Author Archives: mmariola

As Susan Clayton reported earlier, the college’s teaching garden had its official ribbon-cutting ceremony several weeks back, and I wanted to take this moment to describe the garden in a little more detail. The plot is about 65′ long and &#… Continue reading →

Here is a second update from Lauren Vargo, one of our students doing an urban gardening internship this summer with the Cleveland Botanical Garden’s Green Corps program.  Read her first update here. * * * * * Several weeks ago … Continue r… Continue reading →

Here is the third in our series of mid-summer updates from three COW students working at urban gardening initiatives in Cleveland.  This one is from Andrew Smiles, a rising senior, who is working in the same program as Lauren Vargo, … Continue r… Continue reading →

Here is an update from Lauren Vargo, a rising junior who is serving a summer internship with a very different kind of urban gardening program than Alex (see recent entry).   Lauren’s program, Green Corps, is much older and more established &#82… Continue reading →

Here is an update from Alex Haas, a rising sophomore who is serving a summer internship with a new and ambitious urban gardening venture in Cleveland.  Urban gardening is just what it sounds like, the cultivation of crops and even … Continue rea… Continue reading →

I have a few final thoughts on the Yucatan’s “eco” status that will best be articulated by answering some of the questions I asked in my first post.  I should say quickly that the Yucatan promotional literature does not necessarily … Conti… Continue reading →

1.  My observations of the countryside, which are, granted, confined almost entirely to what I could see from the car window (and a good swathe from the plane window on the way in), did not reveal much agriculture to begin … Continue reading &#8… Continue reading →

Our last day proved to be one of our most memorable, taking us 15 kilometers south of Tulum along the coastline and into one of Mexico’s twelve UNESCO-sanctioned “biosphere reserves” (the most stringent category of land protection in the country,… Continue reading →

In a very interesting comparative experience to our time at Kilometer 50 Café in the little town of Jose Maria Morelos, in the much larger, beachside, entirely tourist-oriented city of Tulum we stumbled upon something we did not expect to … Cont… Continue reading →

You would be hard pressed to find any history of the Yucatan Peninsula in which the relations between the indigenous Mayan population and the Hispanic conquistadores would be described as anything other than fractious and violent.  Certainly to call i… Continue reading →