Thoughts

What We Build On It was a brisk October day. My breath hung in the air. Tourists huddled around me with their hands wedged tightly in their coat pockets, and they breathed into the cold with pursed lips. We stood there, feet grounded on the marble bricks outside the Historical Society. Our tour leader greeted us. Frosty air rippled out in smoky chains from her mouth as she spoke. “Shall we begin?” she asked. We smiled, mumbling our agreements, and began our historical tour of Bascom. Bascom Hall, and the Hill it sits on, has represented the regality of the University of Wisconsin campus since its construction in 1857 [1] , but many forget about the history beneath the hill. This is a story of the silent, the overlooked—the invisible. This is a story of soil. This is a story of what we build on We made our strides in long lunges as we hoisted our bodies up Bascom Hill. This was a story my legs understood. This was a story of great energy. Roughly 18,000 years ago, the University o...

                                                                                                                                      November 8 th , 2013 Members of the EPA panel, During a recent summer vacation I took a trip with my youngest son William, intending to see some of this beautiful country as we made our way toward Madison, Wisconsin. We loaded our car with binoculars, backpacks and peanut-butter and jelly, and left the Oregon coast intending to camp our way back. But the forest fires in Oregon and Northern Idaho blackened the sky overhead. After watching the fire-fighting helicopters swoop down to lower their hoses and suck water from t...

Her name was Ashley Atkinson. She held with her the experience of compassion, hardship, and hope of communities in the worst of economic times as she paced in front of the classroom. She had seen families with no access to healthy food. She had shaken the hands of those that worked tirelessly to bring not only food to their communities, but hope and celebration too. She passed her eyes along the classroom as she explained the severity of agricultural uncertainty the future held. She let lose the burdens of her mind; the scarcity of future water, the uncertainty of climate change and drought. “Only one percent of the United States population farms” she said, “and of that one percent, forty percent is fifty five and older”. She looked to us with a half humorous, half melancholy smile and asked “am I scaring you guys yet?” The head of the horticultural department at the college was sitting in the middle of the classroom. She raised her hand and it peaked into the air above the crowd. He...