Down the street in Green­belt, MD, sci­en­tists at the God­dard Space Flight Cen­ter use orbit­ing instru­ments to study cli­mate change on Earth. On Feb­ru­ary 7, 2010, in the after­math of the bliz­zard that blan­keted the region with a thick layer of snow, NASA’s Terra satel­lite cap­tured this image.
The Moderate-resolution Imag­ing Spec­tro­ra­diome­ter (MODIS) aboard Terra created […]

Sec­ond week of Jan­u­ary, 2008
Some­times I think I could cross the coun­try on noth­ing more than cof­fee, gas, $9 truck stop show­ers every other day, and Pop Tarts.
Remem­ber when Pop Tarts were only for break­fast? Now they’re in every con­ve­nience store in the coun­try, right next to the Slim Jims. Does any­one really eat the choco­late ones? […]

When we moved into to an old post office next door to St. Michael Ukrain­ian Ortho­dox Church on East­ern Avenue, the church build­ing was only a con­crete slab and a steel skele­ton.
My old­est son, a baby at the time, slept soundly through the con­struc­tion noise out­side his bed­room win­dow. We watched the build­ing grow over […]

“I die with the con­vic­tion, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the Earth; to mine for them, man­u­fac­ture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human fam­ily, and the Earth itself …” — Philip Berri­gan, 2002.
It took me five years to write A People’s His­tory of […]

Early in the pre-dawn morn­ing of Jan­u­ary 19, 2009, my son, Phillip, and I saw the Poe Toaster, the per­son who leaves cognac and three roses at the grave of Edgar Allan Poe.
Not only saw him, but we talked with him. And had our pic­ture taken with him.
But we didn’t know it at the time. Only […]

Although I’ve been aware of the Gwynns Falls Trail for some time, only recently have I begun explor­ing its con­tours in earnest. Trav­el­ing its 15-mile length is rewarded by a tour through Baltimore’s hid­den nat­ural resources and the cra­dle of the city’s indus­trial ori­gins.
From the trail­head in his­toric Franklin­town, on the city’s west side, the […]

Before you judge me, consider:

I’m not break­ing any law
I’m pro­vid­ing a ser­vice to peo­ple in need
It’s green
Frankly, we could use the money

When I read about the Glen Burnie fam­ily that stored their 83-year-old grandmother’s dead body in a freezer, my first response was shock. And then neces­sity met opportunity.