Lunch Pics, Part 1

This is the crab apple next door, Malus x if I'm not mistaken.

Following up on the earth. The apples. The cherries. The last of the Callery pears. Dogwood. Yesterday after work, I sat a while in Cobble Hill Park. Pigeons puttered under me, worrying objects to see if they were food. They, like the house sparrows and starlings, pick up after us. A bull pigeon puffed up to show the greeny sheen deep within his neck plumage. Buy that hen a drink, buddy. A starling flashed its yellow beak, half cartoon character, the other half rather worse. Starlings, introduced from Europe in Central Park by the assholes of the American Acclimatization Society in 1877, because there’s one in Shakespeare, have disastrously affected native species like the bluebird, red-bellied woodpecker, and others. I was reminded of that while perusing the time-line in the back of the just-purchased American Earth, Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, the new anthology edited by Bill McKibben. It’s really a collection of dissent, against the machine, against the ravenous beast; I mean, of course, the devouring whirlwind of capital, aided and abetted by the suicidal egoism of monotheism.

You’ve probably read Michael Pollan’s article in the last NYTimes Magazine. He asks why we should even bother. And has an excellent answer. And here’s Wendell Berry on the necessity of limits in the current Harper’s.