With my new book available just this past week, The Moon in the Nautilus Shell, it seems a perfect time to celebrate another book by a different Botkin, the American classic, A Treasury of American Folklore by my father, Benjamin Botkin.It was a wonderful honor to learn recently that my father's book was selected as one of the first group of books for the Books That Shaped … [Read more...]
Now Available: The Moon in the Nautilus Shell
The Moon in the Nautilus Shell: Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered From Climate Change to Species Extinction, How Life Persists in an Ever-Changing World Author Daniel Botkin’s “Magisterial and Beautifully Written” Examination of Our Role in Nature in an Age of Ideology [For Immediate Release] In a world constantly confronted by global environmental problems, establishing … [Read more...]
Ocean Power Gets A Jolt With A New Turbine
UPDATE: On Tuesday, August 14, 2012, the ocean electric generating turbine was successfully lowered into the Bay of Fundy, just off of Eastport, Maine. Costing $21 million, and benefitting from $10 million in U.S. Dept. Of Energy subsidy, Ocean Renewable Power Company will begin generating some 180 kilowatts, enough to power about 30 homes, according to The New York … [Read more...]
Renegade Naturalist Radio #2: Interview with Arctic Explorer John Bockstoce
This episode of Renegade Naturalist Radio features historian, author, and archaeologist, John R. Bockstoce (audio player above.)John has been traveling and working in the North since 1962. There, he carried out a series of excavations at Bering Strait, serving for ten seasons as a member of an Eskimo whaling crew at Point Hope, Alaska. In the 1970s he descended the Tanana … [Read more...]
Alternative Energy That Works For People
Click here for a demonstration Home Wind Turbine, Boca Raton, FLThis is a new section of my website. It tells about people’s experiences with alternative energy.Here is the first:Amherst, Massachusetts home, not the sunniest of locations. On a barn roof next to the house are 24 SunPower model 230 Solar Panels, covering 20.9 feet (6.4 m) by 15.3 feet (4.68 m) or … [Read more...]
My Recollections of Woody Guthrie
I met Woody Guthrie when I was just 8 years old and he came to visit us when we were living in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.Woody came to meet my father, Benjamin Botkin, who was a well-known folklorist and had been head of the Folklore Archives of the Library of Congress (now known as the American Folklife Center). Woody was brought to our house by Alan Lomax, who was also a … [Read more...]
An Environmental Success Story: Saving Mono Lake
Mono Lake, salty and alkaline and California’s second-largest lake, became the center of controversy in the 1970s. It supported the world’s second-largest breeding colony of California gulls and was habitat to other bird species. Mono Lake was also beautiful, a large open body of water in desert landscape below the east slope of the Sierra Nevada, its shores lined in place with … [Read more...]
Energy and Humanity: The Next One Thousand Years
This video interview was just recently made available from an interview I did for the Foundation for the Future at their Humanity and the Biosphere Conference a few years back.At the conference, scholars from five continents participated in the seminar “Humanity and the Biosphere: The Next Thousand Years,” jointly sponsored and conducted by the Foundation For the Future … [Read more...]