Climate change is anthropogenic (human-caused). This is scientific fact. We have created novel climatological disturbances that have not existed for the past 800,000 years. I’m beginning this blog post with a graphic that everyone should be familiar with. On this graph, above, “normal” lies between the dashed lines. The dashes show the maximum levels that carbon dioxide […]

Sometimes we Creative Types need to mix it up! This spring I was inspired by the Gualala Arts Center 2019 Chowder Challenge where I joined two dozen other professional chefs from restaurants up and down the southern Mendocino county coastline. Friday morning I began in the East Bay by BARTing to Oakland’s Chinatown and buying […]

During the last months of my Fulbright-sponsored PhD research with the Tado community on Flores island (eastern Indonesia), my then-spouse was a passenger on a Singapore Airlines flight that crashed upon takeoff from Taipei. He survived. Ultimately, our marriage didn’t. “Class Divisions,” my recently published essay recounting what happened, emerged after almost two decades of […]

  “My mouth does not know how to pronounce these names, and my fingers only recently learned how to type them. This is a purely scientific form of ignorance.” In my most recently published essay (Camas, Winter 2018: Fragility), I tell the parallel stories of centuries of ecocide and genocide surrounding California’s largest lake, Clear […]

The New York Times recently featured an article written by Brooke Jarvis, ”The Insect Apocalypse Is Here” detailing citizen science research by German naturalists who compiled long-term quantitative data on the presence/absence of insects in nature reserves. Their conclusions, based on twenty-seven years of data collection, were stunning: flying insect abundance in the reserves had […]