Excerpts

Excerpts

Beneath our damp rubber boots, the ground is spongy, rotten and spattered with guano. Rough nests the size of buckets, built of broken sticks jammed together at harsh angles, clutter the treetops; as many as five, six, seven, in a single stunted tree. Tangled in rampant vines beneath the canopy, we find the abandoned corpse of a baby egret, hanging by its long skinny neck, its frail skin bluish in the gray light, its delicate white feathers rumpled and smudged. Chances are a stronger sibling, or a luckier one, pushed it from the nest, competing for food. This is a cruel, wanton, primitive place, where beautiful birds are born.
Bye, Bye, Birdies, Rhode Island Monthly, October 2009

For marine biology students Leah Freedman and Lisa Bourassa, the summer of 2009 will be remembered as The Summer of the Queen Triggerfish. In June, they began to look after 750,000 fertile triggerfish eggs in the Marine Science lab at Roger Williams University in Bristol. The eggs had been collected from the Giant Ocean Tank at the New England Aquarium in Boston, each delicate ovum smaller than the head of a pin. Lisa and Leah nurtured and cared for the brood, seven days a week, around the clock, but by early October, on Day 100, only three little brown fish remained, each scarcely an inch long, barely visible wriggling in the dark water of their 50-gallon tank. “We’re very protective of them,” says Lisa, as she sprinkles some flakes of dry food into the tank. The fish rush to the surface, fins waving, their pale round mouths poking into the air.
Rescuing the Reefs, Roger Williams University Alumni Magazine cover story, Winter 2010

On a bright winter afternoon in January, Steve Insana steps carefully onto the ice covering the brook, where it crosses under Old Warwick Avenue behind the Knights of Columbus hall, and declares it safe. We hike along the frozen streambed and in minutes, the road is lost to view. Tall trees on either side of the brook reach into the bright blue sky, the dense underbrush and deep snow on either side hide any sign of civilization. A white-bellied hawk swoops overhead, and lands in a nearby tree to watch us. Animal tracks form a path down the center of the ice, dogs or maybe coyotes, and along the banks are tracks from birds and squirrels, but ours are the only human tracks. Cardinals and a woodpecker flit past. "It's another world in here, right in the middle of Warwick," says Insana.

Don’t Mess With Our Brook, Rhode Island Monthly, April 2005

You are leaning forward into a hard wind, your arms open wide, like wings. You lift one foot, and then the other, and a force like a muscle pulls you up into the sky -- where you spin and slip and tumble and play in the welcoming air, and where you feel more at home than you ever did with your feet on the ground.
This is our universal dream. Most of us wake, and let it go. Some of us wake, and go in search of altitude.
Their Dreams Took Wing, Providence Journal, December 1998

Rhody Coyote's yellow eyes are in constant motion, looking at Spencer Tripp, the trapper who is holding him down by the neck with a critter-control pole, then at Ralph Pratt, the veterinarian who is preparing to stick him with a hypo, then at Numi Mitchell, the scientist with a camera and a notebook. His bushy tail is clamped tight against his skinny butt, one toe of his right forepaw is caught in the firm rubber jaws of a trap, he’s not moving a muscle, but those yellow eyes are taking it all in, with a look of deep despair. There’s no fierce snarl, no gleam of defiance. When Mitchell squats down and grasps him by the back of the neck, the jaws gape in protest, showing strong, brutal white fangs, but the eyes have a faraway look, as if he’s prepared to see this familiar world—the spring trees, the blue morning sky, the damp, thick woods—give way to the next one.
Where The Wild Things Are, Rhode Island Monthly, December 2007

It’s a cool morning, overcast and damp, when I step off the train in New York. Penn Station is just a few blocks north of Peter Singer’s apartment in Chelsea, but the train was late, and time is short. The sidewalk swarms with pedestrians, the four lanes of the avenue are crammed with creeping taxis, cars and trucks, and the air reeks of petrol fumes. Construction barriers constrict the path, and I note that the skinny young woman striding ahead of me keeps to the concrete edge, avoiding the steel grate that forms most of the walkway. I follow her lead, wondering if others have crashed through to the black depths below, which I imagine are hostile, damp and infested with rats.

If there are rats down there, they’d be just about the only animals to be found in this part of the world. .... It seems an odd place to find a philosopher whose work has focused on the rights of animals and the ethics of farms.

Food for Thought, G The Green Lifestyle Magazine (Australia), Jan/Feb 2008

In most parts of the ocean, it's the marine "snow," drifting down from the surface, that transports captured bits of solar energy to the depths. The snow, formed of tiny surface creatures, their dead bodies, scraps, flotsam, fish waste and debris, flurries slowly down through the water column till it eventually lands on the seafloor. The bright forward lights on Hercules reflect off the particles like headlight beams on a snowy night.
"In this part of the ocean, the snow really comes only once a year, after the spring plankton bloom," says Les Watling, the chief scientist on our expedition. "So imagine if you are a deep-sea coral, for most of the year you are living in the quiet and the dark and the cold, nothing varies, there is nothing to mark the passage of time except that once-a-year plankton bloom. That's when you get fed, and you grow, and then it's all quiet again for another year.
"So while the corals that are hundreds of years old seem ancient to us, a hundred years to a deep-sea coral, probably seems like nothing at all."
Mountains in the Sea daily log, projo.com, 2004
The little airport doesn't look like much at first glance. A shingled office building with a porch overlooks the narrow runway, and nearby sit a couple of rusty hangars and a couple of dozen tiedowns. Along the roadside stretches a mowed field used mainly for banner-towing operations. The view stretches far across the marshes to the south and east, to the beach cottages of Plum Island, about a mile away. The seagrasses glow in the yellow light of late afternoon, as a cool breeze off the ocean fills the two orange windsocks.
There's not a lot to see. Yet if you sit for a while on that porch, with your feet up on the worn wooden railing, and watch as the sky grows bluer, the sun sinks lower, the windsocks sag, suddenly you might realize an hour or two has passed and you're feeling very content. Nothing much has happened — a few touch-and-goes squeaked past, a trike pilot took off on a pleasure flight, a Plum Island vacationer stopped by to inquire about scenic rides and stayed to chat until he was late for dinner. But already the airport has revealed its secret: Yes, it's plain and simple and slow, but that is precisely its allure.
How To Save an Airport, AVweb, Sept. 2000