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If you’ve ever picked a kid up from elementary school, you’ve probably seen a school garden that looks great one year, when a green-thumbed parent volunteers to take care of the space, and sad the next year, when that parent’s kid ages out of the school and no one picks up their gardening gloves. Kaitlin Mitchell had seen it happen, and she feared the garden at her son’s school in San Diego would be overrun with weeds after her departure. So she came up with an innovative solution: Rutabaga Education, a gardening curriculum for preschools and elementary schools that’s been taught in more than 40 states. Kaitlin hopes the lessons do more than just help schools maintain flourishing gardens — she also aims to encourage “more children and families to get outdoors and grow.”

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“Redwoods flourish in fog, but they don’t like salt air. They tend to appear in valleys that are just out of sight of the sea. In their relationship with the sea, redwoods are like cats that long to be stroked but are shy to the touch.”

That’s Richard Preston in one of our favorite books, The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, (available on Amazon) which traces the efforts of botanists to scale and study the ecosystems in the canopies of great trees. Before the 1970s, scientists knew more about the moon than they did about the worlds 250 feet above our heads in the redwoods, sequoias, and Douglas firs of the Pacific Northwest. The work by the scientists at the university now known as Cal Poly Humboldt in Northern California and other amateur naturalists paved the way for the conservation of the great trees. If a lumber company cuts down a 900-year-old redwood, it can’t be replaced by a new sapling. The world that exists in these canopies — plants growing in the crooks of limbs, communities of voles that never touch ground, even running water — would take centuries to grow again. Bluedot writer Jim Miller writes about the seemingly counterintuitive efforts to spare redwoods by encouraging tourism. Check out the book — it reads like an adventure novel!

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• Teaching Kids the Joys of Gardening

• 70 Years of Planting Trees

• Reforesting the Rio Grande Valley

• The Redwoods of Humboldt County

• Songbird Superdads: The Black Phoebe

• Gift for Dad: Birds and Boardgames

• Room For Change: The Lawn

• The Promise of Pollinators

FEATURED STORIES

BIG IDEAS AND LOCAL CHANGEMAKERS

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 Bluedot Living Kitchen

When a wildfire spread through Minnesota almost two decades ago, homes with exterior sprinklers were more likely than those without them to survive the flames. That form of defense against wildfire remains popular in the state and across the globe — it’s been deployed everywhere from Yosemite to Australia — but these days, with fires burning hotter and faster, most houses need more than just sprinklers to withstand a wildfire. Bluedot contributor Jana Sydelska considers what else people can do to protect their homes.

Botanist Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, delivers a Bluedot favorite with The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (both books available on Amazon), a poetic 105-page manifesto based on lessons she learned from the serviceberry tree. Kimmerer “calls us to reject the scarcity model that underlies our economy, in favor of a ‘Serviceberry Economy’ — one that promotes reciprocity, gratitude, and abundance,” Christopher Lysik writes in his review. 

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The Keep-This Handbook
Room For Change: The Lawn

Wings-Out Dads

“Father’s Day comes just as many songbirds are hard at work raising their young — making June the perfect time to celebrate the vital role songbird dads play in parenting,” writes Ilene Klein, citing the Black Phoebe (above, bringing food home) as a stellar example. “In species where mated pairs share chick-rearing duties, males often do far more than just defend territory. From caring for their partners to feeding hungry fledglings, these birds truly take a hands-on — or rather, wings-out — approach to parenting.”

I read this and thought of my own dad, whose chick-rearing duties in our house were not so much about defending territory, but did include feeding hungry fledglings (as a busy executive, his cooking was limited to Sundays, when he offered us an array of creative sandwiches that he’d developed as a teenager working in his parents’ diner — items as enticing as Chiverwursts and Cheematoes). He was a songbird of sorts, too, singing and whistling as he led us on trails through America’s national parks (Yellowstone was his favorite), in a hands-on (or wings-out) effort to raise us with an appreciation for nature and all we could look forward to protecting. 

Happy Father’s Day to the stewards and protectors among us. Enjoy the weekend, and we’ll see you next week.

– Jamie Kageleiry (and Emily Cain, Leslie Garrett, Robin Jones), Editors

Write us at editor@bluedotliving.com

Leslie Garrett has been covering climate stories for close to two decades.  She makes her home in Canada, west of Toronto. She’s still figuring out her favorite spot but it’s definitely near the water.

Jamie Kageleiry, a longtime magazine and newspaper editor from Martha’s Vineyard, says her favorite spot on earth is out on a kayak there, looking at birds.

Robin Jones is a Southern California native who served as an editor at Westways magazine for more than a decade. She lives in Long Beach and teaches journalism at Cal State Long Beach.

Emily Cain is a recent graduate of Cal State Long Beach, where she wrote and edited for the university’s award-winning magazine, DIG.

Sent to: _t.e.s.t_@example.com

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