The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/environmental/)
Smoke from Canada’s over 400 actively burning wildfires has drifted to the Northeast United States —including Tompkins County — sparking public health concerns.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article misrepresented a source. The year is 1686. King James II looks on anxiously from his plushy throne in England as his New York colonial subjects become increasingly unruly. To tighten his grip on the settlers and quell whispers of rebellion, he appoints Thomas Dongan, a Royalist military officer, to govern the New York territory and issue decrees known as Dongan Patents for the creation of trustee-run towns across the royal province. One of these towns was Long Island’s Town of Brookhaven.
Every time a debate about climate change arises around me, I grind my teeth and waver. Should I add my opinion? Will others hear my perspective and denounce me as ignorant? Sometimes they do, but I usually speak my mind anyway. I tell them about an alternative perspective that is constantly weighing on my mind: are humans even obligated to try to mitigate climate change?
Homo Sapiens, showing at Cornell Cinema on September 6, opens with a drenching view of what Ithaca lacks: rain. Not the misty sort of showers that ironically serve to heighten the humidity but the real wet drops of purifying, sustaining rain. From this point, director Nikolaus Geyrhalter spans from one scene to another, each averaging about 26 seconds with a different naturalistic soundtrack of birds, bees, breezes, blizzards and beaches. Intermittent power outages — in which Geyrhalter cuts to black — provide the only pauses from one still life to the next. In its human-free view of the world, Homo Sapiens presents a powerful glimpse of our ethereal human legacy.
This Saturday, the world began to melt. Rays of sunlight fell down from the sky, glistening and dancing upon the shining white snow. I decided to see for myself and went for a brief run on the trails that extend past campus and into the surrounding woods. Pieces of ice gushing into pools of water filled the dirt paths that had been dry and compact in the autumn. Even the hard blocks of ice splintered into watery messes when my feet collided upon them, soaking my shoes, socks and feet into a numb chill. Some paths that ran downhill turned into streams, carryings bits of ice and sticks down the trail.