Summer is winding down, with kids starting school next week where I live (I have a boy around one year old), and it makes me think about summer when I was a kid. I was blessed as a kid to have a swamp in my back yard and to have a wooded lot down the street to play in – along with living in a place where my parents didn’t fear for my safety the moment I went out the door, telling me just to be home in time for dinner.

On my blog today, I blogged about a local case in which two young men tortured and beat an alligator, then ate it. They did so in an area where hunting isn't allowed (in a national wildlife refuge no less), and they didn't have an alligator harvest permit. They have pleaded guilty. A portion of the news article about the case mentioned that some people wrote the judge to request a harsh punishment for the two men because the alligator was "semi-tame."

Space: the final frontier, right? Probably. But a couple of cave divers from the nonprofit Woodsville Karst Plain Project (http://www.gue.com/Expeditions/WKPP/index.html) recently showed there's exploration to be done right under our feet. According to the Daytona Beach News-Journal, divers recently discovered a 28-mile-long underground link between two cave areas. That turns out to be the longest underwater cave system in North America!

Maybe you heard last month that the United Nations decided to downgrade Everglades National Park from its list of endangered sites around the world. And maybe like me, you said to yourself, "Huh? The Everglades isn't endangered anymore?"