by Julie Hanus
(reproduced here for not-for-profit educational profit purposes only)

For anyone who’s ever dreamed of residing in an environmentally-conscious community, Craik (population 450) has lessons to share. Over the past decade, the Saskatchewan town has reinvented itself as a bona fide eco-village, This Magazine reports.

The magazine breaks down the community’s green transformation into five straightforward steps, but the most interesting has to be #1: Find a small town. As This explains: After decades of rural flight, many small towns are eager for new ideas—and new residents. I’m curious how the social dynamics play out (a bunch of eco-newcomers descending on an established community?), but the potential for a win-win scenario is equally intriguing.

“When Saskatchewan’s Prairie Institute for Human Ecology first suggested the idea of an eco-village in 2001, Craik jumped on it,” Kelly-Anne Riess writes. “Seeing the project as a chance to address climate change and revitalize its community, [Craik] donated 127 acres of land for the eco-village.”

Source: This Magazine

Image by MissusK, licensed under Creative Commons.

Mark Twain wasn’t just a riverboat pilot, a raconteur, a mustache pioneer, and one of the great early American celebrity-authors: He was also an animal rights activist. The new Twain compilation Mark Twain’s Book of Animals (University of California Press) explores Twain’s treatment of animals —in literature and in life—throughout his career and arrives at an inescapable conclusion: He was a softie when it came to the beasts. Twain may have come to largely despise what he famously called “the damned human race,” yet he turned into a puddle of mush at the sight of a kitten.

In her introduction, editor Shelley Fisher Fishkin traces Twain’s sympathy for animals to his youth and especially to his mother, who kept a house full of cats with names like Blatherskite and Belchazar and once soundly berated a man in the street for beating his horse. Fisher Fishkin also digs up evidence that a formative experience for Twain was his shooting of a bird as a child, an act he deeply regretted. In the previously unpublished “Family Sketch,” he writes:

. . . I shot a bird that sat in a high tree, with its head tilted back, and pouring out a grateful song from an innocent heart. It toppled from its perch and came floating down limp and forlorn and fell at my feet, its song quenched and its unoffending life extinguished. I had not needed that harmless creature, I had destroyed it wantonly, and I felt all that an assassin feels, of grief and remorse when his deed comes home to him and he wishes he could undo it and have his hands and his soul clean again from accusing blood.

Fisher Fishkin goes on to follow the threads of Twain’s animal fascinations and sympathies in his writings, from his early celebrated story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” to his “Letter to the London Anti-Vivisection Society,” which is perhaps the best known expression of his views on animal cruelty. “From 1899 until his death in 1910,” writes Fisher Fishkin, “Mark Twain lent his pen to reform efforts on both sides of the Atlantic and became the best-known American author—and, indeed, the most famous American celebrity in any field—to give outspoken, public support to agitation for animal welfare.”

Source: Mark Twain’s Book of Animals

The Least Among Us
by Susan Cosier, excerpted from Audubon
September-October, 2009

image by Joel Sartore

In a makeshift studio, a flower-loving fly with enormous green eyes and hairy orange legs lies on a table, anesthetized by carbon dioxide. A federal fly handler stands over the insect—one of only a few hundred of its species left in the world, all in California, and the first fly ever listed under the Endangered Species Act. A photographer, clutching his camera, prepares to shoot. After waiting four months for the government permit needed to take pictures of this insect, Joel Sartore isn’t about to waste this opportunity—and he has only a minute before his subject will awake.

Sartore got the photo he envisioned, plus thousands of others during a yearlong endeavor to preserve for posterity wildlife heading toward extinction. The resulting series is “Last Ones: Threatened and Endangered Species.” Through the variety of images, some 10,000 in all, Sartore aims to raise awareness of just how much endangered wildlife is out there.

It often seems as though a few charismatic creatures—like the whooping crane or the grizzly bear—symbolize all the threatened ones to the public, Sartore says, but there are countless others that deserve attention. For “Last Ones,” he sought out species “great and small that each have a story to tell.” The St. Andrew beach mouse, pictured above, is one. (More photos are on his website, www.joelsartore.com.)

“I’ve always been interested in endangered species and in ways to save them,” Sartore says. “Using photography is a good way to get people to pay attention to what’s at stake.”

Sartore’s ultimate goal is to spark interest and involvement in conservation, even though there might be no financial gain from his venture. “Endangered species belong to all of us,” he says. “At the heart of the story is this: Do we as a society treat the least among us with dignity and respect?”

Excerpted from Audubon (May-June 2009), an environmental magazine that vividly connects its readers with the beauty and diversity of the natural world. Copyright © 2009 the National Audubon Society. www.audubonmagazine.org