There should have been French-Creole farmhouses overlooking the Mississippi River, wide gallery porches under deep overhangs, rockers waiting for hot, humid summer evenings spent in society with neighbors. The yards should have been surrounded by weathered brick and iron fences and concrete statuary. There should have been Spanish moss dripping...
Here’s what you can and must do. The Union of Concerned Scientists, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are but a few of the organizations reporting dire statistics about consequences to our planet as the level of CO2 rises beyond any level seen for 800,000...
If you drink two cups of coffee daily, eighteen coffee trees must be dedicated solely to your habit. It takes 100 beans to produce one cup of coffee. One tree yields about 4,000 beans annually. With 400 billion cups of coffee enjoyed around the world daily, it requires 100,000,000 trees...
Step off the bus and smell the air. You can feel in your bones that it’s different here. Over 10,000 species of plants and trees are breathing in CO2 and breathing out oxygen. Costa Rica is one of the most biologically diverse pockets on the planet. Ancient trees host green...
If I were a climate change naysayer, I would wonder, “Why haven’t scientists who refute human-made climate change gotten together and compiled reports to support their opinion? Where is the spirited debate?” Solid evidence does prove that the Earth naturally goes through warming and cooling cycles over periods of time....
It had been a day of low humidity, strong winds, and lingering drought. We had experienced over 200 days with no significant precipitation. Driving home, I turned onto the boulevard and fear leaped into my chest! Across the western horizon loomed a surreal yellow-brown cloud, billowing thousands of feet high...
The children, their little brown bodies and silky-black sun-streaked hair shining, are bathed in the shallows after running unconstrained all day. A woman, bent doubled over, digs tiny protein-rich clams out of the sand to feed her infant. The strong young men, with their small, weathered, fishing boat, are sliding...
In the early 1700s, Jean Baptist Le Moyne de Bienville planted the French flag on a bank near the mouth of the Mississippi River. On a berm above the water line, outside an acute curve, he laid out the crescent-shaped city of La Nouvelle-Orleans, or New Orleans. About a year...
On Isle de Jean Charles, a barrier island of coastal Louisiana, there lives a tribe of Native American Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw. The island settlement was established when Jean Marie, the son of Frenchman Jean Charles Naquin, married Pauline, a Native American woman, and was promptly disowned by his high-brow family. The couple...