Ten years ago, the monarch butterfly was in serious trouble. Its numbers had cratered to the lowest level researchers had seen since the current monarch population monitoring programs began in the mid-1990s. Although the monarch has rebounded from that low point enough for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to upgrade its status […]
nature
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City Nature Challenge returns to Iowa City and Des Moines this weekend
More than 700 communities around the world will participate in the City Nature Challenge this weekend, including Johnson County and Polk County. It’s a four-day long event that starts Friday and concludes at midnight on Monday, during which time volunteers take photos of any “WILD plants and animals in backyards, in parks, along city streets, […]
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UR Here: Rethinking the gnat
Those pesky clouds of airborne annoyance come around every spring, but they’ve been especially bad this year. Chalk it up to this year’s cool spring and heavy rains, says Patrick O’Malley from the Iowa State University Extension. Mother Nature’s vichyssoise stewed up an extra-heaping helping of the buggers, and then the sudden heat of late May shot them out of our backyard swamps, all at once, faster than you can say “Anton Arcane” (an arcane reference for the Swamp Thing fans out there).
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John Dilg Lecture: Retracing the Path of the Labyrinth–A Close Look at Tom Aprile’s Real and Mythic Daily Exits
This Wednesday, Sept. 28, UI Painting and Drawing Professor John Dilg presents a lecture on the work of the late Iowa City Sculptor, Tom Aprile. The UIMA has curated a presentation of Aprile’s work, currently on disply in the North Reading Room on the second floor of the UI Main Library.
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UR Here: Nature's Economy
As the global economy crumbles around us, I have been writing about relocalization as a way toward sustainability, last month expanding on the concept of abundance as the foundation upon which it could work. One more important fundamental concept for a sustainable economy is looking to the natural world as a model, so I’d like […]
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The Eagles of Iowa City
When I relocated to Iowa City, one of my major fears was missing out on the outdoors activities that make the winters bearable (and the make the spring, summer falls even more enjoyable). There’s no downhill skiing, not much ice skating, and the snowcover is usually in a perpetual cycle of melting and freezing, not […]
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UR Here: Visiting Ober
I visited the grave of Ernest Oberholtzer today last month. I was invited to read from my new book of essays Under a Midland Sky (ok, that’s a plug) at the Unitarian Church in Davenport. This was a wonderful occasion to find the resting place of one of my heroes, especially given that Davenport’s Unitarian […]
