January 2009 Archives

Getting your kids outside, even in the cold

Sligo Naturalist

Alison Gillespie

A lot of times people are surprised to find out how much I like winter. Maybe because I am such an avid gardener, people expect me to hibernate somewhere until the warmth returns.

But winter is one of my favorite times to hike. You see things in winter you don't see any other time of the year. There's a feeling of standing backstage at a big opera; everything is quiet and still and hushed, and the bare branches are like open stages where nature's more reluctant divas cannot hide.

One of the best hikes I ever took was a lone winter walk I made one January afternoon outside Irvine Nature Center in Baltimore County almost a decade ago. I left my office and the stuffy, hot air of the indoors behind and felt the cold burn at my cheeks as I walked past farm fields full of stubble and frozen mud to find the woodland trail along a favorite creek.

Foxes ran alongside the trail a few feet ahead of me at one point, and as the sun waned along the horizon, I watched an enormous silent owl as it glided through the branches over my head. I had never seen one before, and I was the only person there to witness its silent beauty that day. When I returned to my car, snow began to fall and I felt as if I was the only person alive on earth watching it fall from the sky.

Sustainable Gardening

by Susan Harris

Have you heard about the "Eat the View" campaign that's petitioning the Obama administration to grow a Victory Garden at the White House? Led by Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International and widely promoted by food and garden writer Michael Pollan, Eat the View uses big names plus great videos and graphics to garner gobs of publicity for this excellent cause - over 450 newspaper items so far.

And the Victory Garden idea has proven very popular with the voters at OnDayOne.org - it's the leading candidate among nine finalists in the climate category. President-elect Obama himself has said that he's read about the proposal, via Pollan's New York Times article about our grossly misguided food policy, in which he endorses a Victory Garden for the Obamas. And in an interview with Barbara Walters, Obama stated his intention to "green the White House." He then went on to talk about saving energy, but environmentalists in the outdoor world would dearly love to see some much-needed greening of the 18 acres around the White House.

On New Year's Eve, curmudgeons at Lake Superior State University in Michigan included "green" on a list of overused terms that had lost meaning and ought to be banned from serious conversation.

They have a point. Claiming to be "green" seems to be the theme of half the commercials on TV. Yet making the world "greener" is one of the few universally shared goals of our time. The questions are: What does it entail, how do we do it, and when?

The Voice asked a number of the well-credentialed environmentalists and policymakers who live in Takoma Park or Silver Spring to give us a few ideas that could be enacted soon, sometime this year, at the local or state level.