This Week's Post: An Invitation to Visit the Biodiversity Heritage Library

This weekly blog post and its host website cover a wide variety of Fred Montague's environmental commentaries, gardening topics, and wildlife/art activities.  Please browse the website and the blog archives for topics you are interested in. 


An Invitation to Visit the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Celebration of the Earth's biological diversity is one of the goals of the art and writing projects of Mountain Bear Ink.

My drawings, woodcuts, and handmade books are designed to foster an awareness of the amazing variety of organisms on Earth, the essential services they perform, and their current status in the shadow of an ever-increasing human population.

Consider becoming familiar with another related website-- the Biodiversity Heritage Library.  This site archives scientific reports, surveys, and other materials related to our planet's biological entities.  I am particularlyimpressed by the organization's  fascinating collection of illustrations from all over the world.

The BHL's mission:  "The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community."

Posted below are two examples of pages from the BHL collection.

Gardening: Essays on Ecological Concepts

For the past eight issues of Edible Wasatch magazine I have written a series of essays derived from my book Gardening:  An Ecological Approach.

These short pieces discuss, one-by-one, key ecological concepts and principles that make up the rule book for living on Earth. Of course, they are most applicable in wild places, and they are least well-applied in intensively occupied urban areas (at least as we usually occupy them). A backyard garden, however, in town or in the country, still expresses the principles and still promotes the processes (e.g. energy flow, material cycling, soil formation, carbon sequestration, etc.) that make life possible.  

You may read the following via the "online editions" page at Edible Wasatch.

"Backyard Biodiversity"  Fall 2012  pp. 56-57

"There Are Limits"  Summer 2012  pp. 56-57

"Global Conservation, Backyard-Style"  Spring 2012  pp. 50-51

"The Intimacy of Global Nutrient Cycles"  Winter 2011-2012  pp. 44-45

"Solar-Powered People"  Fall 2011  pp. 44-45

"Soil Matters"  Summer 2011  pp. 44-45

"Ecologically Competent People"  Spring 2011  pp. 44-46

"Diversity and Sustainbility"  Winter 2010-2011  p. 28