As reported in Nature, two leading ecologists are calling on their colleagues to publish negative study results. Richard Hobbs, a plant biologist and the editor-in-chief of the journal Restoration Ecology, explained to Nature: The subject of what constitutes ‘success’ in restoration has been actively debated over the last few years, but it is only recently…Continue Reading…
Per that new “miscellaneous” item attached to the recent credit card bill, Carl Hiaasen is painfully hilarious: Like many other Americans, every time I take my family to a national park I find myself thinking: Wow! If I only had a gun . . . The whole column is a must-read.
Earlier this week, Curtis Brainard at CJR’s The Observatory wrote an excellent appraisal of the cacophonous debate over the Waxman-Markey climate bill. Brainard neatly summarized the two contradictory narratives and the main protagonists. To help navigate what Andy Revkin recently called “the fog of climate policy,” Brainard suggests that newspaper editorial boards should be weighing…Continue Reading…
Would climate change have greater urgency in the public mind if we started talking more about adaptation? I realize many climate advocates fear that such a discussion is a slippery slope to non-action. But it needn’t be. In fact, I believe that more stories and chatter about the growing humanitarian concerns of near-term climate change…Continue Reading…
Is is possible to judge a book by its title? Roger Pielke, Jr. believes so. But he’s making much ado of nothing in this post, which Marc Morano has, ironically, turned into a splashy and hugely misleading headline on Climate Depot. Here’s the quick background: at Seed magazine, Michael Mann participated in a forum on…Continue Reading…
Yeah, the catastrophe card is played by both sides, that’s for sure.
The indispensable one, boxed into a corner by Roger Pielke, Jr., and The Breakthrough Institute, does something rare: Yes, my thinking on rip-offsets has evolved, primarily because I have spent the last few months talking to leading experts, domestic and international, including the chief climate negotiator for a major European country. As one reader to…Continue Reading…
This observation on human behavior by a park ranger is something to think about next year at Yosemite or Yellowstone, when guns in national parks potentially become as ubiquitous as water bottles: People don’t leave their problems at home when they go to recreate.
One archaeologist has a bold plan to take back his profession from Hollywood and The History Channel: The ghost of Indy is hard to stamp out. Everywhere archaeologists gather, we complain about how archaeology is portrayed in pop culture: it’s sensationalistic, cheesy, misleading, schlocky! It gives people the wrong impression of what archaeology is. This…Continue Reading…
Last summer, Bill McKibben argued in Orion magazine that global warming is essentially a literary problem. A technological and scientific challenge, yes; an economic quandary, yes; a political dilemma, surely. But centrally? A crisis in metaphor, in analogy, in understanding. We haven’t come up with words big enough to communicate the magnitude of what we’re…Continue Reading…