Something I Ate This Week

Here’s a picture of something I found and put in my mouth. You get to guess what it is. The season for these where I live is just getting going, and this first ran four years ago, so it’s about time to show it again. First, is it organic or manufactured? Don’t scroll down to […]

Pollinators in Dangerous Times

It’s hard to know what to say, every twist and turn becoming a knot. Forces are crashing, glass flying. I’m up in the mountains where ancient volcanoes choked themselves to death, then eroded for 30 million years into the throaty remnants of a Colorado hotspot. Forests have grown on the rubble and I’ve been walking […]

The Future Remaking Itself

Almost 15 years ago I traveled to a polar ice sheet with two key researchers who have since passed away. First, José Rial, who I followed to Greenland, was taken by cancer. His death was followed by his friend Konrad Steffen, one of the great Arctic ice scientists and explorers, who fell into a crevasse […]

Cloud Cover

I wrote this post a few years ago after being off the grid for a week and coming back to a bunch of messages about an emergency. I’m about to head out again, and I do always have that worry–what if something happens when I’m gone, and I’m not here to help? But reading this […]

OH NO!! Dust On Snow!

I live in Western Colorado, where we’ve had an absolutely EPIC winter. At the Skyway cross-country ski trailhead on the Grand Mesa, we’ve measured more than 450 inches of snow this winter, compared to our seasonal average of about 290 inches. Our 10 foot high snow measuring stake was buried this winter — that’s how […]

Thanks for All the Snow

I took a train with my high school kid to Salt Lake City for a little urban immersion on Winter Break. We disembarked at 2:30 in the morning in a city experiencing what some said was the biggest blizzard they’d seen in a decade. That early morning, with packs on our backs, we walked into […]

Hope for the Alarmed: An Interview with Madeline Ostrander

Madeline Ostrander is a passionate and talented science journalist and a good friend. Her must-read book At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth is on shelves now. KATE: What initially sparked this project for you? MADELINE: Like most people who’ve been writing about climate change for a long time, I’ve […]