Matthew Dickerson: Boosting native plants to promote nature’s lifecycle

A year and a half ago, my wife, Deborah, bought an Extractigator. What on earth is an Extractigator? The short answer is that it’s a device for yanking plants (think shrubs or small trees) out of the ground, roots and all.

The phrase “wicked problems” has been around since at least the early 1970s. It refers to challenges that typically have no correct solution, but only different options of tradeoffs and costs: problems for which any proposed solution will have likely nega … (read more)

Earlier this week, my wife and I took our two-year-old grandson B to the ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain to see some fishes and turtles and frogs and snakes.

It was early January 2018, a year we actually had winter. Our Christmas present to our three sons that year was taking them and their significant others on a three-day, two-night, lodge-to-lodge cross-country ski trip at the Appalachian Mountain Club prop … (read more)

There aren’t a lot of similarities between Matthew Dickerson’s work as a computer science professor at Middlebury College and his literary endeavors as a published author. 

Vermonters may have woken up on June 6, 1912, thinking it was a normal day.

There is something magical about sitting atop a ledge looking out over a lake, river, canyon or even just a swath of undeveloped landscape.

“People learn best when information enters through their peripheral vision, out of the corner of their eye … through stories.” 

I will admit that it’s a bleak Monday morning. Between the rain and the low clouds, I can barely see the hills a half mile from my house. The nearby cornfield looks like one vast puddle.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing the sitting-in-the-woods-waiting-for-large-game-to-pass sort of waiting.

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time in the woods lately in my annual attempt to harvest local free-range, antibiotic-free venison.

“It was comparable to Tropical Storm Irene. We lost a lot (though not all) of the young-of-year age class.” Austin Galinat, a fisheries scientist with Vermont Fish and Wildlife, was giving me an overview of some of the results of the late summer and early … (read more)

The number of bears I have seen this year — and seen evidence of around my house — gives testimony to our vibrant and growing black bear population.

Sometime — likely between 3,000 and 2,500 years ago — a Hebrew poet wrote a beautiful nature poem that has, thankfully, managed to survive the centuries, and has come to modern readers as Psalm 104. I say “thankfully” because for many years this ancient p … (read more)

The rain was falling again. Alaska’s 2023 summer was beginning to feel a lot like Vermont’s.