For any American who believes that climate change is not only real but one of the most pressing issues of our time, it’s oddly invigorating to hear one’s President declare the debate “settled,” as Obama did last night in his State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact,” he followed. It’s exciting to […]
Cally Carswell
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Ocean acidification is already driving changes in Northwestern marine ecology
For a time, Pseudolithophyllum muricatum was king of the kelp forest understory around Tatoosh Island, a rocky blip of land off the northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula. In experimental “bouts” staged there by famed ecologist Bob Paine that pitted the crusty, milky red algae against other species of coralline algae it lived amongst, P. muricatum […]
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Forecast for drought continues Westwide
El Nido is a small settlement of some 300 souls located almost right in the middle of California, in the grand agricultural enterprise known as the San Joaquin Valley. Translated into English, El Nido means “the nest.” It’s a fitting name for the place, though its founders couldn’t have foreseen how. Today, El Nido is […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
Environmentalists without borders
Two winters ago, I visited California’s central coast for the first time since I was a teenager. Back then, I paid little attention to botany or landscaping. But this time, I spent the trip gripped by plant envy. In Santa Cruz, lemon trees littered yards with ripe fruit, and multi-colored aloes with fleshy leaves as […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2013: The Tree Coroners
The Tree Coroners
To save the West’s forests, scientists must first learn how trees die.
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Second Yarnell investigation reaches damning – and tragic – conclusions
As we reported in October, the first investigation of Arizona’s Yarnell Hill Fire, in which 19 hotshots were killed this summer, drew extremely cautious conclusions. No “direct causes” of the accident were identified, no one was blamed. Policies and protocols, the report said, were not violated. It was almost strangely timid, leaving some to wonder: […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2013: The Tree Coroners
Snapshots of a forest two years after a megafire
Southwestern forests have become burdened by wildfires that burn much hotter than those that preceded nearly a century of fire suppression. These so-called “high-severity” fires have been stoked not only by plentiful fuels, but by dried-out vegetation and hot, dry weather. The 2011 Las Conchas Fire, which burned through 156,000 acres in New Mexico’s Jemez […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2013: The Tree Coroners
What’s happening in other Western forests?
AspenAfter hundreds of thousands of acres of aspen in the West perished during the 2000s, William Anderegg, a Princeton University forest and climate researcher, set out to test tree physiologist Nate McDowell’s hypothesis that drought killed trees in one of two ways: thirst or starvation. Anderegg found that aspen primarily died of thirst, but it […]
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What’s at stake in this November’s off-year elections
Next week’s elections will come and go relatively peacefully. And for that we can be thankful. To simultaneously endure the hyperbolic screeching of political mailers and television ads, along with the federal government’s self-implosion, would have broken even the most committed of citizens. Then again, a high-stakes election season probably would’ve saved the federal government […]
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Oil spill, eagles and fracking: the news you missed during the shutdown
The staff of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was welcomed to work yesterday by a “coffee cake bite”-bearing Joe Biden, and a grinning administrator so thrilled to have her employees back on the job she jumped up and down as they entered the building. There wasn’t, I expect, a lot of jumping and grinning happening […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Lessons from the flooded Front Range
Learning to live with the inevitable.
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Why are the conclusions of the Yarnell Hill Fire investigation so timid?
Some brutal details have emerged about the Granite Mountain Hotshots’ last day of life. The 19 firefighters were just 600 yards from the safety of the ranch they were headed toward when they were forced to deploy their fire shelters and were quickly overtaken by flames and 2,000-plus-degree heat. Just 40 minutes or so before […]
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Why flooding on the Front Range is an inevitable disaster
Excuse my language, but: Holy. Shit. That’s what all of us natural disaster-curious Internet voyeurs were thinking last week, our jaws giving in to gravity as we clicked through images from Colorado’s Front Range of people trudging through baseball fields covered hip-high with water, roads sliced apart by whitewater, and cabins transformed into riverine islands. […]
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The untouchable sheriff of Maricopa County celebrates a questionable legacy
It costs less than a dollar a day to feed an inmate of Maricopa County’s Tent City. Meals are served without flourishes like salt and pepper, which saves taxpayers a few bucks and reminds inmates that jail is not supposed to be fun, much less pleasing to the palate. So the cake and ice cream […]
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EPA chief confirmed. Are three key judicial nominees next?
Gina McCarthy must have been exhausted last week when she completed her 136-day slog down the path of most resistance – also known as the U.S. Congress – to the helm of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It was the most drawn-out battle over a nominee for EPA’s top job ever. But it had little […]
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Behind the fire headlines
With firefighter safety and the West’s changing fire ecology on everyone’s mind right now, it’s a good time to broaden our view with a trip into the HCN archives. Below are links to some of the in-depth stories we’ve done on these issues. Firefighter fatalities and safety The Fiery Touch: Wildfire arsonists burn forests, grasslands […]
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Yarnell Hill fire fatalities, in context
A good friend of mine who is a wildfire medic was in the airport yesterday, en route to his next assignment, when I called to ask him, in that helpless way we do, to be safe, and to see how he was handling the tragic news from Arizona, where 19 hotshots lost their lives Sunday fighting […]
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What’s eating the snowpack?
The water gods created haves and have-nots this year, and nowhere more dramatically than in Colorado. In March, after another dry winter, the whole state was biting its nails. Then: Snowpacalypse! An unusually stormy April built up the snowpack in most of northern Colorado to just about average. In the southern part of the state, […]
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New Mexico on fire
New Mexico is burning. Again. In June 2011, winds gusting up to 40 miles per hour propelled an aspen into a power line in the Jemez Mountains, near Los Alamos, igniting a 156,593-acre blaze that became known as the Las Conchas Fire. It was the biggest wildfire in the New Mexico’s recorded history, until the […]
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The other Cannabis legalization story
There were obvious ways to avoid being drafted into combat during World War II: Be a woman. Or a man younger than 18. Or a man of prime age who was somehow “physically, mentally or morally” unfit. And then there were less apparent avenues. For instance: grow hemp. The government would not only allow you […]