As the leaves flare in brilliant hues of orange, gold and russet, and the days grow shorter, we have a few environmental items available for your reading pleasure. One of my favorite places on earth is Oswald State Park. Writing about the Short Sand Trail is a gift to myself and hopefully a gift to you too. Happy October!!
Short Sand Beach, a trail in Oregon’s Oswald West State Park, wends through a forest of old growth trees. Wild and alive for years, some say centuries, the trees do not know when the time will come—to give up life as they have known it.
On the topic of Oswald West State Park, along the Cape Falcon Trail there is a memorial to the journalist Matt Kramer. I am forever grateful for the work that he did. One person can, indeed, make a difference!
An appreciative nod to the animal crossings that help animals, from panthers to tortoises and ducklings to deer, get safely to the other side of the road.
Dr. Corning's latest work is Superorganism: Toward a New Social Contract for Our Endangered Species. As the evidence of our global survival crisis continues to mount – with mega droughts, catastrophic floods, rampant wildfires, melting glaciers, devastating hurricanes and more, the expression “too-little-too-late” comes to mind.
Dr. Peter Corning’s groundbreaking work Superorganism is a cautionary tale of the ancient human societies that have vanished – many of them as victims of ecological disasters. To purchase Superorganism in its entirety, go to Cambridge University Pressor Amazon.
The Democratic and Republican parties have flipped their basic philosophies since being founded. Currently, we strongly associate each with being conservative or liberal. We often assume that conservatives are Republicans and Democrats are liberals. But it was the opposite for approximately the first 80 years of our nation’s founding.
Conservative commentators and politicians attack the reliability of the "media" since they believe the liberals control it. While the liberals do not dismiss all media as being too conservative, they argue that big corporations' concentration of media ownership limits the breadth of opinion and promotes conservative views.
From the killing of Remus by Romulus to the gruesome assassination of Caesar in the Senate, murder was common in Ancient Rome and, for the most part, the act was not considered a crime by the state. Historian Dr. Emma Southon brings this brutal world to life in her book A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome (Abrams Press).
Banish any notion of psychopathic killers on the rampage, desperate ghouls foaming green froth from their mouths, or flesh-eating zombies. Wharton’s ghosts are borne of mind-numbing fear, a form of intellectual mania that is never truly terrifying but fodder to ponder life’s greater truths. -Patricia Vaccarino
