Culture. Knowledge. Nature.
The Festive season is upon us. Many of us are busy hanging wreathes, decorating trees, and putting up mistletoe in doorways for that holiday smooch. If it's Christmas you celebrate, most of our traditions go far further back than inflatable characters out of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on the front lawn. And one thing that... Continue Reading →
The other day, on a whim, we went to a thrift shop and something happened that you fantasize about but never expect. We found a masterpiece. The painting was sitting in a corner behind a lot of faded prints from the 1980s, with "$12.99". scrawled on the back. We thought it was probably a clever... Continue Reading →
The other day, while looking for something to watch on YouTube, I was offered up in the side-bar a series of videos of a chicken playing the piano. Intrigued, I clicked on the link and was treated to two minutes and one second of a chicken at an electric piano playing "O mio babbino caro"... Continue Reading →
Like many people, I'm very fond of manatees. Despite being mossy and a little bit potato-like, there's something incredibly engaging about them. And, like many people, I've also spent a lot of time teleworking over the last few months. Fortunately, the first situation has made the second a little easier. At noon, several days a... Continue Reading →
Dan letting me help rehabilitate a cold-shocked green sea turtle Last Wednesday, I teamed up with my colleague Dr. Dan Dombrowski, Chief Veterinarian at North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences to launch Love Nature: The Biophilia Podcast. The launch itself was part of of BugFest, the Museum's largest event of the year, attracting 30,000 people... Continue Reading →
I've written recently about our pressing need to think globally about wet markets and the bushmeat trade. Aside from their devastating impact on wildlife, these practices are superhighways for diseases to enter the human population, with catastrophic effects to health and the global economy. While we're currently experiencing this with Covid-19, it's also been the... Continue Reading →
Just a couple of weeks after the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day, which was meant to engage the world in "a billion acts of green," saw us focusing instead on a global Coronavirus pandemic catalyzed, it would seem, by eating wild animals (most likely bats) from so-called "wet markets" in Wuhan (if you follow the... Continue Reading →
Like a lot of people, the global pandemic has made me think about our relationship to nature. What might life look under the combined effects of climate destabilization, disease, and other environmental stressors (wrapped up nicely in the concept of planetary boundaries)? Could we expect, in the wake of a global population vastly reduced by... Continue Reading →
There was a turkey in our backyard this morning. It was scratching around the the wood pile looking for whatever small animals might be living there. Despite diving for my phone, I missed getting a photo of it, so here's a picture from somebody else. Living in an urban area as we do, it's pretty... Continue Reading →
This is my final blog post related to Carnegie Museum of Natural History, finishing up with a topic that has interested me for the last four-and-a-half years. Natural history habitat dioramas can provide passage to another place, and another time. In 1932 the artisans at Carnegie Museum of Natural History created this habitat diorama "Red... Continue Reading →
ERIC DORFMAN 