Mother Nature

After a miserable winter and a weirdly warm early fall, shops that sell snow gear are getting a break. "Ever since we got snow and cold weather, everything's good," said Duke Edukas, co-owner of Surfside Sports in Costa Mesa. "Prior to that," he said," everything was bad." With a blanket of white from Big Bear to Boston, and 10 shopping days until Christmas, the season could be looking up for retailers and manufacturers, including Quiksilver Inc. of Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa's Volcom Inc.

Two rainy summers followed by drought have produced a shortage of some Christmas tree varieties in New York, especially Fraser firs, one of the most popular choices, according to growers. "We've had it three years in a row now. Two with excess rain and now a drought. Mother Nature can't seem to get it right," said Robert Norris, a tree farmer and executive secretary of the Christmas Tree Farmers Assn. of New York Inc.

Re "Yosemite needs its plan back," Opinion, July 17 As the debate rages over how Yosemite will spend the $200 million appropriated by Congress to "rebuild" after the 1997 flood, consider this: The projects completed in recent years, such as the Yosemite Fund's rebuilding of the Yosemite Falls area, are reason enough to question any further development in the Yosemite Valley.

Re "Words in a time of war," Opinion, June 1 Mark Danner attributes to presidential advisor Karl Rove a quote of what defines reality. It's fascinating that the White House thinks it can define reality by "acting." The problem for the White House is that reality must be uncontradicted. The actions of nature and the laws that humans name to describe those behaviors must be a real thorn in the side of the White House. Laws such as gravity (water flows downhill) or our genetic predispositions that help explain so much of human behavior -- such as the desire to express oneself or the desire to resist attempts at domination -- contradict Rove's glib description of reality.

On a break from installing his exhibition at Regen Projects, artist Charles Ray sits in the gallery, shoulders hunched, hands clasped in his lap. Soft-spoken and withdrawn, he comes to life only when he gets up to walk around his latest project: a life-size sculpture of a fallen tree, carved in wood. "I'm interested in where you find yourself in relation to the work," he says, "so your perception of it changes. Scale changes as you move through it or around it."

Gretchen Daily, an ecologist at Stanford University, wears butterfly-patterned socks. She's a careful recycler and bikes to work. She composts. So what's she doing hanging out with guys from Goldman Sachs? As a tried-and-true "green," she believes she doesn't have a choice. "Time is running short," she says. "Appealing to moral sense isn't enough anymore. We have to make conservation fit mainstream business calculations."

I'VE NEVER KNOWN a thing about pregnancy, so once I got pregnant, I quizzed every mother I knew about what Mother Nature had in store for me.

THEY consider themselves nomads, have lived in a Northern California commune and currently make camp in an adobe in the mountains outside Santa Fe, N.M. They are active with such groups as the radical environmental group Earth First. They go by the names Nabob and Rabob. They write songs with titles such as "We Share Our Blanket With the Owl" and note that lyrics on their new album were written "in a tent, tepee or far off the trails of Point Reyes National Seashore."

WHEN Charles Darwin was in his later years and famous, a research team of German phrenologists paid him a visit. Surely such a remarkable man must enjoy remarkable head bumps. Among the most remarkable, they discovered, was the Bump of Reverence on his crown: 10 times as prominent as most people's. Reverence is the theme of "Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent": part philosophical ramble, part personal journal and part a rethinking of Darwin's character and life.