Tag: preservation

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn30 Comments

…I have spent 63 years trying to cultivate hope, but my thoughts wander in this direction too often these days. Why protect the wildflowers that grow in our yard when all the emerald yards nearby are drenched in herbicides and when their purely ornamental shrubs are drenched in insecticides? Why trouble myself to keep the stock-tank ponds filled with water when every spring there are fewer and fewer tree frogs who might need a nursery for their eggs? Why turn off the lights to protect nocturnal creatures when all around me the houses are lit up like airport runways? Why bother to plant saplings when a builder will only cut them down later, after my husband and I are gone, to make room for yet another foolishly large house that glows in the dark? …

More and more I find it hard not to ask the question I have spent my adult life avoiding: What is the point of even trying? …

At my lowest, I have never entirely given up my faith that good people working together can change the world for the better. When I have been downhearted in the past, I have always explained to myself that I am not alone in my efforts to cultivate change — by writing, by planting, by loving the living world in every way I can find to love it. Individual efforts gather momentum through the individual efforts of others…

In saving the leaves for the moths and the fireflies and the dark-eyed juncos, I am still trying. And in the trying perhaps I can save my own soul.

— Margaret Renkl, from “How to Keep Your Own Soul Safe in the Dark” (NY Times, December 9, 2024)

Sunday Morning

Live & Learn13 Comments

The natural world is not, to me, a fabric of stuff that gleams with revelation of a singular creator god. Those moments in nature that provoke in me a sense of the divine are those in which my attention has unaccountably snagged on something small and transitory – the pattern of hailstones by my feet upon dark earth; a certain cast of light across a hillside through a break in the clouds; the face of a long-eared owl peering out at me from a hawthorn bush – things whose fugitive instances give me an overwhelming sense of how unlikely it is that in the days of my brief life I should be in the right place at the right time and possess sufficient quality of attention to see them at all. When they occur, and they do not occur often, these moments open up a giddying glimpse into the inhuman systems of the world that operate on scales too small and too large and too complex for us to apprehend.

—  Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights (Grove Press, August 25, 2020)

Photo: Mand. “We had hail one day and I noticed that one hail stone managed to get trapped on a single web strand.”

Sunday Morning

Live & Learn30 Comments

When I found the seal pup alone on the far beach,
not sleeping but looking all around, I didn’t
reason it out, for reason would have sent me away,
I just
went close but not too close, and lay down on the sand
with my back toward it, and
pretty soon it rolled over, and rolled over
until the length of its body lay along
the length of my body, and so we touched, and maybe
our breathing together was some kind of heavenly conversation
in God’s delicate and magnifying language, the one
we don’t dare speak out loud,
not yet.

~ Mary Oliver, from “The Return” in From What Do We Know: Poems And Prose Poems.

Notes: Poem via Words for the Year. Seal pup photo by gemma reddington

Frans Lanting

Live & Learn46 Comments

“No photographer turns animals into art more completely than Frans Lanting,” writes The New Yorker. Lanting’s images have been featured in exhibitions at major museums and leading art galleries around the world.

004909-01

“Impalas alarmed, Serengeti National Park, Tanzania: I keep three cameras on the seat next to me, each mounted with a different lens, allowing me to frame a moment any way it unfolds–far or wide. For this image I grabbed a Nikkor 300mm f2.8 lens to crop in smoothly on a herd of impalas when one alarm call transformed a placid scattering of grazers into a scene of suspense. An ever-present sense of danger characterizes the African plains. This image visualizes fear by inferring it. The collective gaze of the impalas points at something invisible, hidden in plain view–in a moment that could not have been chased, only waited for.”

006692-01

“Macaws over river, Tambopata National Reserve, Peru: Perched on a scaffold a hundred feet above a clay lick where macaws gather, I had an eagle’s-eye view of their coming and goings as they flew over the muddy river below. From that perspective I could see how each species of macaw flashes a distinctive combination of colors and patterns visible only from above.”

Source: DON’T MISS checking out his Lanting’s other photographs here.

FRANS LANTING has been hailed as one of the great photographers of our time. His influential work appears in books, magazines, and exhibitions around the world. Born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, he earned a master’s degree in economics then moved to the United States to study environmental planning.  Soon after, he began photographing the natural world–and never turned back.  For three decades he has documented wildlife from the Amazon to Antarctica to promote understanding about the Earth and its natural history through images that convey a passion for nature and a sense of wonder about our living planet. See his full bio here.

Pachyderm & Her Pal. 9000 pounds of inspiration.

Live & Learn31 Comments

“Bubbles, 32, was adopted as a ivory orphan by the Myrtle Beach Safari in 1983. As Bubbles grew over the years, from 300 pounds to 9000 pounds, so too did her love of swimming.  In 2007, a contractor hired to build Bubbles a swimming pool, abandoned Bella as a puppy at The Preserve.  The river presented these two the opportunity to interact in a way that developed a deep and lasting friendship. Today, they are inseparable.

Bubbles’ family was killed in 1981 by ivory poachers.  She was one of the fortunate few that survived the slaughter.  Today, tens of thousands of elephants are still be illegally poached for their ivory.”

Thank you Janet.