Who will stop the flood?

Missouri has tornadoes, which are conjured and over within half an hour. They also don't usually put 7 million people out of power. So hurricanes are cinematic, for better or worse, and I've been glued to the New York Times throughout this storm.

This op-ed on oysters and bank stabilization was a surprising nugget among the crisis coverage.

Just as corals protect tropical islands, these oyster beds created undulation and contour on the harbor bottom that broke up wave action before it could pound the shore with its full force. Beds closer to shore clarified the water through their assiduous filtration (a single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day); this allowed marsh grasses to grow, which in turn held the shores together with their extensive root structure.

See also: this prescient, month-old article on New York City's "resilience strategy" for storm flooding.

Map porn, dead poets and a friendly hello

Hello!  My friend Nick and I share things with each other: music, nature, art and kind words.  Cookies, sometimes.  We also love sharing with other people.  In college, the two of us started an environmental reading and media group, but then we got real jobs.  Yada Yada.  And then I made the mistake of calling a barred owl a "bard owl."

. . . So now we have this blog.

Last week, Nick and I discussed what our first blog post would be.  I said map porn and old Bruce Springsteen.

But that was last week.  This morning my friend shoved headphones at me and played "Where Did the Night Go" before breaking the news that Gil Scott-Heron died.  I've been listening to his poems the rest of the day.

Also big news among the right circles is the rising Missouri River.  The Army Corps of Engineers is releasing 110,000 cubic feet per second from its dams (the previous record was 70,000 cfs), and the higher-than-average snow upriver hasn't even begun to melt.  Brace yourselves.

This is mostly a test post.  We'll see how it goes.