By Dr. Robert Thorson My how things change … and how they stay the same. That’s was my first thought after reading a riveting story about academic chemical pollution published in the March 7 Seattle Post- Intelligencer. A perfectly respectable professor from the University of Washington named Daniel Storm recently pleaded guilty in federal court […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson `A River Runs Through It.” This 1976 novella by Norman Maclean describes a family bound to itself and to the land by a river. A dam runs across it. This was my first thought when I learned last week that the Connecticut River population of blueback herring migrating past the Holyoke […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson This is a happy tale of two cities. One takes place in Denver, the heart of the wide-open West. The other takes place in Hartford, the heart of the settled, Yankee East. In both versions, chemically tainted patches of land called brownfields rise from the ashes of military or industrial pollution. […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Last Saturday night was a riot of lightning, thunder, tree-toppling gusts and drenching rainfall. By morning, Connecticut had been spared the tornadoes that ripped through much of the Eastern United States. It was not spared the heavy taint of urban pollution flushing into our watercourses and rivers from impervious surfaces. Sunday […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson The hymn “America the Beautiful” reminds us to appreciate the majesty of purple mountains and the immensity of ever-spacious skies. Southern New England has neither. Should we be disappointed? Not really. You see, there’s a downside to the immense, staggering beauty that lies west of the Mississippi River: chronic exposure to […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson `The largest poisoning of a population in history.” That’s how an epidemiologist from the University of California, Berkeley, Alan Smith, describes arsenic groundwater contamination in India. In the Indian state of West Bengal, more than 40 million people live in the poison zone. In Bangladesh, more than 82 million are threatened. […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson There’s a cover-up taking place at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. This cover-up does not involve fiscal auditing irregularities or construction mismanagement. Instead, it involves the rampant growth of shrubs over a prime specimen of Eubrontes giganteus. What on earth is that? It has three toes with curved claws. It’s […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Occupying Hartford since 1977, and targeting the state Capitol, is a permanent symbol of resistance – geological resistance, impervious to wind, rain, cold, hunger and boredom. I refer to the Stone Field Sculpture by Carl Andre, euphoniously located at the corner of Gold and Main. There they sit: 36 native rock […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Political hypocrisy we understand. Political hypoxia we do not. In the familiar case, politicians say one thing but do another, and are often caught with their pants down. In the second case, a dearth of oxygen in political discussions involving the environment leads to a damaging dearth of oxygen in the […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Connecticut exists by geological consent. That’s my corruption of historian Will Durant’s most quotable quote: “Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” The Roman city of Pompeii, buried by volcanic ash from Vesuvius, provides a dramatic example of change without notice. We may look back on climate change […]