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☆ Opinion | The Northern Lights I Did Not See
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-20 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

I spend a fair amount of time looking at the sky, for the sky is nearly always full of magic. What I am never looking for is the Northern Lights. Even with an extreme solar storm underway, as it was on May 10, the news seemed unlikely to affect us here in Nashville. “Northern lights become visible further south as solar activity rises — but not in Tennessee,” read the headline in Nashville’s daily newspaper. To long for a glimpse of the Northern Lights in Middle Tennessee is not a helpful exercise for the muscle that performs hope in the human heart.

Persons: ” Organizations: National Oceanic, Prediction Locations: American, Nashville, Tennessee, Middle Tennessee, Sweden

☆ Climate Change Is Making Allergies Worse - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-13 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

It’s spring, and I love spring more than I love almost anything else about the natural world, but I don’t love the pollen. My husband turns away from me to sleep because the pollen grains clinging to my hair make him sneeze, too. I was never prone to seasonal allergies before I moved to Middle Tennessee, which is not even one of the 10 most challenging places for allergy sufferers in this country. I also drink gallons of an herbal tea labeled “congestion relief,” though I no longer believe that relief is possible. In spring, my little red Nissan Leaf looks like a little orange Leaf, and the gray boards of our back deck look as though they’ve grown a coating of new moss.

Persons: lozenges, Wanda Sykes, doesn’t Locations: Middle Tennessee, North, Northwest, ”

☆ Opinion | The Cicadas Are Here, Singing a Song for the Future
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-06 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

For more than a week, I’ve been walking around my yard at night with a UV flashlight, looking for the white glow of cicada nymphs emerging from their exoskeletons. I walk around again in the morning looking for their spent shells clinging to a tree or a stalk of pokeweed. To think about periodic cicadas is necessarily to contemplate time. We nicknamed our newborn Cicada Joe, the baby who emerged into a sunny new world just as millions of cicadas were also emerging into brightness. As an ecosystem measures time — and also as a mother measures time — it all happened in a blink.

Persons: I’ve, Joe Locations: Nashville

☆ Opinion | Can Nonprofit News Save the South From Itself?
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-29 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

When I moved here in 1987, Nashville had two daily newspapers: a morning paper, The Tennessean, whose editorial page leaned left; and an evening paper, the Nashville Banner, whose editorial page leaned right. I recall with fondness that venerable newspaper, no matter that its editorial page did not align with my own politics. Today less than a dozen U.S. cities have two competing daily newspapers, and many communities have no local news source at all. It’s hard to conceive of a local newspaper, in print or online, that’s fully staffed and fully funded anymore. Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the country, owns the daily newspaper in three of the four largest Tennessee cities, including The Tennessean in Nashville.

Organizations: Tennessean, Nashville Banner, Gannett Locations: Nashville, Tennessee

Margaret Renkl andIn a time of climate crisis, can poetry help us save the planet? In this audio essay, the contributing Opinion writer Margaret Renkl speaks with Ada Limón, the U.S. poet laureate, to understand how the written word can help the natural world. (A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)

Persons: Margaret Renkl, Ada Limón Locations: U.S

☆ Opinion | Why Aren’t We Saving the Urban Forests?
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-22 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The volunteer black walnut sapling in our front yard arrived courtesy of a local squirrel. I had to mark it with a little flag to make sure my husband didn’t mow over it by accident. The baby Eastern red cedars and the baby black cherries and the baby red mulberries were all planted by birds. (The baby willow oak and the three baby shingle oaks that appeared two years ago have already fed the rabbits.) This black walnut won’t reach full maturity for another 150 years or so, and that’s if no one cuts it down — a bet I would not take.

Persons: didn’t mow

☆ Opinion | A Few Words About Nests
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-15 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Spring is proceeding apace in this yard, despite my worst fears. After my neighbor’s death last year, a backhoe demolished the house and nearly all the old trees along with it. In most ways, it’s been a glorious spring anyway, despite the ceaseless hammering next door. The spring beauties and woodland violets are nearly bloomed out now, but already other flowers have taken their place. And yet, all spring, our yard has been bereft of nests.

Persons: it’s, There’s Locations: Carolina

☆ The Invasive Species Debate Is Not Always Simple - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-08 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Starlings descend in great flocks on orchards and farms, decimating crops and dining on feed meant for livestock. As the discourse around nonnative plants and animals grows increasingly strident, I’ve been thinking a lot about the starling-softened stone that was once my heart. In late March, a New York chapter of Wild Ones, a national nonprofit that advocates for native plants and natural landscapes, posted an explanation for why planting spicebush is better than planting forsythia. Like forsythia, spicebush adds a pop of yellow color to the early spring garden. Like forsythia, spicebush can create a natural screen for backyard privacy.

Persons: I’ve Locations: New York

☆ Poetry and Nature: A Love Story - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-01 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

This kind of connection between strangers, human heart to human heart, is so rare as to be startling, especially these days. April is National Poetry Month, and it strikes me that no one is better positioned than Ms. Limón to convince Americans to leave off their quarrels and worries, at least for a time, and surrender to the language of poetry. When Ada Limón tells you that poetry will make you feel better, you believe her. In her nearly weekly travels as poet laureate, Ms. Limón has had a lot of practice delivering this message. “It’s so meaningful to lean on poetry right now because it does make you slow down.

Persons: Ada Limón, Limón, ’ ”, “ Locations: United States

☆ Opinion | On the Wild Intoxications of Spring
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-11 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

I spied the first spring beauty of the year on Feb. 20, the same week a Northern flicker started drumming on our metal chimney, the week of budburst for our red maple sapling and our young red mulberries. The bluebirds often start house-hunting much earlier than they intend to nest, but the first flicker concert at dawn and the first spring beauty opening in the afternoon sun — they’re for real. Soon the crows will be stalking through the wild parts of the yard after a rain, collecting long, damp stalks of grass to line their nests with. This year spring beauties came a little late compared to last year (Feb. 16), but still very early compared to the year before that (March 20). Spring is here!

Persons: skinnier

☆ What We Can Learn From Flaco, the Wild Owl in the Urban Unwild - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-04 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped the Central Park Zoo and spent a year on the lam in Manhattan, is dead. Few apex predators fare well in the built human environment, and Flaco was an apex predator who had never been taught to hunt. He learned to hunt anyway, as a wild owl in the urban unwild. I live in Tennessee, but I began to follow the wonderful urban wildlife photographer David Lei on Instagram just for the pure joy of seeing Flaco, day after day, in all his ill-fated magnificence. Flaco had spent his life among our kind and seemed to be as curious about us as we were about him.

Persons: It’s, irretrievably, Flaco, —, David Lei Organizations: Park Zoo, ahs Locations: Manhattan, York, Tennessee

☆ Opinion | We Owe It to Nex Benedict to Do Better by Bullied Teens
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-26 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

There’s much we don’t know about why Nex Benedict, a nonbinary teenager in Owasso, Okla., died a day after a fight in a high school bathroom. We know that 16-year-old Nex, who often went by they/them pronouns with peers, was bullied at school. We know that Nex didn’t report the recent encounters to teachers or school officials. We know that Nex responded to the harassment by pouring water on the students, but we also know the bathroom fight didn’t appear to be an even match. The family’s attorney stated that the teen was “attacked and assaulted in a bathroom by a group of other students.” Nex collapsed at home the next day.

Persons: Nex Benedict, Sue Benedict, “, ”, Nex, ” Nex Organizations: Owasso Police Department Locations: Owasso

☆ A ‘Natural’ Gas Pipeline in the South Will Be Disastrous - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-19 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Earlier this month, the Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Company announced its intention to build the South’s largest gas pipeline in more than a decade. The Union of Concerned Scientists instead uses “methane,” “fossil gas” and “gas” as interchangeable terms for this greenhouse gas which, in its first 20 years of reaching the atmosphere, has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. The problem with gas is not simply that it’s a fossil fuel or that gas pipelines routinely leak and can explode. And it’s not simply that gas is a human health and environmental nightmare. Perhaps the most damaging problem with gas pipelines is that they permit the construction of new gas-fired power plants that will be in service for decades.

Organizations: Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Company, Carolinas, of, Environmental Defense Fund Locations: Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, American, Southern

☆ In Defense of Saving Everything - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-12 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Worse were the cement mixers lined up down the street, one of them stretched like a growling triceratops across our driveway. But it was the masonry drills that sent me over the edge. An entire day of screaming masonry drills will drive a person to madness. As our sons grew, that table became the place for homework sheets, and then for laptops. Tucked beneath four windows that open onto bird feeders and a pollinator garden, it spans nearly the width of the room.

☆ What Happens When We Don’t Drain the Swamps - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-29 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Even toddlers who find the ocean overwhelmingly huge and alien will merrily splash in a tidal pool, dabbling their dimpled fingers in the water. Last week Nashville got its first truly drenching rains in months, and the rain fell on soil already saturated by melting snow and ice. The whole wild world — parched first by severe drought and then by hard freeze — came up from burrows or descended from trees to drink. And because wetlands in the United States are more imperiled now than they were just a year ago. Too few of us understand how fundamental these damp, spongy places are to the struggling organism we call Earth.

Persons: I’ve Organizations: Nashville, United Nations Locations: United States

☆ Opinion | When the Sky Offers an Unexpected Gift of Time
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-22 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Middle Tennessee has one metaphorical foot in the Midwest and one in the Deep South. We expect a certain amount of weather whiplash here, even without factoring in the extremities of climate change, but January has been a carnival ride. Thunderstorms and tornadoes followed by brutal cold and then by snow the likes of which we haven’t seen in years. Last week, temperatures dropped into the single digits at night and didn’t rise much higher during the day. Many people lose work they can’t afford to lose, while others risk their lives to get to jobs they aren’t allowed to miss.

Locations: Tennessee, Midwest, Nashville

☆ Opinion | Another Gun Fight Is Looming in Tennessee
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-15 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

But a bipartisan coalition of gun-safety advocates, some of them people who a year ago could not have imagined spending their days at the Capitol, were doing far more than paying attention. Here in Tennessee, firearms are the leading cause of death in children, and these voters are determined to do something about that. Poll after poll and referendum after referendum make it clear that Republican legislators are out of step with their own voters on a host of topics. They want to limit who can speak and for how long on the House floor. They want to control which Tennesseans can sit in the House gallery to monitor — and possibly protest — legislative proceedings.

Organizations: Tennessee General, Capitol Locations: Tennessee, Nashville

☆ Opinion | Notes on Going Home
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-20 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The sun was in my eyes, and I was holding the steering wheel too tight because the car kept getting buffeted by the winds of trucks passing at an astonishingly illegal speed. At least I’m not heading east, I kept reminding myself, stuck behind one big rig trying to pass another on a steep mountain incline. On the flat lands of West Tennessee, even eighteen-wheelers can pass going 90 miles an hour. It was a relief when the car’s map directed me toward a four-lane that would take me south. Now the winds weren’t coming from passing trucks but from the world itself, blowing across unfurling fields.

Persons: Cotton Locations: Nashville, West Tennessee

☆ Opinion | North American Birds Will No Longer Be Named for Racists — or Anybody Else
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-13 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

On Nov. 1, the American Ornithological Society announced that it would be renaming all the birds under its purview that are currently named for human beings. This change, which will affect some 150 North American birds, has been a long time coming. Ornithologists and amateur birders alike have long wrestled with the historical nature of bird names bestowed by early collectors. Some of the birds — not all, it’s important to note, but some — were named for people who held views considered repugnant today. John James Audubon, for whom the Audubon’s shearwater is named, was an unrepentant slaveholder who opposed emancipation.

Persons: Colleen Handel, John James Audubon, slaveholder, Winfield Scott Organizations: American Ornithological Society, Ornithologists

☆ Margaret Renkl Writes in the Space Between Grief and Hope
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-25 | by ( Dina Gachman | More About Dina Gachman | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Many of the black-eyed Susans, sunflowers, and zinnias have been picked dry by birds and insects. The caretaker of this garden, the author and essayist Margaret Renkl, leads me to her leaf-strewn deck out back, to show me a glimmer of hope. She placed the monarch caterpillar and the butterfly weed it was attached to inside the cage to protect it from red wasps. “They look like little jewels,” Renkl said of the chrysalis. In her new book, “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” published on Oct. 24, her powers of perception are on full display.

Persons: Margaret Renkl, Renkl hasn’t, ” Renkl, ” Organizations: Alabama lilt, chrysalis Locations: Nashville, Tennessee, Alabama

☆ Opinion | The Parable of the Squirrel-Planted Pumpkins
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-25 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Pecans were a cash crop for my grandparents, who supplemented their unreliable farm income in any way they could. Unlike peanuts, the farm’s primary crop, pecans required no planting and almost no care, and they paid out every year so long as someone picked them up before the squirrels got there first. I was astonishingly old before I learned that pumpkins are food. The first year I was in graduate school there, a vine with large, squash-like leaves popped up in my raised beds. They were small, dense, pie pumpkins, apparently planted by the neighborhood squirrels.

Persons: Pecans Locations: Lower Alabama, South Carolina

☆ In Atlanta, Photography of the American South Since 1845 - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-18 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Unsurprisingly, then, it wasn’t long before the moral clarity offered by photographs became considerably less clear as politicians discovered the manipulative power of the medium when its goal is manipulation. The beauty of the resulting images by Theodore Lilienthal obscures the dark reality of postwar life for Black Southerners. And yet the most affecting photographs in “A Long Arc” are not — or at least are not merely — visual records of exploitation. The most powerful images capture the beauty and the tenderness and the self-possession of people who are living out their lives mostly invisible to the rest of the world. Or of the ramifications of an unresolved history still unspooling in this history-haunted part of the country.

Persons: Theodore Lilienthal, Charles Street, Brian Piper Organizations: Southerners, Charles Exchange, New Orleans Museum of Art Locations: New Orleans, St, America

☆ Opinion | How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mall
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-11 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Even for the South, this was extreme: frog-strangling humidity, smother-you-in-your-sleep heat. It blanketed the region, day after day after day. At one point the forecast called for a heat index here in Nashville that was higher than the heat index in Las Vegas. Very close to 100 percent of the time, the resolution to a problem comes to me while I’m walking. It never occurred to me to stop in, and clearly I’m not the only one.

Persons: I’m Organizations: Parnassus Books, Amazon Locations: Nashville, Las Vegas

☆ Opinion | We Need Shopping Malls, or Something Like Them
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-11 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

It was already hot at 5:45 in the morning, the humidity so thick it left me breathless. Even for the South, this was extreme: frog-strangling humidity, smother-you-in-your-sleep heat. It blanketed the region, day after day after day. At one point the forecast called for a heat index here in Nashville that was higher than the heat index in Las Vegas. Very close to 100 percent of the time, the resolution to a problem comes to me while I’m walking.

Persons: I’m Organizations: Parnassus Books, Amazon Locations: Nashville, Las Vegas

☆ Opinion | I Put My Money on the Weeping Mothers at the Tennessee State Capitol
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-04 | by ( Margaret Renkl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

“No Significant Action Taken on TN Gun Laws” read the headline of The Tennessean on Wednesday, the day after the Tennessee General Assembly ended a special legislative session on gun safety. To call that headline an understatement is itself an understatement. Since then, every single day she worries if it will be her last because it almost was. As a mother, I’m going to have to look at my 9-year-old in the eye and tell her nothing. During the special session, which cost Tennessee taxpayers $58,000 a day, Republicans passed no legislation that would have any significant effect on gun violence in the state.

Persons: ”, Mary Joyce, ” Ms, Joyce, I’m Organizations: Tennessee General Assembly, Covenant School, Covenant Families Action Locations: Tennessee

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