Author: Leonard Green

Leonard Green grew up on Long Island, spending his summers in the African-American summer community of Azurest, Sag Harbor. He now lives in East Hampton, and is a founding member of the environmental action group ChangeHampton.
Detail from Albrecht Dürer’s “The Great Piece of Turf.”
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Climate Local Now: About Looking

Leonard Green
by Leonard Green Looking out the window while preparing breakfast, these days, I’m likely to see ruby throated hummingbirds visiting our deeply scarlet bee balm, blue vervain, and white spired Culver’s root. In spring, migrating hummingbirds arrived just about the time the bell shaped red and yellow columbine flowers opened.  Pictured Above: Detail from Albrecht Dürer’s “The Great Piece of Turf.” The synchronized flowering and arrival are not coincidental. Columbine
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Griffin Beckmann, Maya Taveras, and Shirley Jiang at Share the Harvest Farm. |. Leonard Green photo
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Climate Local Now: From Environmental Education to Action — Three East Hampton Students Reflect

Leonard Green
By Leonard Green East Hampton High School’s Environmental and Garden Clubs have been important gateways to student environmental activity, both on and off campus. When the South Fork ReWild LI chapter ran its inaugural Summer Volunteer Program “to further biodiversity, climate resilience, and food security in our communities,” its first eager student volunteers came from these school clubs. Three years later, three graduating seniors look back on what they have
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Leaves help to nourish garden beds, and provide habitat for beneficial insects. |. Leonard Green photo
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Climate Local Now: Turn Off the Lights. Leave the Leaves.

Leonard Green
by Leonard Green In spring, the nearby bayside meadow is covered with beach plum blossoms. It looks like snow. The white fields fade, and a golden carpet of beach heather follows. By late summer, the beach plums are ripe and sweet to eat. They have withered now, food for winter’s wild foragers. Asters and goldenrods flower in time for the monarch migration. They are an important source of nectar for
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Len Green Nature is not optional
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Climate Local Now: Coming Home to Nature

Leonard Green
by Leonard Green Nature is not optional. Still, all too often, we treat it as if it were. Walking my neighborhood, yard after yard, I see the same assault on the native landscape. Old houses are torn down, and new ones pop up. The land is cleared, scraped, and compacted. Landscape teams roll out sod and install irrigation. Native shrubs like bayberry disappear, replaced with neatly regimented rows of non-native
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Len Green Photo - In the Forest
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Climate Local Now: In Forests, No One Rakes the Leaves

Leonard Green
by Leonard Green Walking the Red Spring Path of Northwest Woods in East Hampton recently, among all the dead and fallen pitch pines, I thought of renewal, how a forest heals itself, if we let it. Among the dead trees, there was life, abundant, thriving life emerging from the soil. And the dead trees themselves were essential to this process, doing what they had always done: feed the soil. Looking
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A deforested landscape in Panama. | Leonard Green photo
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Climate Local Now — Letter From Panama: Commerce & Water, A Cautionary Tale

Leonard Green
by Leonard Green The Panama Canal is in the news, probably for the wrong reasons. Whatever the geopolitics might be, the real story, as James Fallows has written, is about water. We live in a period of climate transformation: rising temperatures and persistent droughts. If we don’t do more to protect our watersheds, we are in trouble. To protect international shipping, the Canal needs a functioning ecology. And a functioning
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Mushrooms, the fruiting bodies of an immense fungal underworld. |. Leonard Green photo
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Climate Local Now: Rethinking Community — We Are Ecosystems

Leonard Green
By Leonard Green Rewilding has deepened my understanding of community. What we do with our properties reaches far beyond our surveyed property lines. Our landscapes are each small parts of cross-property systems that touch all our living neighbors, human and otherwise. Reading Merlin Sheldrake’s marvelous book on fungi, “Entangled Life,” I am reminded that we are all entangled. We live in a layered world, “enmeshed” in ways we barely can
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Above: Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), a native spring flowering wildflower, photographed by Len Green on his rewilded property.
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Climate Local Now | Spring: Nature is Speaking

Leonard Green
Above: Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), a native spring flowering wildflower, photographed by Len Green on his rewilded property. by Leonard Green May is migration heaven, all the birds singing. On my way down to the beach this morning, the air is thick with song: orioles, cardinals, chickadees, wrens. Closer to Gardiner’s Bay the trilling of prairie warblers, the buzzy notes of red winged blackbirds.  Then the leaf blower starts. And won’t
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stone_wall
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Climate Local Now | Of Mice and Men: Befriending Nature’s Balance

Leonard Green
Pictured Above: Stone walls were once prime snake habitat on the East End, but few snakes have been seen here in recent years, leading to cascading consequences up and down the food chain. by Leonard Green When I was a boy, snakes were a common sight on the island: garter snakes, northern black racers, and milk snakes. Black racers are the largest snakes on Long Island. I know they are
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