There's Beauty in the Bellow

We just came back from a week in California, where we visited the peerless Monterey Bay Aquarium. Conservation is a frequent theme of the aquarium: every exhibit makes some plea to consider how one's personal choices affect the health of the oceans. It's a persuasive appeal in the presence of so many beauties. Why not give up a reliance on ugly plastic bags and bottles if they are hazards to majestic sea turtles and sunfish? The Aquarium's stance isn't merely political. It participates in rehabilitation and care for injured wildlife as well as research. Part of its facilities inhabit an old canning factory and is situated on Cannery Row: a reminder that once upon a time, fishing defined its existence. Conservation became a necessity when overfishing took down an industry. The aquarium doesn't demonize seafood lovers: it passes out fliers listing the seafood choices of Good, Better, Best, and Avoid. (Many of which overlap with the recommendations for pregnant and...

We watched the BBC's Tudor Monastery Farm with the unstoppable Ruth Goodman several months ago. We've watched the Primitive Technology channel on YouTube but something about Tudor Monastery Farm -- maybe because of William T. Cavanaugh's lectures -- has stuck. Maybe because Ruth, Peter, and Tom explain the techniques of our forebears in more detail than the gentleman on Primitive Technology. Tudor Monastery Farm (such a mouthful!) challenges what we mean by Primitive. "Primitive" encompasses a vast range for us on this side of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Cave men living in caves to Roman aqueducts and Gothic Cathedrals. If you mean simple tools, well maybe yes, all those things are primitive. If you mean ignorant, most certainly not. The Medievals may not have understood the human body as seen under a microscope. But they most certainly knew what boiling water, salt, and sunlight could do. They wasted nothing. If their tools were simple, the...

First off, I liked The Riot & The Dance, a nature documentary. It had a sense of humor, which most documentaries don't. I don't mean that you don't find humor in the films themselves, else why would we see so many shots of baby animals? They're funny, that's why. But usually the creators themselves don't have much humor about them. Reverence, yes. Awe, yes. Beauty, yes. An urgent message, yes. Sometimes Sir Richard Attenborough starts to sound tired telling the same story again and again, with different factoids, dragged down with the weight of saving the universe in its entirety. Dr. Gordon Wilson is quite taking with his gentle humor and enthusiasm for some of the more homely and despised members of the animal kingdom. I took his biology course plus some electives in college and all the things I liked best about him are present in the film. He's persistent, patient, careful of speech, and slyly provocative. I don't know where Dr. Wilson's w...