The state budget deal that recently was hammered out failed to adequately tackle the worsening climate threat, but it also did little to attack another environmental crisis: the generation and disposal of solid wastes.

We again are experiencing mixed reactions to the demonstrations at Columbia University and actions taken by its administration. The real issue is what constitutes anti-Semitic actions or language, which in some instances is difficult to define much like Justice Holmes saying that he would know pornography when he saw it.

Just as I was about to declare Miller Lite the beer that litterers were most tossing from moving cars in my annual totally subjective Earth Day survey of trash deposited on our road, I happened to look down and got a shock.

I didn’t turn on Game 2 of the New York Knicks vs. Philadelphia Seventy Sixers playoff series Monday night until the 4th quarter, largely because it felt inappropriate watching the game during a Passover Seder. But like a lot of folks, I actually turned it off with less than a minute to go, I believe switching to House Hunters, or something like that. That’s because the Sixers went up four and heading to the free throw line with only 47 seconds left. So by all accounts, this game was over. The best of seven series would be tied at a game apiece heading to Philadelphia.

Though it grows mostly in the southeastern United States, the sweetgum strikes me as an All-American tree. It is, as it were, nature’s version of good old American ingenuity: a supremely versatile resource in the nation’s arboretum that has, over the generations, yielded easily to inventive people who transformed its botanical riches.

While returning from a trip to see family, my wife commented that we were driving through an almost never-ending stream of Civil War battlefields that reinforce the military losses of the Civil War without reinforcing the moral meaning of what happened.

It’s the season of plenty for sports fans – which others view as exhausting excess: Before we’ve recuperated from the NCAA basketball hoopla and golf’s Masters tournament, we’re launched into the Major League Baseball season even as the NHL and the NBA are just beginning playoffs.

April 22nd is “Earth Day,” the global celebration of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. History shows that Earth Day was not intended to be about personal actions – planting a tree or recycling one’s garbage, although both are good ideas. Instead, the original Earth Day was a reaction to the enormous environmental damage done by the essentially unregulated discharging of pollution into the nation’s airways and waterways.

China’s exports are surging, and there is a strong likelihood that there will be a backlash on a worldwide basis. We are certainly hearing it from Mr. Trump who wants to increase tariffs but other countries including those in Europe and South Asia are all likely to lose jobs which will cause them to take action.

I assumed Jake Samascott had heard everything, at least everything related to apples, when I reported to his family’s sprawling Kinderhook, NY orchard last Saturday morning. The reason was a workshop on apple tree care sponsored by the Columbia Land Conservancy.