Author Archives: Roger Gosden
Letter from the Trenches, Passchendaele, 1917
The graveyard of Grace Episcopal Church, Yorktown, Virginia is an apt place to meditate on Veterans Day (Remembrance Day in the UK). 101 veterans from as far back as the 17th century are buried in these grounds. Lord Cornwallis’s troops … Continue reading
Honeybee up the Creek
Paddling the Powhatan Creek on a fall day I floated near the saltmarsh at low tide. The mud heaved with armored creatures that I alarmed, hauling themselves on ten legs to run into the reeds with a giant claw like … Continue reading
Posted in Nature
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Human Population Through the Looking Glass
I can’t avoid this topic forever, not under the headline Peace with Nature. It is the intractable, controversial matter of the teeming numbers of human beings. How many more of us can the Earth sustain in this Anthropocene? Only the … Continue reading
Posted in Environment
Tagged birth rate, demographic transition, Lancet, one child family, overpopulation, Population Council, Rachel Carson, Robert Edwards, Sanjay Gandhi, Silent Spring, The Population Bomb
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Don’t Write Off the Bat
It was a perfect evening for a spin in the Batmobile with a team of three amateur chiroptologists. The air was warm and still when the sun went down. After leaving the carpark, we were overtaken by every vehicle along … Continue reading
Posted in Nature
Tagged ACE-2, Batmobile, Big brown bat, Chiroptera, coronavirus, COVID-19, Red bat, SonoBat, White-nose syndrome
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Virginia is for Oyster Lovers
“Why then the world’s mine oyster, which I with sword will open.” Thus, Shakespeare gave us a new idiom in the Merry Wives of Windsor repeated ever since, and Oscar Wilde wielded it with customary wit: “The world was my … Continue reading
Posted in Animalia, Environment, Nature
Tagged Chesapeake Bay, Oscar Wilde, oyster, Shakespeare, VIMS, York River
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Roger musing about Peace with Nature 