Bluedot Living Magazine
Below are selected articles from Nicole Javorsky’s work as a freelance writer for Bluedot Living in 2023 through 2026 …
Why the Urban Landscape Needs More Plants
It is spring and here you are, sipping your piping hot coffee among wildflowers, listening to the trills of warblers and hummingbirds, following the flutter of monarch butterfly wings with your eyes that become more alert as the morning ticks on. All of this in the big city, where the sky phases through shades of tangerine, crimson, and magenta over a sprawling expanse of verdant rooftops.
A city integrated with, instead of divided from, the natural world: This is the vision Inger Yancey, the founder and president of Brooklyn Greenroof, is working to bring to life, along with other green-roof proponents like The Nature Conservancy, Brooklyn Grange, Alive Structures, and New York City Soil and Water Conservation District …
Fighting for Home and Way of Life
Travis Dardar, an Indigenous fisherman, grew up on Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles, in Terrebonne Parish. It’s where his grandfather taught him to fish, shrimp, and oyster, in the tradition of the group of Louisiana Indigenous people who fled to the island when forced from their lands by the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
Once 22,000-plus acres, Isle de Jean Charles saw its size eroded by 98 percent between 1955 and 2018, due to a combination of oil extraction, hurricanes, and sea level rise. In 2002, nearly 300 people made the island their home; today, just three households remain on Isle de Jean Charles’ 320 acres. After his grandfather passed away in 2015, Dardar was one of the many who moved his family to the mainland.
“After the funeral,” he says, “I looked at my wife and I told her, ‘Let’s go. This ain’t home anymore. We’ll never get ahead if we keep losing everything we have.’”
Protecting the Tongass
Five years ago, Wanda Culp traveled from Hoonah, Alaska to Washington, DC, for the first time. Culp didn’t travel that roughly 3,000 miles to tour the White House or traipse along the National Mall. She had a crystal-clear objective: convince lawmakers to protect the Tongass National Forest.
Culp, an Indigenous Tlingit woman, calls the Tongass — one of the world’s last relatively intact temperate rainforests — her home. “Folks down south don’t even realize what clean air, clean water, and healthy land is,” she says. “This is our cultural existence.”