Environmental journalism, by and large, reflects not just news of the day (and an underlying theme) but also the zeitgeist. For example, when I made ecology my beat in the late 1990s, stories about the biodiversity crisis were prevalent in mainstream media and in environmental magazines–one of which I worked at through most of the…Continue Reading…
A new video by Climate Desk explains “how climate change is fueling wildfires” in the U.S. West. The truth is a good bit more complicated, which James West attests to in the accompanying text: In this video, Matthew Hurteau—assistant professor of forest resources at Penn State University—explains how warming temperatures, prolonged drought, and a century’s worth…Continue Reading…
As a child of the suburbs, my first real contact with raw nature was in 5th grade, when a friend and I built a treehouse in the woods behind the apartment complex we lived in. (This was a two-year pit stop after my parent’s divorce.) No adults helped us. It was pretty awesome. I used…Continue Reading…
There are two stories in the current issue of New York Magazine that are of great interest to me, particularly this one by Robert Sullivan, titled, “The Concrete Jungle.” I’m teaching an Advanced Reporting course this Fall at New York University, called Hidden New York: Where the Wild Things Are, and incredibly, Sullivan’s wide-ranging survey…Continue Reading…
In the current issue of American Scientist, environmental historian John McNeill mines a famous political treatise to posit why climate change is an intractable socio-political issue: We know orders of magnitude more about the global climate system and climate history than we did in 1950. We do know that there are potential alternative states and…Continue Reading…
Humans have taken over the earth. Evidently there’s a new concept that confirms this, called anthropogenic biomes. Then there’s the recent push by scientists to declare a new era, called the anthropocene. I jest, only because this is not new territory. Environmental historians have built a whole discipline from this fertile ground. And geographers dug…Continue Reading…
This brilliant post by environmental historian Steve Pyne might be the first time that anyone has compared wildfire to Wall Street: Like economic transactions, fire is not a substance but a reaction ““ an exchange. It takes its character from its context. It synthesizes its surroundings. Its power derives from the power to propagate. To…Continue Reading…
I’m just catching up with this essay by Mark Dowie. Money quote: The perceived arrogance of “big conservation” is a confounding factor; so too is the understandable tendency of some indigenous people to conflate conservation with imperialism. The results of this century-old conflict are thousands of protected areas that cannot be managed and an intractable…Continue Reading…
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the horrible fires in Australia can be partly attributed to global warming. It’s a legitimate storyline, which many in the media have picked up on. By and large, these stories have been measured, with the appropriate caveats. (See here and here for two good examples.) The brutal…Continue Reading…
No one knows more about the history and ecology of fire than Stephen Pyne. “Australia,” he writes today, “is a fire continent: it is built to burn. To this general combustibility its southeast corner adds a pattern of seasonal winds, associated with cold fronts, that draft scorching, unstable air from the interior across whatever flame…Continue Reading…