Randomly, I chose a spot on the Five Star Louisiana Road map (“A Traveler’s Best Friend”). “Bohemia! That sounds like a place I want to visit!” I declared. I punched the location into my Samsung GPS, and along with my companion and the beige four-door rental car, left our hotel in New Orleans’ French Quarter, crossed the Mississippi River on the steepest bridge I’d driven, and headed south on Hwy 39 for our first sojourn into southern Louisiana. Thus, began our odyssey. […]
The worst thing you can do is be indifferent or cavalier. Do what you can! Despite the committed path global warming is on, your choices can and will make a difference to the quality of life for every soul on this planet. If we all pull together, we can eventually bring back our beautiful world. […]
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 ferns, mosses, and vines, layered like filo dough, all grappling upward, searching for the exchange of sunlight for energy. […]
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. By examining glacial ice cores, […]
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! […]
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 with a stick, 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 into the turquoise lagoon, spreading their hand-made nets to collect the hefty fish from the slow, outgoing tide. […]
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 later the little city flooded […]
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 settled on a lush island […]
As surely as God molded Adam and Eve from the clay of The Garden of Eden, New Orleans people sprang from the mud of the mighty Mississippi River. The city’s reputation is dark, dirty, sticky and tough. In 1718, on an inhospitable mound of land, surrounded by swamps and bayous, mosquitoes, and alligators, the […]