Your mother and I are very proud.

This is the Scrap Fairy’s truck. Where else would scraps come from?

The deed was done as my life is done in watermelon sugar.  Or for it, in this case.  Lemons from one of K’s experiments.

I found this in the bushes a while ago.  Chicago is reputed to have a lush and varied ecology– and I’ve certainly seen hawks munching pigeons in the church parking lot down the street from my house.  This little guy though: all hunkered down in the woodchips, living quite well off of the stuff students leave out or toss away.  He probably fits as well into his niche in the bioregion as he does into his little hutch of hasta.

It’s been a little while.  Here is a photo of a building under construction in the sunset.  I took it from a high-up window in a clinic waiting room.  I am there pretty often for professional reasons.  When I took the photo, there was a woman was standing next to me who had been at the clinic for several hours already. A thing happened that actually happens to me pretty often at this window.  People start talking, just a little bit, letting the blanket of privacy and worry that they wrap around themselves slide off a bit more than they would in the soft seating (technical term, btw).  They don’t talk about the reasons that they’re waiting, either.  I hope that nonetheless they are thinking of the scope of the project of conceiving and then building a sky scraper, the reach of the project, the possibilities of the tools we’ve invented.

Seems to me this is 100% polvo estelar.

Uninhabited islands seem a trope, right?   What would you bring to, what book would be your only reading material on, what album would be the only thing you listened to for the rest of your life on , who would you want to be trapped with on, etc.   

The Galapágos are famously unpeopled.  Endemic species might be destroyed by too much traffic, eaten up by accidentally-imported rats, intermixed with species from another island and lose its special traits.  They might be eaten up by people, too.  That’s how the giant tortoises nearly collectively bought the farm.  Species that simply stop off at the islands, sharks and sea turtles and whales and even albatrosses, might be frightened away if repeatedly harassed.

Firm measures have been taken, then, by a park service, a municipal government, a state government, and a special Galápagos preserve administration to keep the islands pristine or at least safeish. 

Maintaining what the islands takes a good deal of work. Travel to and between the islands is tightly controlled. Species like wasps, rats, and goats are terminated with, as they say, extreme prejudice.

Visitors are controlled, too, and this control reflects the social and economic realities of Galápagos tourism. They mostly speak (and read) English. Most people to who make it to the Galápagos are from the US, though there are some programs which bring Ecuadorian school children and teachers to the islands. Maintaining this uninhabited space is expensive, after all. These primitive conditions are the product of incredibly sophisticated control.

Which is to say that if you were marooned on these islands, you’d have daily visitors, bringing you a WSJ subscription. But your main reading material might be a big book of regulations.

I can’t let this photo out into the wild interweb without my now-traditional gripe. A tiny tourist town in Ecuador has a better recycling system than the south side of Chicago does. Or at least has a recycling system. Which we do not, despite the heavy ad campaign that Daley has put on. Daley! Your city is not very “green” at all, compared with the rest of the world. I am shaking my fist from near the ecuator.