What this is about.

This is another branch of my blogger tree. "Great Nerve" was not designed to be a nature blog, but I've been finding more and more of my energy flowing in that direction and I needed a place to divert it. (In the same way my interest in Japanese/world music moved to Friendly Noises). To some readers the name of the blog won't be the least bit obscure, but I fear that increasingly the reference is disappearing from our culture. I read Thornton Burgess's nature books obsessively as a kid and have recently considered embarking on an extended study of Burgess's work as a nature communicator. For several generations his voice (whether in his syndicated newspaper column or his radio shows) informed Americans' understanding of the natural world. I was thrilled to find recently that many of the newspaper columns are available in digital form in Proquest's Historical Boston Globe archive and elsewhere and thought it might be the time to consider his work again. That said, this blog is not about Burgess per se, rather it shares his perspective that one effective way to get people to think about the natural world is by paying attention to the lives of the creatures around us.