Dreaming in the dark

The lights are always on. The Christ­mas tree out­side the shop­ping mall, the lap­top on my desk. But tonight I will leave the lights out and vis­it the dark­ness. Even the moon won’t show her face this night. Dark­ness. An uncom­fort­able word. A word wait­ing for Light. Away with the dark­ness of our igno­rance and …

The flowing river

“Look, mush­rooms!” The tiny rental car hic­cups to a stop. The mov­ing box­es slide dan­ger­ous­ly, but we man­age to squeeze past them and out of the car. Fred­dy is already on his knees at the base of an ancient pine tree. Every­where we look, we see mush­rooms pop­ping up from among the fall­en nee­dles and …

Talking to a tree

I hur­ry along the nar­row path. The rain has final­ly over­tak­en me, here in the rel­a­tive wilder­ness at the edge of Read­ing. I know there will be a place to shel­ter around the cor­ner. There it is, the plane tree. Knob­bly, lop­sided and with branch­es that almost reach the ground. Hug­ging it would take four …

Climate crisis? Try this!

It’s a prob­lem that every­one runs into every now and then. It is a anoth­er day at the office, you are just get­ting into the flow of work­ing won­ders for human­i­ty, med­ical progress, eco­nom­ic growth — and then your plan­et sud­den­ly turns out to have a cli­mate cri­sis. What to do? I dis­cuss five home …

We can change

Our way of life is destroy­ing the plan­et. We hear this mes­sage reg­u­lar­ly. When I switch on the wash­ing machine, the CO2 that is released in the process of gen­er­at­ing elec­tric­i­ty caus­es the atmos­phere to warm up a lit­tle bit more. As a result, the chances of extreme weath­er have already become much greater, and …