By Dr. Robert Thorson One thing that’s puzzled me this winter is the astonishing box-office success of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which is nearing the $2 billion mark in ticket sales. This is remarkable for the seventh movie in a series consisting of a trilogy, a prequel trilogy, and a sequel trilogy now under […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Last week, even as I enjoyed the first signs of summer’s rising heat, I found myself wincing at the progressive death of our planet’s mountain glaciers. Each summer, a few dozen more melt into nothingness. There are plenty of practical reasons for keeping glaciers healthy. They are natural reservoirs providing water […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Last week, even as I enjoyed the first signs of summer’s rising heat, I found myself wincing at the progressive death of our planet’s mountain glaciers. Each summer, a few dozen more melt into nothingness. There are plenty of practical reasons for keeping glaciers healthy. They are natural reservoirs providing water […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson I have insect envy. Cicada envy. Right now, I wish I could be watching and hearing these noisy, redeyed, prune-sized, flying bumper-car bugs in the woods behind my Connecticut backyard. But I can’t because the habitat range of this year’s crop of these extraordinary insects reaches only as far north as […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is a staple of environmental politics. Take the case of the old stone dam on the Blackledge River in Glastonbury. The dam is likely to come down not because it’s the right ethical response to nature, or because it’s economically advisable, but because […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Though I hope to forget the divisive political campaign as soon as possible, I do want to keep those baseball embers glowing. Hence, I offer the following story about a Little League team that stayed on top for 840,000 years. Dubbed “hobbits” by the scientists who discovered them, this extinct group […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Late last month, more than 500 enraged citizens crammed into an auditorium in the sleepy hollow of Old Lyme to beat up on bureaucrats from Washington. Led by a gang of national and state senators, representatives, mayors, first selectmen and business leaders, they lambasted the Federal Railroad Administration for proposing a […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson As the new year begins, I’m scrounging for hope. I’ve been wracking my brain for a resolution that will bounce me out of bed in the morning, despite my concerns for the next four years. After some pretty desperate digging, I found something that works for me. I will promulgate the […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson America remains obsessed with post-election analysis. I think Sen. John Kerry lost, in part, because he failed to exploit the frog factor. I refer to the worldwide plight of amphibians: frogs, salamanders and the like, as documented by the Global Amphibian Assessment (www.globalamphibians.org), released just two weeks before the election. Of […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Meat-eating wild dogs prowl the peripheries of our lives. Known as coyotes (Canis latrans), these carnivores have gradually been moving eastward during the last century. This is wonderful news to me, even though it may cost my neighbors a few of their cats and my daughter a few of her bunny […]