By Dr. Robert Thorson Connecticut was lucky on Wednesday night, and then lucky again. The east-west bullet of tornado destruction merely grazed the top of our state, and wind damage was restricted to its woodsy, rural towns. In southern Massachusetts, however, several tornadoes lined up between Westfield and Sturbridge, taking direct hits on downtown Springfield […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson To drive or not to drive; that used to be the question when it came to ice-glazed roads. Today, however, lots of us have quit asking. We assume that we can drive no matter how miserable the winter driving conditions are. We know we can count on vigilant, even heroic, road […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson It was a pleasant summer evening in New England, a backyard barbecue with friends. In the background was the mellifluous sound of water cascading down the face of an old mill dam. On my neck were mosquitoes, sucking my blood and possibly exposing me to West Nile virus, a disease detected […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Last week, I got my annual news jolt about shoreline pollution, this time from the river that divides Clinton and Madison. At issue is whether the Department of Environmental Protection should help a multinational corporation (Unilever) construct a mile-long pipe so that its factory wastewater can discharge directly into the larger, […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Saturday’s extra-tropical cyclone needs an official name. Otherwise we’ll forget the Halloween havoc it wreaked: dumping heavy snow that snapped leaf-laden branches and sending an estimated 884,000 Connecticut customers into the dark. We name tropical storms like Irene, the ninth in a series of alphabet soup for the 2011 hurricane season. […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson It’s been several weeks since the trapped Chilean miners were rescued from the San Jose Mine in Copiapo. On that day, I was asked to comment for a radio program. I declined because I wasn’t willing to repeat the obvious, had no relevant personal angle and couldn’t interest the producer in […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Here’s my remake of the song “America the Beautiful”: O beautiful for spacious skies For ever crowded lands For purple landfills majesty Above the flooded plain. America, America Junk shed its grace on thee And crown thy goods with anti-brotherhood From sea to shining sea. This tune just keeps popping into […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Sisyphus, from Greek antiquity, was eternally condemned to roll a boulder up to the top of Mount Olympus, only to have it roll back down again. Although ostensibly about gravity, his plight also symbolizes the futility of work that goes nowhere. The same can be said for the never-ending job of […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson I’ve got a gripe against bottled drinking water. Just because it is healthier to drink than soda doesn’t make it healthier than tap water. And what might be healthy for your inside environment is actually unhealthy for your outside one. For starters, trucking this heavy product around the country consumes petroleum. […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson The price of gasoline and diesel is spiking upward toward $5 per gallon. I don’t think it’s high enough. Were it high enough, the drive-through lanes at fast-food restaurants and doughnut shops would not be lined with mostly oversized vehicles carrying mostly oversized people toward food energy. Were the price of […]