It’s amazing what scientists can do nowadays. They can get right down into the center of an atom. They can tell us in detail about rocks on other planets. So it’s no wonder when they report there are a certain number of very large animals in an area – and they only have to count […]
Eco
So the election’s over, the days are getting shorter, and it’s about time for a nice long nap. May I suggest an 80-foot-long concrete chamber, tucked neatly into a hillside in Tennessee? Clean, cool, and cozy, it’s the perfect winter hideaway … if you’re a bat, that is. Yes, The Nature Conservancy of Tennessee has […]
We’ve got a lot of dead trees in the Rockies. More than usual. As the region has warmed, bark beetle populations have exploded, and they’ve been killing off massive swaths of pine and spruce. It’s hard to miss the damage, and when British landscape artist Chris Drury visited the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie, […]
Autumn. It’s perhaps my favorite time of year. Ski season is just around the corner and the tomatoes in the garden have reached their peak. A few late peaches remain, and our pears and apples are perfectly ripening. The sun’s angle in the sky intensifies the light and makes the landscape appear especially vivid and […]
The six undergrads that trickle into the Aquatic Ecosystems Research Laboratory at the University of British Columbia are unsure about what they’re in for. The room they enter is all black from the carpet to the walls and the ceiling. A conference table partitioned into six sections is illuminated in the middle. They each take […]
Two weeks ago, I wrote about scientists who intentionally killed 80,000 feral goats on one of the islands in the Galápagos archipelago. The effort was in the name of biodiversity and conservation, sure, but was it right? The post spurred some fascinating questions and comments, particularly from Jason G. Goldman, who writes The Thoughtful Animal […]
This is the last installment of my six-week series about the Galápagos Islands. To recap the first five posts: The Galápagos is an archipelago of 14 volcanic islands that scientists since Darwin have gone well out of their way to study. The islands are extremely inhospitable to life, and yet, over long periods of time, life has […]
This story, I promise, will end with giant deep-sea tubeworms like the beauties above. Please bear with me while I get there via the Colorado River. I’m one of the nearly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado for water, and for most of my adult life I’ve heard about (and reported on) the bureaucratic […]