A friend sent along an amazing and heartening story from the Washington Post, called Decoding the Redwoods. In short, to better understand the long-lived coast redwood, scientists in two different labs have been working to decode the species’ genome, which — astonishingly — is vastly larger than ours. The redwood genome project began in AprilContinue reading “The deep resilience of the redwood”
Category Archives: disaster
Home versus the Mountain
One of the acknowledged great non-fiction pieces of our time is John McPhee’s Los Angeles Against the Mountains, from l988, an uncanny and alarming foreshadowing of the disaster in Montecito this month. It’s one of those astonishingly thorough and appalling pieces of writing, almost beyond journalismn, and to my mind can hardly be overpraised (butContinue reading “Home versus the Mountain”
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Not an optimist. Not on Twitter
The writer, journalist, and thinker Ta-Nehisi Coates has been embroiled in controversy for years now. Seemingly his every move attracts controversy, (for reasons mysterious to small-town hick yours truly). Near as I can tell Coates has not been doing anything another prominent and successful writer wouldn’t like to do, such as moving to Paris forContinue reading “Ta-Nehisi Coates: Not an optimist. Not on Twitter”
“There will be no food in Puerto Rico”
…for a year or more, says an orchard owner who saw every one of his thousands of his trees killed in a matter of hours. From the New York Times, well down the front page, far below the latest Twitter tweetstorm: “Sometimes when there are shortages, the price of plantain goes up from $1 toContinue reading ““There will be no food in Puerto Rico””
Greatest hurricane movie ever? Key Largo
Key Largo has to be the greatest hurricane movie ever, and one of starriest pictures of all time. The cast will knock you out: Beginning with Bogart and Bacall, and including Lionel Barrymore, Claire Trevor and Edgar G. Robinson, for crying out loud, who dominates the picture as a gangster threatened by the power ofContinue reading “Greatest hurricane movie ever? Key Largo”
In Ojai, global warming + summer = heat. But how much?
A week ago New York magazine published a blockbuster climate change story. Here’s the annotated/footnoted version. Highly recommended, because the writer — David Wallace-Wells — finds a way to bring home the urgency, using current science. It’s very simple, really. Instead of focusing on what will happen next year, or next decade, or by 2040,Continue reading “In Ojai, global warming + summer = heat. But how much?”
President Trump unveils new climate policy
For Atlas Obscura: Why Scientists Are Worried about a Landslide No One Saw or Heard
Here’s the lead (er, lede) I pitched to Atlas Obscura, which (to my delight) they ran unchanged, giving me a welcome chance to write an interesting story I learned about at the AGU Fall Meeting from Kevin Krajick of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory: If a steep mountainside in a remote national park gives way andContinue reading “For Atlas Obscura: Why Scientists Are Worried about a Landslide No One Saw or Heard”
Wounded Earth: poem and photograph
The late great C.K. Williams thinks through the suffering of the earth — whose suffering is it really? Is it as I suspect not that rare for you to be wounded ravaged stripped of so much of what you wore with seeming pride your seething glittering oceans your forests nothing new for you meteors cometsContinue reading “Wounded Earth: poem and photograph”
Is desalination the answer for drought in Ventura County?
Although climate change was hardly mentioned in the two-hour discussion of desalination led by Ventura County supervisor Steve Bennett last Thursday at the county government center, the question of drought has clearly been very much on the minds of water officials in the county. Even more alarming, possibly, might be an earthquake that could interrupt supplies toContinue reading “Is desalination the answer for drought in Ventura County?”
Kit Stolz 