Would you consider your neighborhood to be “pro-social”? David Sloan Wilson, author of The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time, offers his list of the best behaviors that can maker your city a better place to live.
Selected Readings
Selected Readings
In this excerpt from her memoir, Sylvia Earle reflects on her relationship with the ocean, and how essential it is for human well-being and even survival.
Sounds of Silence
"More than ever before, we need to fall back in love with the land. Silence is our meeting place. To experience the soul-swelling wonder of silence, you must hear it."
A lyrical essay in which Gordon Hempton reminds the reader of what we can find inside ourselves through nature and how it makes us better listeners too. A must-read.
by Vigen Guroian
"Lilies and hyacinths signify the resurrection, and I can understand why. But I have a pair of turtles that plant themselves in my garden each fall like two gigantic seeds and rise on Easter with earthen crowns upon their humbled heads."
by Vigen Guroian
Two characters of modern literature in whom one finds a radical disjunction of agape and eros are Flannery O'Connor's Rayber in The Violent Bear It Away and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov. Both suffer from similar spiritual maladies. Both are haunted by a yearning for a transfigured world against which their reason rebels.
by Vigen Guroian
When Adam gardened, he imitated his Maker in a purely recreative act of cultivation and care. He did not need to subdue the earth in order for it to yield fruit. Rather, the plants were Adam's palette, and the earth was his canvas. There was nothing but delight in the Garden, for Eden itself means "garden of delight."
by Vigen Guroian
"I once said that gardening began when God expelled Adam and Eve from Paradise. I was wrong. What I should have said is that after the first couple greedily consumed beauty, gardening got inextricably mixed up with labor and survival, and farming came into existence."
