Author Archives: Kim & Jim

Just Talking About…Two Versions of the American Boulevard

September 26, 2017.  Last summer my neighbor and I conspired to turn our shared boulevard (the strip of land between the sidewalk and the street in our Winona neighborhood parlance) from a crabgrass herbarium to a prairie.  We covered the … Continue reading

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Just Talking About…The Little Things That Run The World

September 8, 2017.  It’s amazing to me how much of the world hinges on the workings of tiny things.  I’m reading about Alexander von Humboldt, the most famous man you’ve never heard of, who paid attention to those small things.  … Continue reading

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Just Talking About…Highway 62 Prairie Revisited

September 3, 2007.  I passed this morning a postage stamp piece of the original, authentic Minnesota.  It’s just a little scrap of land wedged between two highways and the federal lands containing the Veterans’ facilities and other administrative chunks, all … Continue reading

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Just Talking About…Britain Giving Up Coal For A Day

August 27, 2017.  A noteworthy moment in the history of the planet occurred with few of my countrymen noticing.  On Friday, April 21, 2017, the United Kingdom got all its energy needs without burning an ounce of coal.  Coal, as … Continue reading

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Just Talking About…A Walnut Eclipse

August 25, 2017.  My wife took this picture last Monday in our back yard:  the naturally-occuring “pinhole camera” effect that happens when the partially-eclipsed sun shines through tiny spaces between the leaves.  For a moment, the ground was shining with … Continue reading

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Just Talking About…Harry Nelson and the Riffle Beetles

August 15, 2017.  This past month I was in Chicago and had a chance to visit one of my favorite institutions, the Field Museum of Natural History.  I was especially eager to visit an exhibit entitled “Specimens,” a fascinating overview … Continue reading

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Just Talking About…The Illusion of Rural Character

August 13, 2017.  A couple years before the housing market imploded, I was asked to design a residential neighborhood in a way that would protect one of the largest wildlife preserves in the Twin Cities region.  The development bumped up … Continue reading

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Just Talking About…The March For Science, Part 2

August 5, 2017.  It seems eons ago that I and ten thousand others walked from the St. Paul Cathedral to our state’s capital in St. Paul.  It was Earth Day, 2017, and a massive slice of the Twin Cities elite … Continue reading

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Just Talking About…The March For Science, Part 1

[I wrote this a month after Earth Day, 2017, forgot I’d written it, and wrote another essay on the same topic, which follows this one.  The first is an essay, the next seems more like a poem.  Interesting, the way … Continue reading

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Just Talking About…How Something Good for Coal Miners is Bad for Coal Miners

July 1, 2017.  Among the many dramatic yet predictable executive orders in the first several weeks of the Trump Administration was this one:  allow coal companies to again sidestep the intent of the 1972 Clean Water Act and let acid … Continue reading

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