Last night I ran through quotes in my new book manuscript, making sure they were all amply annotated, meaning I spelled the names right. There were a lot of women in this run. For a book on the Ice Age and paleo sciences, mostly archaeology and paleontology, I’d had no trouble finding female researchers to write […]
You’ve noticed the cold starting to leave. The light has been strengthening, sun lifting every day, and the wind has lost some of its bitterness. Twenty-three and a half degrees of tilt to the planet, you can feel every degree. Two mornings ago a blizzard hit where I live in Colorado. It was a fierce […]
We were great in the Ice Age. Big weapons, big animals, big land. While parts of the world were crawling with hominids for a million years or more, this side of the planet was off limits. Getting here was never easy, not in the late Pleistocene, not now. The Americas are bookended by the world’s two […]
I joined a film crew several years ago in Chilean Patagonia where we put together a flick opposing dams along the turquoise rivers of the Aysén region. At the time, stopping the advance of some of the biggest investors in the world seemed impossible. But soon more films were made, protests ignited across the country to save […]
Winter Solstice passed last week. I think of how far the Northern Hemisphere has pitched us into space this time of year, tipping us away from the sun’s light. This is when middle latitudes in the north get 9 hours and 30 minutes of daylight out of a 24 hour day. The North Pole sees […]
I close on a house this week. I’ve never done this before, not quite sure how the paperwork is supposed to happen. It’s not much of a place really, almost a thousand square feet and a loft with spaces between the planks where my older boy pressed his eye, watching his brother being born on the […]
I have been paying attention to poop and where I find it. This isn’t a passing interest, I’ve been noting for years where animals choose to squat. In the out of doors, you can’t help noticing because they squatted to get your attention, like a billboard that reads GOTCHA! With a little chub of scat […]
This week started with a guest post from Jenny Cutraro who on election day took her father and two young daughters to Walden Pond where Thoreau still offers lessons of civil disobedience. I chimed in on the election by finding similarities between the catastrophic end of the Ice Age and Donald Trump’s electoral victory. In […]