Melissa Munro's blog

“I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.”

-- The Graduate, 1967

I highly recommend you take a few minutes to read this piece by Joel Ballard from The National Observer. It is an impressive piece of journalism.

We are ready to take on the challenges coming our way. But we can only do that with new members like you.

It takes one person – YOU – as a valued member of our national family – to build and sustain the kind of movement that our Founding Director Elizabeth May envisioned.

Family. Food. Warmth. Safety. Home.

These are the things I’m thinking about in the intensifying few days leading up to the holidays.

It always makes me think about our families of wildlife, out there in the elements, finding their way. I’m in awe of their resilience, their own unique family and social structures, and how they have adapted over millennia.  I wonder how they do it.

It feels like a death in the family.

The New England Aquarium Right Whale Research Program has just released confirmation of the death of the 13th right whale this season.

Couplet, right whale #2123, was found on Monday, east of Cape Cod.

Few things are as spectacular and awe-inducing as a breaching humpback whale.

The sheer enormity of their body, with such strength and grace – blasting out of the water, seeming to defy the laws of gravity even just for a moment – is enough to take your breath away. It’s acrobatics and ballet on the largest scale, with a splash down that is out of this world!

It’s what they do, and it is what they have done for millennia.

It’s the holidays, and I can’t get this song out of my head, and those beautiful words sung by our beloved Joni Mitchell,

I wish I had a river.

Admittedly, the song is a good dose of melancholy, and some longing for home, a longing for Canada, where the landscape is rich with rivers so long you could teach your feet to fly.