A Change in the Wind
Reporting and writing on climate, culture, Ojai and the Pacific Crest Trail
Featured Article
Patagonia’s environmental activism: a timeline
1960’s: Yvon Chouinard, a competitive rock climber, takes up blacksmithing to improve the quality of steel pitons and climbing gear. He quickly establishes a reputation for worth and reliability, and begins selling climbing gear to other climbers out of the back of his car. …
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Mr Willis Goes to Washington
Not long after the COVID-19 pandemic began, a media attack on masking, epidemiology, and vaccination came in the form of a film called “Plandemic,” made by Ojai resident Mikki Willis, which dropped on May 4th, 2020. Spread by thousands of anti-vax and QAnon followers — according to a follow-up investigation by the Stanford Internet Observatory…
Ojai’s Lorax: Alasdair Coyne
Ojai gardener, Alasdair Coyne, left the Japanese Mafia in the dirt in a high-stakes game to preserve what is now the Ventura River Preserve, owned by the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy. By Kit Stolz On a hot summer day in the mid-1990s, the conservationist andprofessional gardener Alasdair Coyne, who emigrated to Ojai fromScotland as a…
Fire weather and climate change
In Ventura County this week, the local National Weather Service station in Oxnard has issued the following warnings: On Sunday, a Red Flag Warning (for high heats and offshore winds)For the week, a Critical Fire Weather warning (for high heat, low humidity)for the last three days, an Excessive Heat Warning Do these “fire weather”warnings seem…
Megadrought in the Southwest: LA Times vs NYT
Let me point out how different the same study can look to different reporters in different arenas. Bettina Boxall, the Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Times reporter, looks at California in her big front-page story a week ago about long-term drought in California and SoCal, and finds little change in rainfall but substantial change in human behavior…
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Climate
Storm vs. Drought: After weeks of flooding, how can CA still be in drought?
Climate scientists who have studied the Southwest largely agree that the vast region — which includes Southern California — has been in drought almost since the beginning of the 21st century. It’s a historic megadrought — meaning a drought of twenty years or more — with the driest soils in the West in at least…
UCSB Scientists See End to “Normal” Climate
From the Independent in Santa Barbara, a story I pulled together on two young scientists exploring the data underlying the megadrought in which SoCal finds itself today: By Kit StolzMon Sep 19, 2022 | 4:49pm In August, Governor Gavin Newsom and officials from the Department of Water Resources released a new Water Supply Strategy, saying that because…
Ventura County heats faster than Lower 48
by Kit Stolz [published in the Ventura County Reporter April 14, 2022] Ventura County is warming faster than any other county in the continental United States, according to data compiled by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (1). The county has warmed 4.75 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895, which is about a half a degree warmer than either…
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Culture
The Eternal Return of the Grateful Dead
Here’s a story I wrote for the Ventura County Reporter on the Skull and Roses festival coming up next week at the Ventura County Fairgrounds. Let me post the published version (below) and add some color, for those who like a little extra. From the VCR: At the end of 1995 the much beloved jam…
Orwell and the earth
When [the critic] Woodcock compared Orwell to Antaeus, who draws his strength from the earth, he might have also meant that he drew his intellectual strength from the specific and the tangible and from firsthand experience. It set him at odds with an era in which ideologies led many astray, not least as doctrines defending…
“Radical Distraction” by Saul Bellow
From Saul Bellow, in an essay from 1975, published in Critical Inquiry: “We are in a state of radical distraction,” he writes in “A World Too Much with Us,” an essay for the journal Critical Inquiry, in 1975, the same year Humboldt’s Gift appears. “I don’t see how we can be blind to the political…
How Yoko turned on John’s imagination
A charming piece via the BBC, drawn from a new book, reveals how Yoko’s idealism turned on John’s imagination and — pretty directly it seems — inspired the creation of his most iconic song: Imagine. Specifically, Yoko’s book Grapefruit. Lennon said:“There’s a lot of pieces in it saying like ‘imagine this’ or ‘imagine that’,” he…
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Kit Stolz 