Painted Leaves

I saw these leaves earlier this week while I was walking down by the river along the pathway. Many of my pictures come from here because I go on a lot walks. I don't always expect to spot something new every time since I usually walk the exact same way. However, I usually find something to look at. Within a bush I saw some leaves that were (painted?) blue. I'm not sure how else they would achieve such pigmentation without paint. However, the color didn't seem glopped on like paint would. Either way, even a small color change in a leaf makes you wonder about the life of nature. Who else was in this spot? Why are these leaves blue? Were they painting? What were they painting? (There was nothing obviously blue around.) Maybe someone had stopped in this spot with their canvas to paint the river the day before. I'm not sure really. But we all share in these leaves as a community and we are all affected by how others interact with the natural world around us.

Defiance, Ohio

The song "Oh, Susquehanna" by Defiance, Ohio, is much more articulate than my thoughts about Louv's observations, so I decided to share their song. The link will take you to youtube to listen, and I also included the lyrics to my favorite verse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuTmSmK5GzI

And I miss that place behind my house

Where I hiked and climbed and played

Where I ditched this noisy century and just hid out from the decade

My home thought it could stand to be updated

Forced it all into a grid until it looked like the funny pages

With every trace of life, it seems, confined within a frame

The faces move from day to day but the strips all look the same

And the punch lines are resoundingly unfunny

For those trapped in this architecture of easy money.

And I feel like this could all come to no good

The kids who populate these cul-de-sacs will never know what stood

Beneath those cookie cutter houses: fields and streams and woods

They'll sit in cars and wait for mom to drive them

Out of this boring neighborhood!!!

May Day

Over the weekend, I attended a May Day festival/party in Germantown where adults, students, children all celebrated the arrival of spring by enjoying a meal, music, fireworks, and nature. Fittingly there was a maypole.

Gettin' Dirty

Today's post is on everyone's favorite topic: public indecency. Okay, maybe not, but it always brings up a pretty funny memory.

I was riding on the Schuylkill path and suddenly a few younger women started taking off their clothes! Today's weather was sunny enough that a lot of people, including myself were wearing shorts and a tank top, but I wasn't at the level where I wanted to undress. After staring at them, I realized they had bathing suits on and were going to sun-bathe. It seems strange to me that just because she is wearing a bathing suit it's okay to lay in the sun with hundreds of commuters and families passing by. Perhaps I'm just a bit too shy for these situations.

The second incident was a little more awkward. A gentleman must have had a little bit too much water to drink and had to use the restroom. At Columbia Bridge, you are very far from an accessible bathroom. So he resorted to a more au-naturel approach and wizzed in the woods. Well, I was lucky enough to pass by for this exposure. I just smiled and peddled faster.

This leads me to my question, do you remember your first pee outside? I hope it won't be your last... it can be quite freeing!

Baby Geese!!

The picture is a little blurry, but I assure you that trying to get a picture of the little ones without the mother attacking you is very difficult!!

Play Reservations

Lately, I’ve found myself relating many of the topics discussed by Louv to my experiences here in Philadelphia. The first section of this week’s reading, discussing reforms and remedies to allow children to become more active in the environment, particularly captured my attention. Being an urban center, Philadelphia offers very limited amounts of land for the public to utilize. As a result, such limited spaces are experiencing an overflow of public enjoyment, which leads to higher liability risks. “As long as cities continue to overdevelop housing tracts and under develop parks and other sites for natural play, our regional parks and beaches will be crushed by demand, necessitating even more stringent enforcement. The ultimate remedies aren’t to lift the restrictions on endangered habit, but to create or preserve more natural places to play – including vacant lots and ravines and backyards of our own neighborhoods – and to reduce private vulnerability to lawsuits and fines” (240). Considering this, I thought of multiple places in Philadelphia in which the city could open up for public use. Perhaps the city should consider evenly distributing “play reservations”, as Louv names them, throughout the city. These plots of land would give children directed places to play, an alternative to finding places where they can potentially damage the existing ecosystem. By better distributing the amount of useable land, less people would be utilizing a specific space at one time, decreasing liability risks that many fear.

Unknown Environmental Hazards

In the beginning of the term, Chris posted on our blog commenting about how strange it was to see Philadelphia residents mowing their small yards (if you consider that tiny patch of land a yard). Initially, I felt positively about this, viewing the act as people caring about the environment in which they live. After reading this article, my opinion was drastically altered. To my disbelief, gasoline-powered lawn mowers produce the same amount of polluting hydrocarbons in one hour as driving a car 200 miles! Calling these mowers “the smokestacks of garden equipment”, the article encourages people to invest in electric mowers, specifically ones that are zero-emission. Reading this eye-opening article made me realize that we often neglect to question the environmental hazards that come from items we use on a regular basis. Shocked by the harm lawn-mowers cause, I am beginning to think more about the materials I use in my daily routine.