Our featured North Carolina icon this week is the Appalachian Trail. There are thousands of different species of plants and animals along the Appalachian Trail, varying as the trail goes through different climates. There are 2,000 rare, threatened, endangered, and sensitive plant and animal species. Continue Reading North Carolina Icons: Appalachian Trail, Part 2: Nature
A large portion of New Orleans lies below sea level, although the historic and touristic French Quarter, the part of the city that dates to the French period in the mid-eighteenth century, is just barely above sea level and suffered the least from Katrina. The reasons for New Orleans’ vulnerability, and the reasons why the city was established where it is, are revealed in the narrative of Jean-François Benjamin Dumont de Montigny. Continue Reading Gordon M. Sayre: The Founding of New Orleans: A City of Floods
This week in our North Carolina Icons series, we jump to #94 on Our State Magazine’s list of 100 North Carolina Icons: the Longleaf Pine. Our book recommendations are to be enjoyed with your favorite beverage, a glass of which you should raise high as you recite the North Carolina State Toast (yes, we have one!). Continue Reading North Carolina Icons: Longleaf Pine
This week we continue our NC Icons series with loggerhead sea turtles, number nine on Our State magazine’s 100 North Carolina Icons list. Loggerhead sea turtles are an endangered species that nest along North Carolina’s coast (and as far south as Florida and north to Virginia). Continue Reading North Carolina Icons: Loggerhead Sea Turtles
During the post-WWII period in the United States, a new generation of pollutants proved especially mobile and persistent. Overriding a widespread segregation of neighborhoods by class as well as race, these pollutants proved capable of pervading entire suburban metropolises. Americans, especially around our largest cities, were forced to confront just how shared the burden of pollution had become. Continue Reading Interview: Christopher C. Sellers on the origins of American environmentalism
In the United States, even from Bunner’s time, what nourished the nature love of the more and less scientifically qualified alike was a shared suburban experience. It was one not so much of home buying as home owning. Nor was it reducible to suburban dwellers’ relationship with “the land,” however fraught. What finally secured the breadth of environmentalism’s appeal was how nature love itself had become ever more suffused with anxieties about human health. Continue Reading Excerpt: Crabgrass Crucible, by Christopher C. Sellers
“Beltway politics” are not the only barrier to efficiency in government. Despite what they say, the American people have long preferred an inefficient federal government that they could shape rather than an efficient government that they could not. Continue Reading Sarah S. Elkind: The Allure of an Inefficient Government
We have become so used to hearing of regulations–particularly consumer protections like banking rules or the proposed controls on mercury emissions—as threats to prosperity that it has become nearly impossible to imagine these debates in any other way. But in 1940s Los Angeles, controlling air pollution and creating a healthy environment was understood as essential to prosperity, and the business community led the regulatory effort. Continue Reading Sarah S. Elkind: Los Angeles and the History of Air Pollution
The shallows are a hub of biological activity. This is where many species of fishes spawn and where small fish seek haven from larger ones looking for lunch. Plants also grow in the shallows, and where there are plants there will be snails and small harmless insect-like crustaceans such as isopods and amphipods and shrimp and occasionally everyone’s favorite—a seahorse—and their close relatives, pipefishes, clinging, crawling, and slithering over the stems and blades of the vegetation. Continue Reading Robert Lippson: Wading in the shallows and loving it!
Müller’s discovery generated little international publicity. Europe was engulfed in a continental war, and the United States remained an interested observer. But as the United States entered the war, which expanded across continents and into the tropics, where the threat of insect-borne diseases increased, military health officials on all sides of the conflict demanded new methods to control disease, and DDT was positioned to play an important role in the war effort. Continue Reading Book Excerpt: DDT & the American Century, by David Kinkela
September 1, 2011 As I write this, electric power is just now returning in the last remaining North Carolina neighborhoods darkened by Hurricane Irene’s pole-cracking winds last weekend. Chainsaws are still buzzing, landfills are just beginning to be overrun with truckloads of debris, and people flooded out of their homes are returning, exhausted from the ordeal. Hatteras Island, isolated by… Continue Reading Jay Barnes: Before & After Hurricane Irene
Stanley Riggs, co-author of The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast, answers questions about protecting NC’s changing coastline–as well as its coastal economy. Continue Reading Interview: Stanley R. Riggs on the Importance of Protecting North Carolina’s Coast
Well, it’s the last day of our celebration of National Wildflower Week. We’ve given you a lot to read about so far, so now that it’s Friday, let’s look at some pictures of flowers! These beautiful images come from another backlist favorite, Wild Flowers of North Carolina, by WIlliam S. Justice, photographer and botanist, C. Ritchie Bell, botanist and founder… Continue Reading National Wildflower Week concludes–with pretty pictures!
How to treat the landscape to ensure we can continue to enjoy the bounty of wildflowers the Blue Ridge Parkway has to offer. Continue Reading The Ten Commandments of Wildflower Conservation: National Wildflower Week Continues!
Continuing our celebration of National Wildflower Week: check out Bruce Sorrie’s new Field Guide to Wildflowers of the Sandhills Region. Continue Reading National Wildflower Week Day 2: Off to the Sandhills Region with Bruce A. Sorrie
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