My sit spot has gotten colder. It’s now autumn in Dunedin, and while fall here quite frankly cannot compete with a New England fall, the changing colors in the trees are also very beautiful. The view of town from my sit spot in the Botanic Gardens is dotted with orange and yellow in the trees. […]
Month: April 2025
6. Stories of Dunedin
At my sit spot, I imagine myself as a tree with many stories to tell within the city of Dunedin: given that Dunedin is home to New Zealand’s oldest university, I imagine that a lot of my stories revolve around students. Students coming to Dunedin for an education, and having a fun time around town […]
Denmark’s low lying soil policies
While Denmark is known for being an environmentally conscious country internationally, there are some things that are often over exaggerated. For instance, they often use most of their arable land for livestock production rather than leaving it as a nature reserve (aka just profiting off of lands while not really preserving/conserving it at its natural […]
Buzzing bees and buzzing crowds
The figs are almost here. I’ve been anxiously awaiting them since I realized the trunks and leaves that intermingle with my beloved aspens are none other than those of fig trees, one of my favorite fruits. The blossoms all around have already arrived, coloring the air with their mixed floral and citrusy seductions. I don’t […]
Aix-actly in the heart of a story
This weekend I went to the movies with my friend, Julie. We saw “Bergers” a film about a man from Quebec who moves to Provence to be a shepherd. He quickly learns that it is not the idyllic career that he once imagined it to be. The job is incredibly difficult as he learns to […]
Aix-amples of Sustainability
Aix-en-Provence has a lot of humans. Humans walking about town, riding their bikes around, going to lunch, taking the bus. But there is a lot of wildlife. A mouse on the way to school. Pigeons cooing. Magpies peering around on a wire. Oftentimes, I can see or hear all of these elements from my sit-spot. […]
Ecotourism, Agriculture, and Green Spaces
The first thing I noticed walking into the botanical garden today was the overpowering smell of plants. There are long beds of sage, rosemary, and cumin throughout the garden, and the sage is blooming, as is almost everything else in the garden. There is pollen in the air so thick I keep sneezing, and the […]
Natural resource or curated product?
We used to be taken care of. We used to be wild, we used to be clean. We used to be the source of life for the people and creatures on our banks, and were honored as such. The change has been gradual, as everything is to us when the only way for us to […]
6: The Soil of Semana Santa
I root, I root, I root. It is Holy Week –or Semana Santa– and I am hearing sounds at once familiar and foreign. Sometimes I have trouble figuring out what time of year it is, especially lately. This winter (at least, I thought it was winter) was long and wonderful, filled with rain day after […]
Craft-vism
This past week, I had the unique opportunity to visit my “Climate Change and Radical Political Movements” professor’s home, where I was introduced to a creative form of climate activism known as “craftivism.” After a whirlwind couple of weeks—traveling from Sicily to Bologna for a school trip and an alum meetup—I was feeling drained. But […]