David Grinspoon is a comparative planetologist and an astrobiologist. He’s also a big book nerd, and his love for both fiction and nonfiction are proudly on display in his own book, Earth In Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future. The book was recently featured in an ongoing series on “Resistance Reading” selected by authors and published […]
This week, you may have seen the following headline in your feeds: “Not exercising enough is worse for you than smoking and diabetes, study suggests.” For 122,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic, better fitness—as demonstrated by better performance on a treadmill test–strongly predicted longer lives. Because there have been some questions about possible health risks […]
Note: This post originally appeared in December of 2016. I find a stick and use it to break up the dry twists of coyote scat I have found on the trail. Shit is nature’s obituary page. In each pile are the traces of lives recently lost. In this particular excreta I find a sprinkling of […]
I have a friend who is worried about our country. Haw haw. Who am I kidding? All my friends are worried about our country, every single one of them, even the Republicans I know. We are living through an incredibly bonkers and troubling moment: climate change is starting to actively bite us in the ass […]
For the past two years, I have been following the voyage of OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft headed to an asteroid called Bennu. Bennu is important for at least four reasons: Local space history may recorded in its rocks, which are about as old as the formation of the solar system. It is carbon-rich and scientists think […]
I am so angry, so sad. Today I drove my two children to the first day of a weeklong day-camp with a nature theme. They are learning about local species, pressing flowers, that kind of thing. The teachers expected that the kids would spend most of the day outside in nature. Instead, the kids will […]
This summer, I decided not to cut the grass in my backyard. I’ve long argued for letting a little more wildness into our gardens, but the cult of the lawn is a powerful cultural force and for years I, like most of us, have conformed and kept the back lawn mown. Ideally, I’d some day […]
I’ve been lucky to travel to some beautiful and fascinating places while reporting on the complex human relationship with the rest of nature. In May 2014, I bought an REI Half Dome Plus tent for $175.19 to use for field reporting. The first trip I took it on was an excursion hosted by Oregon Wild to […]