For four frustrating months in 2007, Mark Wiegardt and his wife, Sue Cudd, witnessed something unsettling at their Oregon oyster hatchery: tank bottoms littered with dead baby oysters. Usually, the larvae are grown until they’re three weeks old and a quarter of a millimeter in size — 10 million bunched together are roughly the size […]
Climate change
Posted inGoat
Dispersing the toxicity
It’s every coastal community’s nightmare. An off-shore oil rig explodes, a tanker runs aground, and the name of their town — Homer, Alaska, say — becomes synonymous with the latest disaster of our oil-besotted age. When such a disaster does happen, oil spill responders are faced with many choices about how to contain the spill […]
Posted inWotr
Here come the Super Storms
Once again, we were all New Yorkers. Watching the heartbreak that continues in Staten Island, parts of Queens and along the pummeled Jersey Shore, our sympathies turned eastward toward the victims of this unusual “Super Storm.” But just how unusual was it? Sandy’s devastation gives us the opportunity to remember another giant storm that barreled […]
Posted inGoat
Money and climate
Ah, money. During one of the biggest shopping times of the year, after spending Thanksgiving morning rolling stacks of coins with the kids, my thoughts turn to it, naturally. Or maybe unnaturally; what was mostly on my mind was the high cost of doing something to slow climate change. Specifically, I was thinking about carbon […]
Posted inRange
Turning climate change talk to action
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House I have a file on my desktop called “Cool Ideas.” It’s filled with news items on practical steps Westerners are taking to address climate change. I collected them over this election year while the issue drew platitudes and punch-lines from the candidates but little meaningful discussion on the national […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2012: Nowhere to run
What scientists are learning from wildfire in New Mexico
New Mexico’s Gila National Forest is an ideal place to study wildfire scars. Ponderosa pines on the western cliffs have blackened bark at their bases. On the eastern range, frequent burns keep the grass treeless and nutrient-enriched, so that it stretches for miles like a thick green hide. From a small plane in July, I […]
Posted inGoat
From coal mine to clean energy
At first glance, the man greeting visitors last Friday at the start of the gravel road leading to Elk Creek mine, a coal mine in Colorado’s North Fork Valley, might have been mistaken for a miner. His bright orange vest and black hardhat looked the part. But both items lacked the black dust that settles […]
Posted inGoat
Fecal matters
The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY is one of the nation’s most polluted waterways. Toxic sludge lines the bottom of the canal, designated a Superfund site, and used condoms, human feces and tampons bob on the surface. Every time it rains, wastewater treatments plants inundated with storm water flush sewage and run-off into the Gowanus […]
Posted inGoat
Gettin’ down with cap ‘n trade
Next month, California will hold the first auction as part of its carbon cap and trade program. The program, which will be the second largest CO2 emissions trading system in the world, has been in the works since 2006, when the Golden State passed the Global Warming Solutions Act, a piece of legislation that mandated […]
Posted inGoat
Some (diseases) like it hot
All sorts of things have been linked to climate change lately: skin cancer, shrinking leaves, extreme weather and death. This summer, scientists and reporters have been puzzling over a wave of disease outbreaks—hantavirus,valley fever and West Nile virus—and whether they, too, are linked to climate change. With some of these diseases the climatic connections are […]
Posted inWotr
Our survival depends on fighting climate change
I am 88 and have seen a lot of change over the decades, but I do not think anyone living now has ever faced a more serious threat to life than the threat of global climate change. As President Obama said recently, “More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They’re a threat […]
Posted inGoat
The sound of pollution
Artists like British “grime writer” Moose, who scrubs designs into filthy, smog-charred city surfaces (including the Broadway tunnel in San Francisco), have found novel ways to visualize air pollution for passersby. But now it’s also possible to experience air pollution with a different sense: hearing. Using mass spectrometry, which helps scientists pinpoint the exact compounds […]
Posted inWotr
Pondering change in the Great Basin
I’m standing on the shores of Summer Lake, or, to be more accurate, what used to be a lakeshore but is now a dry lakebed in Oregon’s high desert. I’m here with a group of writers, scientists and artists, all of us gathered to talk about changes in the northern Great Basin. Sharp environmental contrasts, […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t look for the frontier in Alaska
Alaska. The word tumbles out like a wild stream, carrying a cascade of images: grizzly bears, glaciers, vast mountains, Native villages. It’s the Alaska we believe in, an American Eden for lovers of wilderness. But as change sweeps the state, the veneer is cracking. In the southeastern panhandle, the famed Inside Passage bordering British Columbia, […]
Posted inGoat
Is Lake Powell really shrinking?
The West is heating and drying up so much that the whole place could burst into flames at any second. At least, that’s the way it seems, reading the news these days. Every day it’s another item about the catastrophic, unprecedented drought and the “new normal” of months of consecutive 90+ degree highs in places […]
Posted inRange
Reviewing how native peoples will deal with climate change
Editors Note: This piece is cross posted from Mother Earth Journal, where reporter Terri Hansen writes about indigenous people and the environment. Extreme weather events forced an awareness of urgent climate disruptions this year, with July 2012 being the hottest month on record – hotter even than the Dust Bowl’s July 1936.The science tells us climate changes would […]
Posted inGoat
Dam that methane
Updated 8/13/2012 10 a.m. Last summer, visitors to Lacamas Lake, a reservoir outside the town of Vancouver, Wash., may have seen some strange devices floating on the reservoir’s surface. “It look(ed) like an alien lander,” says Washington State University doctoral student Bridgit Deemer. The mysterious objects were traps designed to catch air bubbles spurting up from the […]
Posted inGoat
Global warming, local politics
“I was a victim of the snow,” former Chicago mayor Michael Bilandic told Chicago Magazine in 2000, referring to his failed 1979 reelection bid. Bilandic replaced the first Mayor Daley, who died in 1976, in the midst of his sixth term, and he was expected to glide back into office. He was the Democratic “machine’s” chosen one post-Daley, […]
Posted inGoat
Are big, severe wildfires normal?
The conventional wildfire wisdom goes something like this: Western forests are out of whack due to past fire suppression and logging practices. Forests that used to be open and free of undergrowth have turned into dense “dog hair” thickets of young trees that burn like kindling. Combine that with millions of acres of trees killed […]