This is my 230th column for the Great Neck Record, and I'm already at work on the 231st. A decade of writing about the environment has enabled me to share many local, national, historical, and even galactic environmental matters with readers, who otherwise might not be aware of the scientific and societal issues involved. Through writing and teaching (both life passions; second only to my wife), I have journeyed with readers and students millimeters through ocean sediments, miles over continents, and light-years across trackless space and measured time, in a continuing quest for knowledge and understanding.

The word science means "knowledge," and all seekers of knowledge are in a sense scientists. Learning is the pursuit of knowledge, which is unending for curious humans. We are ever so much better at learning than the innumerable hordes of other species who have evolved and tenanted this planet during the past 4,600 million years since it originated in the Solar System. Through evolution (chance mutations that made it through the bar and vicissitudes of stressful environments to confer survival benefits upon us), we have been endowed with brains far superior to even those of our closest relatives, chimpanzees, whose DNA shows a mere one percent difference from humans.

The big brains of Homo Sapiens (that's us) evolved about 125,000 years ago. We didn't learn or advance much during most of the intervening time (120,000 years) when we were hunter/gatherers (except for learning how to kill and eat without being killed or eaten), until about 5,000 years ago when civilizations first developed, and people became individual specialists who had to deal with the multitude of needs in the large urban centers they inhabited. The information needed to sustain large numbers of people living and working at different tasks in large city-kingdoms and the surrounding fields (where their food was cultivated) became too complex to be disseminated verbally or to be passed down by word of mouth successfully from one generation to the next.

The oral information and communication glut that ensued made writing essential for record-keeping and knowledge dissemination. Necessity being the Mother of Invention, schools, libraries, and universities sprang up quickly to "educate" humans in reading and writing, and in how to perform all the specialties people needed to learn in order to survive and get along in a crowded habitat. Some of the earliest preserved writings are of teachers' lesson plans and students' notes inscribed on clay tablets. Written information and knowledge astronomically increased the rate of learning and of human advances as myriads of discoveries, which more efficient learning made possible, enabled humankind to embark on attempted dominance (and concomitant despoiling) of the Earth's diverse and pristine environments.

We now face another information glut and communication crisis brought about by the very success of modern computer technology. While knowledge can be read off a screen, stored in a disc, and transmitted via internets, satellites and cables, the value and easy accessibility of the written word; in a book, a magazine, or a newspaper, will extend the usefulness and pleasure of gaining knowledge from these as well as from more advanced media well into the next millennium and perhaps beyond.

All this is to say that I have enjoyed the past decade of writing for the Record (along with four previous decades of crafting works for publication, and I expect to continue until the pen drops from my hand or my fingers fall from the keyboard. Writing, for me, is a cerebral extension and a means of creative or pleasurable thinking. Writing is another path to knowledge. I learned to write long ago, so that now I can write to learn.