The batter is out if a fielder cleanly grabs the ball before the batter touches the base. Otherwise, a run is tallied.

“The games have the same varied pace of traditional baseball: stretches of inactivity, such as foul balls and swinging strikes, followed by frenetic action, with fielders scrambling and batters sprinting toward the bag. Most of the players grew up as avid baseball fans or played other sports as youths.

“ ‘He’s very competitive,’ says Christina Smerz of Mr. Schultz, her husband, who wrestled in high school, despite his lifelong blindness. ‘He gets a real sense of freedom playing sports.’ …

“Beep baseball has been on a steady upswing, according to Stephen Guerra, NBBA secretary. … The NBBA has 500 members, split about equally between players and volunteers. That’s double the number from two decades ago, according to Mr. Guerra, who is a player for the Minnesota Millers.

“Bob Costas, the Emmy-winning sports broadcaster, has promoted the World Series on both a baseball podcast and a video made for MindsEye, a nonprofit sponsoring the tournament. 

“Beep baseball dates from 1964 when Charles Fairbanks, an engineer at a telephone company, designed the first practical beeping baseball. Mirroring the general societal attitude toward those with disabilities, the sport evolved from a genteel, slow-moving one, in which players were basically coddled, into a highly competitive activity. Fielders dive after balls, and batters fling themselves into the padded bases. …

“Comet Dustin Youngren remembers his debut several years ago with vivid clarity. … ‘I was so nervous. But I hit it, got to the base, and scored a run – in my first at bat,’ says Mr. Youngren. … Beep baseball is a central part of his life. ‘I love my team. I get a lot of support,’ he says. ‘I want to play forever.’ …

“Begun in 1995, the Comets practice every Saturday during the season and play a 20-game schedule. The 12-member roster has fluctuated, but it often has included players as young as teenagers and women as well. Many on the team are either in school or gainfully employed. The current roster includes a rehabilitation therapist and an IT support system engineer.

“On hand at the recent Saturday game is David Smolka, a 60-something former league MVP. Cooper, his Labrador leader dog, lies at his feet. ‘I was pretty good,’ he says with a chuckle. ‘I’d get upset with myself if I didn’t do well. I learned to talk to myself and realize it’s OK to have a bad day, just like you might have a bad day at work.’

“Mr. Smolka coached the Comets when he retired from playing. His players learned much more than how to hit or field. ‘Some had to learn how to get to practice. They had to learn bus routes, how to get equipment,’ he says. ‘My mom never pampered me. I didn’t pamper them.’ …

“Beep players understand, all too well, that off the diamond it’s not an even playing field. ‘People look down on you. They think you should be flipping burgers,’ says Mr. Youngren. ‘I want to break that line of thinking, to show people what I can do.’

“Mr. Schultz teaches young people who are blind as part of his job as a special education teacher. He uses beep baseball to illustrate the possibilities for them. Often it’s their parents who need to be reached. ‘They can have such negative expectations,’ he says.”

At the Monitor, here, you can get more details, including how the play-by-play is narrated by someone who can’t see what’s happening.

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Making Art for an Octopus

September 8, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Shimabuku.
Unlike animals that spend their days eating, sleeping or mating, octopuses “have time to wander — time for hobbies,” says Shimabuku, who makes art for sea creatures to enjoy. 

There’s an artist in Japan who makes art for marine animals just to see how they react. The responses of octopuses seem to be the most gratifying to him. The whole time I was reading this story, I was wondering why I had never heard the naturalist Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus, talk about this on Boston Public Radio in one of her her weekly visits. I must have missed that day.

“When the Japanese artist Shimabuku was 31 years old,” writes Francesca Perry at CNN, “he took an octopus on a tour of Tokyo. After catching it from the sea with the help of a local fisherman in Akashi, a coastal city over 3 hours away from the Japanese capital by train, he transported the live creature in a temperature-controlled tank of seawater to show it the sights of Tokyo before returning it safely to its home the same day.

“ ‘I thought it would be nice,’ the artist, now 56, said about the experience, over a video call from his home in Naha, Japan. …

‘I wanted to take an octopus on a trip, but not to be eaten.’

“Documenting it on video, Shimabuku took the octopus to see the Tokyo Tower, before visiting the Tsukiji fish market, where the animal ‘reacted very strongly’ to seeing other octopuses on sale, the artist said. …

“The interspecies day trip, resulting in the 2000 video work ‘Then, I Decided to Give a Tour of Tokyo to the Octopus from Akashi,’ kickstarted a series of projects Shimabuku has undertaken over the decades that engage with octopuses in playful, inquisitive ways. A portion of this work is currently on show in the UK, in two exhibitions that explore humanity’s relationship with nature and animal life: ‘More than Human‘ at the Design Museum in London (through October 5) and ‘Sea Inside‘ at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich (through October 26).

“Fascinated by what the sea creatures might think, feel, or like, Shimabuku has documented their reactions to various experiences, from the city tour of Tokyo to being given specially crafted artworks. ‘They have a curiosity,’ he said. …

“When he lived in the Japanese city of Kobe, Shimabuku would go on fishing trips with local fisherman, taking the opportunity to learn about octopuses. ‘Traditionally we catch octopuses in empty ceramic pots — that’s my hometown custom,’ he said. Fishermen would throw hundreds of pots into the sea, wait two days, then retrieve them — finding octopuses inside. ‘Octopuses like narrow spaces so they just come into it,’ explained Shimabuku.

“When he saw the animals within the pots, he discovered they were ‘carrying things’: shells, stones, even bits of broken beer bottles. He began to save the small objects the octopuses had gathered. …

“Shimabuku started to think, ‘maybe I can make sculptures for them.’ … In his 2010 work ‘Sculpture for Octopuses: Exploring for Their Favorite Colors,’ Shimabuku crafted a selection of small glass balls and vessels, in various colors. At first, he went out in a fishing boat and threw the sculptures in the sea, ‘like a present to the octopuses.’ But then he wanted to see how the animals were reacting to the objects.

“Collaborating with the now-closed Suma Aqualife Park in Kobe, he repeated the effort in a large water tank, where he could film the reaction of octopuses.

“ ‘They played with them, and sometimes they carried them,’ said Shimabuku. … ‘They keep touching, touching.’ The resulting film, and photographs, show the octopuses wrapping their tentacles around some of the glass objects, grabbing and rolling them across the sand, and even holding them in their suckers as they move across the side of the tank.

“In 2024, Shimabuku had a landmark solo show at Centro Botín in Santander, Spain. Specially for the exhibition, he collected an assortment of glass and ceramic pots to offer to local octopuses. Some of the vessels were made by the artist and others were from ‘second-hand shops and eBay.’ …

“Although octopuses are colorblind, Shimabuku wanted to see through these projects whether they were attracted to objects of certain colors. ‘What I heard from fishermen is that octopuses like red,’ he said. ‘Long ago in Kobe, I found an octopus in a red pot, so I believe they like red.’ Perhaps more so than the hue, Shimabuku is convinced that octopuses are drawn to very ‘smooth, shiny’ glass objects. He doesn’t have evidence to back this up, [he’s just] a man entranced by eight-legged mollusks is dedicating his time to engaging with them through art.”

More at CNN, here.

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Swedish Town Tests a Sustainability Path

September 7, 2025 by suzannesmom

Illustration: Wingårdhs.
Tomelilla, a town in southeast Sweden, is focused on sustainability and has plans to build a school with reused materials.

With half of my family in Sweden for the fall semester, I am interested in Swedish stories. Here is one about residents in the Skåne district determined to live sustainably.

Abigail Sykes reports at the Guardian, “In a small town in Sweden, the local authority is carrying out an unusual experiment.

“In 2021 one of the team had been reading an article about the concept of doughnut economics – a circular way of thinking about the way we use resources – and he brought it up. ‘I just mentioned it casually at a meeting, as a tool to evaluate our new quality of life program, and it grew from there,’ says Stefan Persson, Tomelilla’s organizational development manager.

“The concept, developed by British economist Kate Raworth is fairly straightforward. The outer ring or ecological ceiling of the doughnut consists of the nine ‘planetary’ boundaries. These are the environmental limits that humans are at risk of passing – we’ve already crossed the safety thresholds on climate change, ocean acidification and biogeochemical flows, for example, but remain within safe limits on our atmospheric aerosol loading. The inner ring forms a social foundation of life’s essentials, and the ‘dough’ in between corresponds to a safe and just space for humanity, which meets the needs of people and planet. …

“ ‘Doughnut economics is like running a farm. Using an excess of resources, like nutrients, on your crops is a mistake. Not using enough is a mistake too,’ says Persson’s colleague Per-Martin Svensson, who is a farmer when he is not doing council work. …

“Doughnut economics is being used in Tomelilla, in Sweden’s southern Skåne region, in several ways. It has been integrated into financial planning and decision support, so that rather than building a new ice rink, the plan is now to revamp an existing building.

“The local government produces an annual portrait of how well it is doing at meeting doughnut economics targets. The best results in the latest diagram were on air quality, housing and social equality. Air quality in the area was good to begin with, but in order to keep improving it, young people at lower and upper secondary school have been given a free travel card for public transport. It is hoped the measure will also improve social equality in terms of access to education and health. Overcrowding and income disparities have both decreased, but it’s hard to link that directly to any of the council’s work.

“Education is a priority, but targets such as carbon emissions, biodiversity and health are more difficult to meet. Emissions have not been decreasing, but in 2023 the town council adopted a climate program to achieve net zero by 2045. …

“Tomelilla’s flagship doughnut economics project, though, is planning a new school. The council hasn’t built a school – or any other big development – since the 1990s. The project is still at an early stage so no decisions have been made about the final construction.

“Last year, a consultant report made recommendations for the project. These included using existing and carbon-neutral materials as far as possible, growing hemp as a building material on the current site; building the school around a greenhouse for growing vegetables as well as for educational and social activities; and making the school an off-grid energy producer using solar power and batteries. …

“This vision has carried over into the council’s procurement requirements, although budget constraints and other considerations have meant it is still unclear whether all of these ideas will come to fruition. …

“It has certainly been demanding. Is it even possible to use the resources needed for a large construction project and stay within the doughnut? Persson thinks it may not be possible but he is focusing on the bigger picture, with a more holistic view of social change. ‘In individual projects, there are always trade-offs. But we’re also looking at how the local community as a whole can move towards the doughnut model. I think that if we’re going to build anything, it should be democratic meeting places and schools.’ …

“Tomelilla is the first local government to attempt to deliver infrastructure and education using doughnut economics. … With a population of about 7,000, it is certainly one of the smallest towns in the international network of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, dwarfed by Barcelona, Glasgow and Mexico City, which are all putting Raworth’s theories into practice in local governments. …

“The people of Tomelilla welcome the challenge and are extremely proud of the way their town is forging a path. As Jonna Olsson, one of the staff at the council says: ‘Doughnut economics is a really interesting way to work with sustainability. It feels cool to be a cog in international change.’ ”

More at the Guardian, here. No firewall.

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Unsung Hero Cleans Kentucky Rivers

September 6, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Mike Wilkinson.
Russ Miller on a cleanup mission of Kentucky’s Red River in 2023. He received the nickname ‘River Cowboy’ after leading efforts to haul tires out of local waterways. 

Another story of one person making a difference. And for me, it’s always beneficial to have my preconceptions about different parts of America challenged.

Jessica Baltzersen writes at the Guardian, “I n the 1980s, Russ Miller and his wife moved to a far edge of eastern Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, where they built a homestead on a ridge hugged by three sides of the river. It’s the kind of place you can only get to with a hand-drawn map. A place so remote that the farther and farther you drive to get to it, the more unsure you are that you are in the right place.

“They would spend leisurely afternoons drifting the river in inner tubes, until they started noticing what floated alongside them: heaps of discarded junk.

“ ‘Back then, the river was embarrassing. It was a conveyor belt of trash,’ said Miller as he handed me a photograph showing a tributary choked with broken appliances, tires, plastic kiddie pools and even a rusted blue car. Chief among the junk: tires. …

“When Miller paddled past a tree where a tire had speared itself ‘like an olive on a toothpick,’ he realized that tire would be there forever, unless someone did something. So, he did. That fall, Miller gathered hundreds of tires then recruited friends to corral them downstream. Lacking boats, he devised a way to fill old tires with empty milk jugs to make them buoyant.

“ ‘That’s how he got the “River Cowboy” name,’ said Laura Gregory, watershed program director at Kentucky Waterways Alliance (KWA) and a friend of Miller’s who produced a documentary about his work. ‘He was the guy herding tires down the river.’ …

“Miller … has spent decades pulling a total estimated 3,000 to 4,000 tires from Kentucky’s waterways. He’s also one of the founding members of Friends of Red River (FORR), a grassroots cleanup group formed in 1996.

“Dumping waste tires outside a permitted disposal facility is illegal in Kentucky. Yet tires continue to pile up. Some are dumped out of convenience, others as part of calculated schemes.

“T ‘here are people who are basically professional dumpers,’ said Gregory. ‘They’ll cover their license plates and wear hoods.’ …

“Miller is soft-spoken but is someone whose words you hang on to. In a weathered manila folder bloated with clippings and op-eds he has penned over the last 25 years, his words are fervent.

“ ‘Already the roadsides that people worked so hard to clean up have sprouted a new crop of trash,’ he wrote in a local newspaper. ‘I’m not sure whether I’m more angry with the litterers or the legislators.’

“On a May night, 11 muddied volunteers gather for a tire cleanup early the next morning on the upper section of the Red River, the only river in Kentucky federally designated as ‘wild and scenic.’ Their grueling paddle will take 13 hours, including a quarter-mile portage. …

“Unlike other cleanups, this one isn’t open to the public, and I’m not invited. The challenge of the Red River’s narrow, technical turns is left to those skilled and familiar enough with the potential class three rapids, which can flip a boat without warning.

“Later in June, on the second FORR cleanup this season, we launch early to tackle a four-mile route through some of the gorge’s most scenic stretches. At first, there are few tires in sight, just a rippling channel beneath understories of rhododendron and oak trees.

“But before long, someone spots a tire along the embankment. Then another. Then another.

“Residents simply lack access to legal disposal, especially in rural areas, where hauling them to a certified site costs time and money. Waste tire collection events offer Kentuckians a free way to dispose of old tires, but they only rotate among the state’s 120 counties once every three years.

“There’s also an old embedded mindset of viewing rivers as ‘out-of-sight, out-of-mind’ dumping grounds.

“ ‘You have to understand the culture of this area back in the early days,’ said John Burchett, board member of Friends of the Tug Fork River (FOTTFR), a group that removes tires on the Kentucky–West Virginia border. ‘Garbage service was sparse in regulation. You took your trash out the backdoor and threw it over the creek bank. … Now we’re dealing with the sins of our forefathers.’ …

“Once, KWA board member Travis Murphy counted 400 tires during a single paddle near Floyds Fork. Between Jackson and Beattyville, Miller counted 2,630 tires in 20 miles (32km). Earlier this year, in the most paddled stretch of Daniel Boone national forest, a team pulled 54 tires in three miles. Along the Tug Fork, 16,183 tires have been removed in only six years by FOTTFR.

“However, states are starting to take action. Connecticut passed the EPR law requiring tire manufacturers to take responsibility for their products post-consumer. Florida is removing millions of tires dumped into the ocean as part of the Osborne Reef Waste Tire Removal Project. And the Kentucky legislature recently adopted senate resolution 238, a bipartisan resolution acknowledging the scale of the tire pollution – thanks in large part to advocacy by KWA and its partners.

“ ‘We will be working during the next few months with local stakeholders as well as the division of water’s river basin coordinators to gather input for our report,’ said Robin Hartman, executive director of communications at the Kentucky energy and environment cabinet, in an email. ‘Once complete, the report will include findings, recommended strategies and any legislative recommendations.’ …

“ ‘While I sometimes feel helpless, I am also hopeful it will change,’ said Miller. ‘Once the awareness is there, the journey has begun.’ ”

I’d say that’s true of many things.

More at the Guardian, here. No paywall. Donations needed.

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100 Years of Recording Sound

September 5, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Alamy.
Sir Edward Elgar recording acoustically – via horn – in 1914.

The first recording device that I came in contact with was my father’s wire recorder, a machine that seemed pretty magical to me. To make his recordings more accessible and “permanent,” he would take special ones to a place in New York City to have them made into records. That’s how I eventually ended up with “The Birth of Willie,” which in turn I had made into a cassette tape. And now of course, no one uses cassette tapes. That’s the trouble with new technologies. You put heart and soul into an artifact and then it goes obsolete.

In today’s article from Gramophone, Bob Cowan gets a bit into the weeds with the attributes and strengths of various early recordings.

“Back in the May edition of my Replay column, under the heading ‘Electric centenary’, I offered an enthusiastic welcome to Pristine Audio’s release ‘1925: Landmarks from the Dawn of Electrical Recording’. On this set, producer and audio restoration engineer Mark Obert-Thorn has programmed two CDs’ worth of recordings, principally from that epoch-making year when for the most part a microphone took over from purely mechanical recording, in other words from a pre-electric recording horn (where the sound is transmitted on to the master grooves with no electronics involved). The ascent from one method to the other was more significant even than the later leaps from wax cylinder to flat disc, shellac to vinyl, mono to stereo, analogue to digital or CD to streaming.

“The electrical breakthrough (from acoustic, horn-recorded sound) had one thing in common with the advent of stereo: it necessitated, for the full effect of the newer system to register, the acquisition of fully up-to-date reproducing equipment. You can’t play a stereo LP with a mono-only tone arm; likewise, reproducing electrically recorded 78s on even the most sophisticated of horn gramophones keeps the dynamic ‘realism’ of an electrical recording at bay, although the human voice or even the most distinctive solo (stringed) instrument can, at best, remain more or less intact.

Arthur Rubinstein, who never left us any horn gramophone recordings, always maintained that the mechanical horn recording system made the piano sound like a banjo. …

“Eliminating resonances from the horn and producing clearer sound with a wider frequency range via the electrical system works especially well with a piano, while it goes without saying that orchestral music benefits enormously after the cavernous horn’s obvious limitations.

“There are, however, a few notable exceptions, principally Sergey Rachmaninov playing his own Prelude in C sharp minor, also known as ‘The Bells of Moscow’, which calls on the composer’s firm, commanding touch (especially strong at the bass end of the keyboard) and suspenseful sense of timing. He recorded it three times, twice acoustically (April 1919 and October 1921) and once electrically (April 1928), and all three versions are included in RCA’s 10-disc set ‘Sergei Rachmaninoff: The Complete Recordings’. Pianists such as Alfred Cortot (with his bel canto top line) and Benno Moiseiwitsch (whose style incorporates the projection of countless simultaneous subsidiary voices) managed to circumvent the horn recording system in ways that other pianists, even the best of them, rarely could; however, Rachmaninov playing Rachmaninov is special: it has listeners poised at a crossroads between passion and foreboding, whether he was recording acoustically or electrically. …

“The great British-born American conductor Leopold Stokowski, who knew Rachmaninov well and recorded with him both acoustically and electrically, made his first discs with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1917 – though, as the Stokowski guru Edward Johnson has noted, ‘Between 1917 and 1924, they made an estimated 450 acoustic recordings, but the old method of playing into a large horn gave a very poor representation of orchestral sound, and of all their acoustic discs, only 60 or so were actually issued.’

“Listening to Stokowski’s acoustic recordings of music from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade, specifically ‘The Young Prince and Young Princess’ (recorded 1921), is instructive. The acoustic version (now on Pristine Audio, alongside another excerpt recorded in 1919) sounds as if it’s being played by a chamber ensemble with bongos, whereas by the time the complete work was recorded in 1927, captured on wax, Stokowski’s characteristic Philadelphian opulence could be reproduced with impressive realism. …

“Sir Edward Elgar’s acoustic recordings of his own music enshrine riveting performances that often generate newsreel-style excitement (even though Fritz Kreisler said, on at least one occasion, that Elgar was a ‘lousy conductor’), but the horn loses the subtler aspects of the composer’s orchestration. …

“Among the most notable ‘Elgar conducts Elgar’ comparisons concerns the Violin Concerto, recorded acoustically in 1916 with the Edwardian virtuoso Marie Hall as soloist, then, most famously, electrically in 1932 with the teenage Yehudi Menuhin. The earlier version crams about a third of the concerto onto four 78rpm sides, making a significant alteration to the scoring by adding a harp to the strummed cadenza, which doesn’t exactly bolster the music’s shimmering sense of mystery (Elgar apparently rewrote his cadenza so that the recording horn could pick it up). Hall, a good, lusty player who was historically significant, can’t match the burning infatuation with the music that Menuhin conveys, seemingly with total ease. …

“Over the years, much confusion has accumulated about the identity of the first Beethoven Fifth Symphony on disc, which was long thought to be a highly individual reading by the Berlin Philharmonic under Arthur Nikisch, recorded in Berlin on November 10, 1913. Then informed pundits revealed that it was preceded in 1910 by a recording featuring a ‘string orchestra’ (a mysterious and inaccurate attribution) allegedly under one Friedrich Kark (1869-1939), who was conductor of the Hamburg Opera House from 1906 to 1918 and also set down the first Pastoral Symphony with the same orchestra during the same year. …

“A rather blurrily recorded Furtwängler Fifth with the Berlin Philharmonic was set down in October (16th and 30th) 1926 and January 1927. You can catch it on YouTube transferred from an ultra-rare set of 78rpm discs issued in the US on the Brunswick label. Although, in terms of its date, it falls securely within the remit of electrical sound, it comes across like a boxy-sounding acoustic production. I can’t say for sure which side of the divide this 1926-27 recording falls. The same conductor’s Berlin Fifth from 1937 (Warner) is superior in all respects. …

“In December 1920, Arturo Toscanini brought the La Scala Orchestra to the US on a concert tour and it was then that he made his first recordings for Victor. This impressive showing of material has been released as Volume 71 of RCA’s ‘Arturo Toscanini Collection’ and proves beyond reasonable doubt that with this orchestra in Camden, New Jersey, Toscanini upped the standard of orchestral playing on disc a good few notches higher than had been achieved elsewhere. The finale of Beethoven’s Fifth (1920) displays an orchestra at the top of its game.”

Loys more at Gramophone, here. No paywall.

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The City in the Sea

September 4, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Alessandra Benini.
The ruins of Aenaria were buried in the sea for nearly 2,000 years, preserved underneath volcanic sediments.

Today’s story is about finding Aenaria, a Roman port that disappeared under the sea after a volcano erupted. Eva Sandoval at the BBC begins by describing a tour you can take there if you are interested in archaeology.

“As our tour sets sail, the vast Bay of Cartaromana opens up before us. Jagged cliffs shoot up from the waves; sunbathers sprawl on the inlet bridge leading to the 2,500-year-old Aragonese Castle. … After just 10 minutes at sea, we reach a network of buoys marking the ruins below. I press my hands against the vessel’s transparent bottom. Through the turquoise-blue water, between waving fields of seagrass and small striped fish, I glimpse a pile of rocks. Then the seagrass parts and I see that the rocks are arranged into a long rectangular form, its sides encased in wooden planks. This is an ancient city’s quay; buried in the cool dark for centuries and perfectly preserved. …

“I am on the Italian island of Ischia, where sometime around AD180, the Cretaio volcano erupted, and the ensuing shockwaves sank the Roman port city of Aenaria beneath the sea.

“At least, that’s what archaeologists think happened. … There are no records of the explosion, and very little written about the settlement itself. For nearly 2,000 years, there was no physical trace of it either. …

“The first hints of its existence were in 1972, when two scuba divers found Roman-era pottery shards and two lead ingots off Ischia’s eastern shore. The find intrigued archaeologists, but the ensuing investigation, helmed by local priest Don Pietro Monti and archaeologist Giorgio Buchner, yielded nothing. … The case went cold for nearly 40 years.

“Then, in 2011, passionate local sailors reopened the excavation, this time digging into the sea floor. Soon, they were able to confirm that 2meters beneath the bay’s volcanic seabed lay the ruins of a massive Roman-era quay. …

“As far as anyone had ever known, Ischia’s DNA was Greek. The island was renowned as the site of the first Greek colony in the Italian peninsula, established around 750BC in the north of the island. …

“When the Romans seized Pithecusae sometime around 322BC, they renamed the island Aenaria – a name that appears in ancient texts from Pliny the Elder to Strabo, often in relation to military events. But unlike the Greeks, who left behind a necropolis, kilns and troves of pottery, the Romans left only a few modest tombs, engravings and scattered opus reticulatum. …

” ‘The name was documented,’ echoes local resident Giulio Lauro. ‘But no one could find the place.’ Archaeologists had been looking for Roman Ischia on dry land, but it was buried below the sea.

“Lauro is the founder of the Marina di Sant’Anna; the cultural branch of the Ischia Barche sea-tourism cooperative. Along with various affiliated cultural groups – comprised of Ischian seafarers, history enthusiasts and archaeologists – they have self-funded the excavations for the past 15 years.

“Lauro is quick to tell me that he’s no scientist. ‘But I love the sea,’ he said. ‘In 2010, I got the idea to look again.’ …

“There were challenges, recalls Lauro: ‘Getting authorizations, training people, sourcing funds. We started from zero. We were lucky to believe in it. And then to actually find it.’ …

” ‘It was believed that the Romans never built a city on Ischia,’ says [Dr Alessandra Benini, the project’s lead archaeologist]. ‘It was the opposite.’ …

“Each summer, Benini and her team excavate the sea floor. Progress is painstaking due to a perennial shortage of funds. … During the site’s active months, curious visitors can take glass-bottomed boat tours, as well as snorkelling and scuba excursions to get even closer to the ruins. ‘You can see the underwater archaeologists at work, the equipment they use and everything involved,’ says Benini. …

“I ask Benini what she hopes to find this summer.

” ‘My dream is to find the foundations of the residential city,’ she says. ‘If we’ve found the port, then we know there was a city.’  

“The team hopes to introduce Lidar, Georadar and sub-bottom profiler instruments into the digs, but Benini points out, ‘That’s expensive. We need more investors.’ “

Lots more at the BBC, here. No paywall.

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Newsy Café in Camden, Maine

September 3, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Hannah Hoggatt/Midcoast Villager.
The Villager Cafe in Camden, Maine, serves as a newsstand and events space for the Midcoast Villager. It allows locals to mingle comfortably with reporters — and maybe share news.

Blogger Laurie Graves in Maine had a fantasy podcast at one point that involved a café/sandwich shop run by elves. I couldn’t help thinking about it as I read today’s story.

Mackenzie Farkus, a staff writer at the Christian Science Monitor, reports, “Inside the Villager Cafe, the scent of freshly brewed coffee lingers, and chatter is sporadically interrupted by chirps from a cafégoer’s walkie-talkie. Three women settle into a window-side table. They’ve known each other since high school, and they regularly meet to discuss politics.

“It’s an apt place to do so. Print copies of the Midcoast Villager — an online daily and weekly print newspaper covering midcoast Maine — are displayed near the cash register. … Just upstairs, a small, bustling newsroom is rushing to meet the weekly print deadline.

“The Villager Cafe, which opened in April, isn’t just a café. It’s a newsstand and events space for the Midcoast Villager. The newspaper wants the café to be a ‘third space for community engagement,’ in the words of deputy editor Alex Seitz-Wald. …

“Last year, 130 newspapers shut down at a rate of almost 2 1/2 per week, according to a report from Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative. As of last October, 206 counties across the U.S. don’t have a local news outlet at all. … The loss of local newspapers is ‘really damaging to civic life and civil discourse, and the ability of average people to be informed about their community,’ says Meg Heckman, an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.

“ ‘It’s a lot harder to know what’s going on in town hall, [or] what changes to federal environmental policy might mean to rural farmers or fisheries or tourism,’ she adds.

“Reade Brower has long been regarded as Maine’s ‘media mogul.’ In 2019, he owned six of Maine’s seven daily newspapers, more than 20 weekly publications, and three printing presses. In 2023, he sold the vast majority to the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit. Four of the papers he held onto … became the Midcoast Villager. It published its first issue in late 2024. …

“U.S. newspapers earned $49 billion in advertising revenue in 2006; that number dropped to less than $10 billion in 2022.

“Around 85% of U.S. adults believe that local news outlets ‘are at least somewhat important to the well-being of their local community,’ according to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey. But only 15% say they’ve paid or given money to any local news source in the past year, which has largely remained unchanged since 2018.

“People have been curious to check out the café, says Aaron Britt, publisher … says Mr. Britt. ‘And I’ve just heard like nothing but great things. People like the food, people run into everybody that they know. … Community members can feel like, “Oh, this is my spot.” ‘ …

“ ‘I think a lot of where we are today is due to the perception that there are editors and writers away in this tower who are covering issues, but they’re not fully connected with readers,’ [Kathleen Fleury Capetta, co-founder of the Midcoast Villager] says. ‘We’re trying to shift that perspective.’ …

” ‘The café’s goal at the very start has been, “How do we connect our community and create a respectful place of dialogue?” ‘ says Mr. Brower. ‘We believe we’re achieving that.’ …

“Staffers at the Midcoast Villager have already fielded calls from other media organizations interested in the approach.

“ ‘Anybody is welcome to call us up and steal our idea if they like it,’ Mr. Brower says.”  More at the Monitor, here.

In my town, we have a community paper, too. It’s doing very well thanks to donations and ads. As delightful as the Villager Cafe sounds, I hope our paper will stick to what it knows best and not try to get into the food business. The rents alone would guarantee failure here.

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Sumo & Ballet Help Rugby Players

September 2, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Neil Reid at the New Zealand Herald.
Former All Blacks coach Mike Cron integrated techniques from ballet and sumo wrestling into the team’s workouts.

Today, I share an article from New Zealand about using creative techniques in rugby training. Since I personally don’t know the first thing about rugby, please correct me if I use the terminology incorrectly.

Neil Reid has the story at the New Zeland Herald.

“Mike Cron has looked far and wide to make his [rugby] forward packs better – including adopting techniques from slender, tights-wearing ballet dancers and borderline-obese sumo wrestlers. Regarded by many as the rugby world’s leading scrum and forwards coach, the former police detective has never been afraid to look in less traditional places to get the best out of his players – and himself.

“In his upcoming autobiography – Coach – Lessons from an All Blacks Legend – the 70-year-old opens up on his 210-test tenure with the All Blacks, including Rugby World Cup triumphs in 2011 and 2015 – and his current role with the Wallabies.

“He writes about the All Blacks pack benefiting from techniques he observed in dancers at the Royal New Zealand Ballet and at a sumo wrestling gym in Japan.

“Cron spent time with both during a period when a variety of All Blacks – most notably front rowers – were battling a condition dubbed ‘turf toe’ involving pain at the base of the big toe when bent. Jumping, landing or pushing off when running could all exacerbate the sometimes career-ending ligament injury.

“In an interview with the Herald … Cron said his first travels in search of ways to prevent turf toe saw him visit NFL franchise the New York Giants. NFL athletes are susceptible to the condition from hard artificial turf surfaces.

“He was then allowed access to the Royal New Zealand Ballet as it prepared for a performance of The Mikado; including a meeting with the group’s Italian artistic director and talking to the dancers.

“ ‘At the end of training, we were invited up on stage,’ Cron told the Herald. ‘And I had two questions, one was about turf toe.’

“Cron was told ballet dancers were able to limit the risk of turf toe because of their landings. They had ways of landing that put less impact on the big toe. It was something Cron passed on to the All Blacks medical team and their lineout jumpers.

“Cron’s other question was to the Kiwi male lead of The Mikado production after he had watched him … lifting above the head’ of his dance partner.

“Cron likened it to the process of forwards lifting a teammate in the air to snare an opposition kickoff. …

“ ‘He tells me about how you lock out and how you breathe, how you fill your belly up with the air and push your guts out and down, and I go … “same as powerlifters.” ‘ …

“Another nugget of knowledge was learned from spending time observing a sumo wrestling school in Japan. Cron spent several days there before returning to his base in Canterbury still contemplating what he’d seen, and wondering whether any of the lessons could be applied to rugby.

“Three months later, he reviewed video footage, and it clicked. ‘The last thing they do before they explode, these big guys, is with their toes . . . they hold the ground to get power and then release the power through into [their] opponent,’ Cron said.

‘I came back and started teaching that. With the sprigs in our boots, we push into the ground and hold the ground like a parrot in a bird cage.

“ ‘You get far more grip, far more purchase because power comes from the ground through your feet and through your body,’ …

“Cron said while top rugby players, ballet dancers and sumo wrestlers excel in very different arenas, they’re all still athletes who had insights others could learn from.

“ ‘If you go and see Cirque Soleil train, you will pick something up.’ ”

More at the New Zealand Herald, here.

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Thinking of Frances Perkins on Labor Day

September 1, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Frances Perkins Center.
Frances Perkins, President Franklin D Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, had more to do with shaping the New Deal than most Americans realize.

A few years ago, someone recommended a book to me, a biography of President Franklin D Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor. I had heard of Frances Perkins, but until I read that book (see GoodReads, here), I really had no idea what an extraordinary woman she was — and how influential.

For Labor Day this year, I thought I would share what the AFL-CIO has to say about her, while also encouraging you to get a biography out of your library.

“Frances Perkins was secretary of labor for the 12 years of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency and the first woman to hold a Cabinet post. She brought to her office a deep commitment to improving the lives of workers and creating a legitimate role for labor unions in American society, succeeding admirably on both counts. …

“Born in Boston in 1880, Perkins grew up in a comfortable middle-class Republican family descended from a long line of Maine farmers and craftsmen. When Perkins was two, the family moved to Worcester, Mass., where her father opened a profitable stationery business. Her parents were devoted Congregationalists and instilled in Perkins an earnest desire to ‘live for God and do something.’ At Mount Holyoke College … Perkins majored in the natural sciences, but she studied economic history, read How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis’s exposé of the New York slums, and attended lectures by labor and social reformers such as Florence Kelley, general secretary of the National Consumers League.

“After graduation from Mount Holyoke in 1902, Perkins accepted a series of teaching positions and volunteered her time at settlement houses, where she learned firsthand the dangerous conditions of factory work and the desperation of workers unable to collect their promised wages or secure medical care for workplace injuries. By 1909, she had given up teaching science and moved to New York to study at Columbia University, where she earned a master’s degree in economics and sociology in 1910. For the next two years, she served as secretary of the New York Consumers League; working closely with Florence Kelley, she successfully lobbied the state legislature for a bill limiting the workweek for women and children to 54 hours. …

“One of the pivotal experiences of her political life occurred in 1911, when she watched helplessly as 146 workers, most of them young women, died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

Many, she remembered, clasped their hands in prayer before leaping to their deaths from the upper-floor windows of a tenement building that lacked fire escapes.

“It was, as Perkins later explained, ‘seared on my mind as well as my heart — a never-to-be-forgotten reminder of why I had to spend my life fighting conditions that could permit such a tragedy.’

“During these years, Perkins also witnessed the widespread labor upheavals among garment and other New York City workers and learned from friends such as labor leader Rose Schneiderman the one-word solution to poverty: organize. …

“In 1918, Perkins accepted Gov. Al Smith’s invitation to join the New York State Industrial Commission, becoming the first female member of the commission. In 1926, she became chairwoman of the commission, and then, in 1929, the new governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, appointed Perkins industrial commissioner of the state of New York, the chief post in the state labor department. Having earned the cooperation and respect of a wide range of political factions, Perkins, ever the master deal-maker, helped put New York in the forefront of progressive reform. She expanded factory investigations, reduced the workweek for women to 48 hours and championed minimum wage and unemployment insurance laws.

“When Roosevelt tapped her as labor secretary in 1933, Perkins drew on the New York State experience as the model for new federal programs. She put every ounce of her formidable energy into weaving a safety net for a Depression-scarred society, securing a remarkable array of benefits for American workers. … Her vision found concrete expression in such landmark reforms as the Wagner Act, which gave workers the right to organize unions and bargain collectively, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established for the first time a minimum wage and a maximum workweek for men and women. Perkins also chaired the Committee on Economic Security, which developed and drafted the legislation that became the Social Security Act in 1935.

“As secretary of labor during the 1930s and early 1940s, Perkins played a crucial role in the outcome of the dramatic labor uprisings that marked the era. She consistently supported the rights of workers to organize unions of their own choosing and to pressure employers through economic action. In one famous incident captured in a widely circulated newspaper photo, an indomitable Perkins strides toward the U.S. post office in Homestead with thousands of steelworkers trailing behind her. Denied a meeting hall by the mayor and steel executives, Perkins found an alternative site where she could inform the workers directly of their collective bargaining rights. It was also the unflappable Perkins who advised President Roosevelt to ignore the pleadings of state and local officials for federal troops to quell the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. The successful resolution of that strike as well as countless others during her tenure as labor secretary laid the foundation for the rebirth of American labor. …

“In 1945, Perkins resigned from her position as labor secretary to head the U.S. delegation to the International Labor Organization conference in Paris. President Truman subsequently appointed her to the Civil Service Commission, a job she held through 1953. In the last years of her life, Perkins assumed a professorship at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She died in New York at the age of 85 and was buried in her family’s plot in New Castle, Maine.”

More at the AFL-CIO, here.

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Photographer on a Grand Scale

August 31, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Edward Burtynsky.
“Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province” (2005) is one of Burtynsky‘s best-known large-scale photos of China’s industrialization of just about everything.

The International Center of Photography in New York City recently hung an exhibit of Edward Burtynsky, a photographer I’ve admired since I first encountered his massive works in the early 2000s.

Louis Bury at Hyperallergic calls the show “A God’s-Eye-View of Earth’s Destruction.,” which doesn’t sound like fun but is sure to be interesting.

“Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration,” writes Bury, “at the International Center of Photography contains the artist’s largest ever print, which is saying something. Across a celebrated 40-plus-year career, Burtynsky has been renowned for his work’s ambition and scalar play. His fantastic images, often taken from aerial vantages, depict landscapes modified by human industry, from a stepped mine resembling an amphitheater … to a salt pan whose multicolored pond rows evoke a painter’s palette. …

“The large formats and supra-human perspectives render the Earth alien, potentially confronting the viewer not only with our species’ collateral ecological harms but also our estrangement from them. 

“Even by that standard, the exhibition’s 28-by-28-foot mural Pivot Irrigation #8, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA (2012) stands out. The distant overhead view and subdued color palette transform farmland into an almost abstract composition, in which the pictorial space is divided into textured, geometric browns on one side and alternating vertical stripes of washed out blues and grays on the other. A teensy farmstead occupies the bottom left corner and the roads running parallel to the edges of the picture plane serve as a clever framing device.

“But the two-story-tall print’s physical size produces its most dramatic effects. It dominates the central gallery, dwarfing visitors in a manner akin to the quarry cliffs that sometimes loom over the ant-like human figures in Burtynsky’s other landscapes, such as the miners digging for cobalt, for a couple dollars a day, in ‘Dry Tailings #1, Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of Congo’ (2024).

“Curator David Campany’s approach encapsulates the ‘bigger is better’ ethos. … The scope of the artist’s environmentalist muckraking matches the scope of the iniquities it portrays; for decades, Burtynsky has pursued research leads around the globe to capture yet more examples of civilization’s terraforming. Early in his career, before the term ‘Anthropocene’ became common in academic and artistic circles, such images offered a prescient vision of large-scale anthropogenic changes that were typically out of sight and out of mind.

“But as others have caught up to and even surpassed that vision … its style has remained mostly the same, god’s-eye-view consciousness raising feels more and more like a pretext for aesthetic dazzle.

“Burtynsky’s dazzle serves a psychological rather than a moral function. It can provoke in viewers the uncomfortable recognition that harmful ecological realities nonetheless appear beguiling. But it can also occlude the human-scaled implications of those realities. On the central gallery’s terrace level, Campany has helpfully included examples of Burtynsky’s lesser known work: early 1980s portraits of food plant laborers; studies of marshlands taken during the COVID-19 lockdown. While these series lack the wow factor of the artist’s panoramic work, they evidence his eye for formal patterns and keen details. …

“[The show] continues at the International Center of Photography (84 Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through September 28.”

Fantastic photos at Hyperallergic, here. No firewall. See also Photographic Journal, here, and the artist’s site, here.

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The Dangers of ‘Ghost Nets’

August 30, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Danielle Khan Da Silva.
Divers risk their lives to protect whales from “ghost nets” abandoned by fishermen.

Today’s article presents one of those impossible challenges pitting the environment against the need to make a living. In this case, it involves the ocean, specifically marine animals.

Danielle Khan da Silva has the story at the Guardian.

“After a day of scuba diving, Luis Antonio ‘Toño’ Lloreda was exhausted. Then a friend brought urgent news. ‘Toño, man, there’s a whale caught in a net out there.’ Lloreda, 43, had freed other, smaller wildlife from fishing nets but this would be his first marine animal of such size.

“The four- to five-meters-long juvenile humpback, accompanied by its mother, had a net studded with hooks wrapped around its fin and mouth. One wrong move could have been fatal for Lloreda or the whale.

‘To connect with the whale, I used what we call intuitive interspecies communication,’ says Lloreda, explaining that this involves non-verbal, energetic communication.

“ ‘I asked the mother for permission – energetically,’ he says. ‘At first, she didn’t want our help. But when I showed her we meant no harm, she let us in.

“ ‘She positioned herself below us. Then I asked the calf. When the calf became very still, I reached into her mouth and removed the net.’ The mother and calf swam for 50 meters before pausing to rest.

“Lloreda is one of nine Guardianes del Mar (Guardians of the Sea), a grassroots African-Colombian collective from six coastal communities around Colombia’s Gulf of Tribugá, a biodiversity hotspot on the Pacific coast that spans 600,000 hectares of ocean, forest and mangroves. The region, where dense Chocó rainforest meets the ocean, is a Unesco biosphere reserve and is designated a ‘hope spot‘ by the nonprofit organization Mission Blue for its ecological significance.

“Scuba diving is crucial for identifying and removing ghost fishing gear – lost or abandoned commercial nets made mostly of near-indestructible plastics – but it is prohibitively expensive. With sponsorship from Ecomares and Conservation International, Lloreda and his colleagues have trained not only in diving, but in removing fishing gear from coral with quick, precise and safe techniques.

“Many guardians double as coral gardeners and reef surveyors, collecting data for both their communities and scientific partners. Three, including Lloreda, are trained to free marine animals.

“According to WWF, 50,000 tons of fishing gear are lost or abandoned in the oceans globally each year. These ‘ghost nets’ drift across borders, ensnaring coral, turtles, sharks – and whales. In the Gulf of Tribugá alone, Guardianes del Mar estimates that 3-4 humpback whales become entangled each year. …

“Guardianes del Mar is working to certify more local divers so they can have a greater impact. But it faces mounting logistical and financial hurdles.

” ‘We used to send the nets to Buenaventura for recycling, but fuel costs are too high,’ says Benjamin Gonzales, 53, one of the senior guardians. There are no roads – the communities are connected mainly by boat – so any rubbish or recycling must be transported out by boat or plane.

“Today, the nets are repurposed into bracelets and sold in Germany and locally in Nuquí, the main coastal municipality. Lead weights are melted down into new dive weights for the local shop, run by Guardianes del Mar advocate Liliana Arango.

“The spirit of mutual care between people and nature runs deep in Tribugá, where the population numbers about 7,000. African-Colombian communities here are descended from formerly enslaved people who escaped Spanish rule and crossed the jungle to reach the coast. They were welcomed by the Indigenous Emberá, and today co-govern the region through a state-recognized model of local autonomy. …

“Says Camilo Morante, 25, the youngest guardian and the group’s legal representative … ‘Everyone in this community fishes, so we can’t tell anyone to stop using nets. … The most important thing is that we raise consciousness locally so that we understand the consequences of our actions.’ “

More at the Guardian, here.

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A Dementia-Friendly House

August 29, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Jim Stephenson.
The yard of a cottage in Comrie, Scotland. More and more architects are designing for people with dementia — and their families.

People who want to stay in their homes to the end are braver than I am, and they are in the majority. I think the most impressive are those who are determined to care for a disabled loved one until they can’t manage anymore. I have known a few caregivers adapting to life with a dementia victim.

To help them do that, some architects are designing “dementia-friendly” houses. Charlotte Luxford writes at the Guardian about a home like that near Glasgow.

“Glaswegian retirees Jim McConnachie and Frances McChlery had always dreamed of building their own home with a waterside view, and had even toyed with buying a plot on Scotland’s west coast. However, when McChlery’s sister was diagnosed with young-onset dementia, they had to rethink their plans.

“ ‘The prospect and implications of supporting my sister-in-law became a key consideration,’ says McConnachie, ‘and we decided to build a home closer to the facilities of the city so she could live with us and be closer to extended family.’

“McConnachie embarked on a tour of Scotland’s lochs, but after making a pitstop at Comrie in Perthshire on a sunny day he passed a ‘for sale’ sign on the way out of the village that piqued his interest.

“ ‘Looking at the cottage from the street it was tiny and worn, but to the rear was a lovely south-facing garden that backs on to the River Earn,’ says McConnachie. Excited, he brought McChlery and her sister for a viewing. They both saw potential in the property and were charmed by the bustling village with its valley views and thriving community.

“Last used as a dental surgery, the 18th-century cottage didn’t have any insulation and suffered from water damage and structural decay. McConnachie, who trained as an architect, embraced the challenge of transforming it into a warm and adaptable home that could also accommodate extended family. ‘We wanted the house to remain flexible and welcoming as a family hub, while also ensuring Frances’s sister felt safe, independent and engaged,’ he says.

“McConnachie sought guidance from architecture firm Loader Monteith on maximizing the layout, navigating conservation area restrictions and incorporating dementia-friendly design principles. For example, accessible kitchen shelving to allow her sister to navigate the space with some independence and open views through living spaces, so she feels connected but not surveilled.

“[Director] Matt Loader … wanted to respect the ‘honesty’ of the original cottage, so the front two rooms were maintained as cosy living spaces, each with its own fireplace and lime-plastered walls.

“The kitchen is at the heart of the home, with a small courtyard … providing a sheltered spot for morning coffee. ‘The relationship between Frances and her sister is rooted in cooking, baking and gardening, so the kitchen and its connection to the outside spaces was key,’ adds Loader.

“A defining feature is the marble-topped island, crafted from a piece of stone passed down through the family. As both sisters are short, ‘the island was set low to allow Frances’s sister to help with baking and food preparation, which is an important occupational therapy,’ says McConnachie. …

“Seating [nooks] are a recurring theme; upstairs is a thoughtfully positioned window seat surrounded by shelves displaying ‘memory anchors’ Loader says: ‘Housing artefacts that hold historical significance can help those with Alzheimer’s recognize that this is their home, and it’s important to retain that sense of familiarity.’

“McChlrey’s sister’s living quarters have been sensitively designed to cater for her needs without making it feel at odds with the rest of the house. The upstairs landing also includes a small servery, complete with sink and washing machine, that is designed to facilitate social interaction while also aiding practical care. …

“On the ground floor, the front of the cottage is currently a home office on one side and a sitting room on the other, each with full-width sliding doors and sofa beds so they can be transformed into sleeping spaces when family visit or permanently if need be later.

“One of the biggest benefits of the layout, McChlery has discovered, is its ‘intervisibility,’ allowing her to keep an eye on her sister without making her feel she is under supervision.

” ‘The deterioration of people with Alzheimer’s isn’t predictable,’ says McConnachie. ‘The best-laid plans to leave clear space and simple-to-use facilities to allow for independence can be quickly taken over by the continuing onset of the condition, so it’s worth allowing space for supervised sharing tasks.’

“McConnachie ensured they left room for the introduction of fittings such as stair lifts and bathroom aids, as well as planning a simple and level route through the house – you can get from the front door to the garden without a step [up or down].

“ ‘Caring for another adult with dementia is very difficult emotionally and physically – the grief and injustice are always in the back of your mind,’ adds McChlery. ‘Everything about this house helps – it provides a beautiful and safe space that enables us all to be at home for as long as possible.’ “

More at the Guardian, here.

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New Photos, August

August 28, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Nancy’s nephew Andrew.
Beautiful poison. The moon is clothed in smoke from a distant wildfire.

Here are recent photos in no particular order. They cover Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, where we attended my brother-in-law’s funeral.

I start off below with an ambitious dog on the rail trail. His owner told me firmly, “He’s not taking that one home.” Then I have a photo of the nearby mural depicting our town in the 19th century.

A couple of painted rock offerings come next. (Someone is a fan of the New York City mayoral candidate who won his primary.)

Staghorn sumac, thistle shadows, a blooming August yard, swamp rose mallow, New Shoreham’s Old Harbor, the Assabet River, a swallowtail butterfly holding still for photographer Sandra M Kelly, Casey Farm, Morning glories or bindweed (not sure which), the shop where I got my 100-year-old quilt repaired, the 30th Street Amtrak station in Philadelphia, and gulls on a fishing vessel in Galilee.

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