Winona LaDuke is angry, and she's not pulling any punches.

Enbridge is prepared to begin construction on the controversial Line 3 project next Tuesday, and LaDuke, a longtime environmental activist and the executive director of Honor the Earth, is fed up.

"This is a disaster for the environment, civil rights and the government," she says.  "The least the governor could do is issue a stay.

"We would like the dogs called off. Enbridge wants to push this through before the pandemic is over and in the middle of winter. And that's wrong."

The University of Minnesota has been offering cooking classes for staff and faculty for several years now, but the combination of the pandemic (and mastery of teaching online) and an increasingly diverse workforce got Robin Schrow thinking.

Tom Kasper's mid-life crisis involves vegetables.

After considering himself a flower gardener (since he was seven years old), he realized that he wanted to do something in the most straightforward way possible to let people in our community know they're cared about.

This year, that meant over a ton (2200 lbs) of fresh food donated to the Damiano Center ... and now he's scheming how to produce more and better for next year.

We perhaps spend more time staring at screens than we did last year at this time, but there's more to enjoy than just work and school stuff.

Thaw during the day ... freeze overnight.

Welcome to "normal November." 

In other news, once upon a time, says Larry Weber (and Laura Erickson), say, 30 years ago or so,  evening grosbeaks were common Northland visitors.

And then ... they were gone.

The good news is, they're starting to come back.

Lee Stuart, CHUM's executive director, is locked down at home with COVID-19.

And yesterday, she had to send out an email saying that CHUM had had its first positive confirmed COVID-19 case in the shelter.

But when you talk with her, she's (perhaps) surprisingly upbeat.

For the first time since the start of the pandemic, Minnesota is showing up as a hotspot.

For the first time since the start of the pandemic, we're hearing about hospitals being overwhelmed with patients and no beds available.

Chances are the two or three wolves who wandered over the ice from Minnesota or Canada to Isle Royale 60-some years ago were just looking for something to eat.

It's not likely they knew they and the moose that would make up their primary diet would become the subjects of decades of research.  And chances are they didn't realize that by becoming the lone predator on an island with essentially one prey species, they were creating the perfect "laboratory."

  Animal Allies Humane Society is temporarily closed to visitors. Interested adopters are encouraged to make an appointment to visit the pet of their interest if they would like to adopt.

Caramel