By Dr. Robert Thorson Rhubarb is everything a vegetable should be. It’s zesty, easy to grow, uses only solar energy, seldom requires irrigation and can be socially meaningful. Celery sold in groceries, on the other hand, is bland, environmentally destructive, exploitative of farm labor and spiritually bland. The other night, I attended a potluck supper. […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Homeland security involves more than the threat of terrorism. It also involves the environmental threat posed by the temporary storage of high-level radioactive waste at sites throughout the United States, several of which are near New England rivers. The sooner we get our high-level waste into permanent storage the better. On […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Last week, my vacation travel took me through Franconia Notch, N.H. This smooth-sided glacial valley struck me as more beautiful than ever, now that the “Old Man of the Mountain” is gone and the scar left from where he fell has been healed by the tarnish of time. Ten years. That’s […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Big Y’s corporate officers should be ashamed of themselves. By naming their new Tolland superstore Fieldstone Commons they are turning two of our favorite words into a double-edged marketing gimmick designed to convince us to drop money in their pockets. By using the words “fieldstone” and “commons” they are exploiting our […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson The management of Connecticut’s coyotes has literally become a dog-eat-dog issue. These wild canids (Canis latrans) have begun to eat our small domesticated canids (Canis lupus), along with an unknown number of house cats. Figuratively, coyote management pits the freedom we want for these sentient beings against the tameness we require […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson The deadly landslide in La Conchita, Calif., was a study in contrast to the Indian Ocean tsunami. Though many of the scenes were familiar — broken homes (literally), body bags, human grief and explicit television coverage — there was one important difference. Either most tsunami victims were ignorant of what was […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Can playing golf be considered an agricultural activity? If my grandfather Anderson — a strapping, weather-beaten man who earned his living behind a plow — were asked that question when he was alive, he probably would have laughed for a week. Then he would have asked who on God’s great green […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson I was delighted by the recent discovery of a mysterious rock on Mars that looks like a jelly doughnut and caused a brief scientific sensation. To see that much excitement brought to bear on any rock made the geo-educator in me feel pleased. Alas, geology is of marginal interest to most […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson The price of oil rocketed up last week. So did political interest in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas lie beneath one of Earth’s most pristine ecosystems. To drill or not to drill? I hope the answer is […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Two weeks ago Friday, an electrocuted eastern gray squirrel shocked UConn’s Storrs campus into submission. It blew a transformer, tripped the nearest electrical circuit and sent a power outage cascading across much of campus. On a list provided by the administration, I counted 92 buildings that were affected. This included the […]