"Thoreau Is Rediscovered as a Climatologist"

This article was basically a feature story. It centered around Richard B. Primack, a conservation biologist from Boston University, and Charles C. Davis, an evolutionary biologist from Harvard University, and their quest to track trends in the New England climate by coupling modern data and environmental records of the past. This article was very interesting since it tied a timely and relevant topic, global warming, into the distant past, bringing forth names like Thoreau and others from as far back as the 1800s. The author picked the scientists' brains and used the sources of their historical data to build a larger, more dynamic story. I doubt that a feature about two scientists who are tracking thousands of plants in Concord, Mass., trying to determine if climate change is occuring would make it past any newspaper editor, much less onto the website with a two page story. The idea of tying in botanists of the past created an entirely new angle that I found very intriguing.

Additionally, the New York Times website added a multimedia feature that showed pictures and text not in the article itself. This aspect provided a unique way of viewing the story and I found myself much more intrigued. There were pictures of the actual manuscripts used by the scientists, Walden Pond, Thoreau's cottage, even some species of flowers that are endangered by the observed climate change. It was very multidimensional and offered a pleasant balance to the relatively scientific article.

Overall, I enjoyed this very much. It was fun to read about a blast from the past in such a relevant way.

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