My friend Taya and I were out at her parents’ country place, about twelve acres in the western foothills of the Cascades. I was maybe eight, visiting for the first time. Taya was taking me on a tour. We were struggling along, as short-legged people do through dense, early successional Northwest forest. She stopped and […]
Eco
When I first moved to New Mexico from the east coast I asked somebody how to tell the difference between a juniper and a piñon pine. Easy, they said: most of the junipers are alive and the piñons are all dead. Across the Southwest, piñon pines have been dying off over the past twenty years […]
A few years ago, I interviewed author and social critic James Kunstler about his novel World Made By Hand, his latest portrayal of a post-peak-oil future. Kunstler, as one might expect, had plenty of complaints — about suburbs, cheese doodles, Wal-Mart, the American road trip. But when I mentioned that I’d grown up in the […]
On a cold, clear June morning high in Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains, Jesse Logan stopped on a snow-covered hillside and pointed with his ski pole to a large pine tree. A few of its needles were turning red, a sign of trouble. About a dozen people gathered around him on the snow to listen. “We […]
Being an environment reporter during the sixth great extinction can be a bit of a drag. Sure, there are tons of important, dramatic stories to cover, but they’re all so darned depressing. Oil spills, nuclear accidents, pillaged seas, the whole climate mess? Ugh. A decade or two of that every week can really start to […]
The Chesapeake Bay was born as the Susquehanna River. Around 35 million years ago, an asteroid apparently smacked into what is now eastern Virginia and left a 50-mile-wide crater, a sink into which all the rivers – mainly the Susquehanna but also the Potomac and lesser rivers — coming east out of the Appalachians naturally […]
The late-night radio airwaves—the insomniac’s solace, the new father’s companion—have been heavy with war, disaster and calamity for weeks now. How very different are the sounds of bombing runs over Tripoli from the small coughs and cries through the baby monitor, with which they commingle. The most extraordinary news of the past two weeks, however, […]
I’m beginning to think that my LWON byline should read: Virginia Hughes, the one who writes about obscure applications of DNA testing. First there was the story about the scientist who found a rare DNA blip that could prove that the corpse in Napoleon’s tomb really is Napoleon. Then there was the team that screened […]