Bufo at the MK Nature Center

Bufo at the MK Nature Center
Originally uploaded by samknox

The MK Nature Center or, as we like to call it, the Trout Zoo, is a great place. From it, Boiseans can learn all about gardening for wildlife and habitat preservation. And the life cycle of Salmon. In addition to this totally cute frog, we saw a deer and her fawn eating apples, lots of butterflies, ducks, and the biggest salmon I have ever seen swimming 500 miles from the nearest ocean.

iPhoneography

Sam drums
Originally uploaded by samknox

Learning how to post entries from the magic wonderbrick. Sam played drums and provided tech support.

Building Blocks

The other day, I watched a speech given by consumer waste watchdog-cum-photographer (and local Seattle resident) Chris Jordan given at the Greener Gadgets conference earlier this year in New York City. If you haven't seen his work, it's highly recommendable and awe-inspiring. At one point in his speech, he talks about plastic water bottles and how many millions are used every day in this county. Bottled water is a rather new phenomenon and a particularly wasteful and decadent one especially for anyone living in Seattle (we have some of the cleanest municipal water in the world for a city of this size). The plastic that makes up water bottles is of course, at its core, a synthetic molecule often a polymer such as polyethylene terephthalate (or PETE). Chris Jordan mentioned that such plastics never truly degrade back into the environment. All they can do is break down into smaller and smaller pieces ending eventually at single molecules of PETE running around.

Which got me thinking . . .

What if we're laying the groundwork for new, sophisticated forms of life that have yet to evolve? I can image strange biota of the future fueled not by glucose and other simple hydrocarbons, but by some of these strange, much more complex polymers. Increasingly, it seems that geology and outerspace will no longer determine the fate of our planet, as it once did. Complex, intelligent, reactive, adaptive life will. Is this all to say that I sanction throwing plastic around everywhere? Truly I do not, but I am constantly fascinated with the lemonade our planet has made of out eons of lemons. Earth's early atmosphere consisted of very little oxygen, and was therefore totally inhospitable to most of the animal lifeforms present today. It look single-celled lifeforms millions of years to slowly convert sunlight and CO2 into a waste product that we rely on everyday, good old oxygen.

Final thoughts: just a sense of wonder at how closely linked death is to birth, and creation is to destruction.