Naveah

The scope of Earth Day has expanded since the first observation April 22, 1070.

When you choose to start putting things in the ground around here is all about managing your crops' expectations about what kinds of conditions they're going to find.

Which led to a conversation about hardiness zones and how they've changed (see the USDA 1990 v Arbor Day 2015 map comparisons below) ... and a book provocatively titled The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World  by Michael Pollan.

Implicit in the idea of "mental health" is that there is a state of "healthy" that individuals can eventually get back to.

But is that always the case?

How can mental health providers (still mostly white, in this country) provide better mental health care to people of color?  And can a person's challenges be separated from the cultural traumas of racism, discrimination, slavery and genocide?

Annie Dugan says in Canada, your doctor might write you a prescription to go look at art.

Prescription or not, you'll hardly be able to miss art this week.  49 years after the first Earth Day, 29 years after the first Art for Earth Day Gallery Hop, the Twin Ports continues its fine tradition of celebrating the natural world and the artists who remind us why we live here.

   “I remember your stories and I appreciate what you tried to teach me.  I wish I could have gone ricing with you and heard you knocking rice as the flocks of redwing blackbirds rose and fell by the thousands in the rice beds. I’ve thought about you sitting by the fire on cold February nights with the stars bright above you and the trees popping and snapping from the cold as you cooked your maple syrup.  I want to learn some of our songs and I always hoped you would teach them to me.”

The return of win-sprin (or "sprinter," if you like), snow, wind, thundersnow with hail ... it's April in the Northland.

Interested in phenology about phenology?  Here's what Larry was talking about last year at this time:

How do cultures change?

Biologist Richard Dawkins advanced the idea that the meme (from the Greeke mimema, meaning "imitated") could be thought of as a unit of cultural information spread by imitation, similar to biological genes.

But there are some problems with the so-called meme theory, and Alan C. Love and William Wimsatt have collected a diverse collection of ideas from a multitude of disciplines, looking at the ways in which cultures are learned, transmitted and evolve.

Eleanor

"Honestly tho...,"an exhibition about the revolutionary nature of vulnerability," opens this Friday, April 12 at Prøve Gallery in Duluth. This is a collective show, celebrating the power of intimacy, pleasure and physical body autonomy.