Sarah Gilman, Author at The Last Word On Nothing

Sarah Gilman

I studied studio art and biology in college and wasn't quite satisfied with either. The art world looked hermetic, sealed off in cities away from the landscapes that I loved. And the science world felt binding, too, with its sprint to publish clunky treatises for an audience of other scientists. Writing, though, stole the best from both fields -- the creativity, the exploring, the analysis and the always-and-forever-learning -- and, at its best, seemed like it could bring the same important topics explored by art and science to a much broader audience of people. So here I am, still at it. I write about the environment, energy, science and miscellany from Portland, Oregon. I'm also a current contributing editor and former staff editor for High Country News, an environmental magazine about the American West. You can find more of my writing at sarahmgilman.com. I tweet @Sarah_Gilman.

Redux: In Visibility

This post originally appeared Dec. 17, 2017 On Tuesday, I texted my friend Michelle a brief video clip of a polar bear. The bear is starving, all jutting hips and elbows, its fur sparse except for a thatch along its spine and Clydesdale tufts around its plate-sized paws. As with any bear, there is something […]

No empty earth

I don’t know when I first saw Cisco, Utah. My early memory of it is imprecise, gathered from a series of impressions over years into one blurry composite. A crumbling edifice of corner store, covered in a mural of eagle and mountains that is in turn covered in black scrawls of graffiti. Dead cars. Piles […]

Redux: Why dating is a lot like this animal guidebook I bought at a thrift store

Last month, a pair of University of Michigan scientists published a study that shows that people who date online tend to pursue mates 25 percent more desirable than themselves. I find this difficult to believe. My experience with online dating suggests that the best strategy is to pursue the people who seem the most *interesting*. […]

Snark week: Beware the bone breakers, and other warnings about seabirds

Welcome to Snark Week 2018! There was one thing I was certain of: My toes were not polychaetes. They were not mollusks. They were not fish, nor were they squid. They were me. But there was one thing the giant petrel was equally certain of: My toes were meat. The seabird was approximately the […]

Redux: Not all stories are words, not all maps are pictures

This post originally appeared June 14, 2017 You know those sounds that slip across the senses until they settle, in the brain, on an association entirely unrelated to their maker? Those sounds that seem to almost synesthetically transform one thing into another? The way noise can be brilliant, or color evokes flavor, or a smell […]

Redux: When science feels like elegy in advance

Last year, I went to an island in the middle of the Bering Sea to count nesting birds. Most of the nests failed, possibly due to elevated ocean temperatures. A couple of weeks ago, one of the techs on the island called to tell me that this year is shaping up to be the same […]

Redux: Doom and the Dogmometer

This post originally appeared June 21, 2017 One way to understand a really big problem is to break it down into more manageable parts. That’s why scientists use specific, smaller systems to help them grasp the overall health of the planet. The Arctic, for example, is regarded as a bellwether for the catastrophes of climate […]

The ocean mummies

The Atacama Desert is country that wears quiet like a skin. Stretching through the top 600 miles of Chile, it is so spare of all save earth and rock that it calls to mind bone stripped of flesh by sun, wind, teeth. It is a place that makes you understand why the painter Georgia O’Keeffe […]