Landsat Is The Perspective We Need Right Now

By: | September 26, 2018

This is an image of a deluge, an absolute inundation, a drainage basin filled to the brim, a coast whose cup runneth over, total saturation, a scene that would make Noah cringe. This is, as my friend pointed out, a f*@kload of water.

This image shows how the land changed after Hurricane Florence was done, after the slow-moving storm finally spun out into meek wisps of white and the blue sky returned. It was made by a thinking box flying 440 miles above us. The box is called Landsat 8, and its job is to show us the terrestrial planet we live on, so we can understand it a little better. Its perspective is one that I think we could all kinda use right now. I don’t see any red or blue here, or BS on Twitter, ok? It’s just a picture of a chunk of this tragically beautiful planet that we have to share.

Here is what this imagery shows. According to an early estimate from the National Weather Service, nearly 8 trillion gallons of rain fell on North Carolina Sept. 13-17. That was a T. That’s an 8 with 12 zeroes after it.

We witnessed that unspeakable volume of water as catastrophic flooding — boats under oar floating through neighborhoods, whole interstates drowned, porches and pigpens submerged, homes and mementos washed away. Satellites witnessed it as a literal reshaping of the Earth’s crust.  Continue reading →

The Pawpaw – A Local Fruit

By: | September 25, 2018

green fruits on my windowsill

When’s the last time you tried a new fruit? The last time I did, I think I was probably in a tropical country, or eating something grown in a tropical country. But on Sunday I tried a new fruit from right here in the temperate latitudes.

The pawpaw is the largest native fruit in North America. They’re native to the woodlands of my part of the world – the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. – and I originally learned about them from acquaintances who, like me, grew up around here but, unlike me, paid attention to trees. You can find them growing wild around here but I have no idea what a pawpaw tree looks like. I didn’t get my fruit from a tree. I got it from a special pawpaw table (a “Paw Paw Pop Up”) at the local farmer’s market.

The fruit looks like a mango, but it’s only about as long as a finger. The nice women at the Paw Paw Pop Up instructed me to cut it in half, then scoop out the flesh, while avoiding the seeds. Avoiding the seeds wouldn’t be hard, she assured me. Continue reading →

Redux: Hidden in this picture

By: | September 24, 2018

This is a picture of an old timey cash register, and thanks to the weirdness of tech and the weirdness of money, there could be actual money in it. Literal money that you can take out of the picture and spend.

Thanks to an app launched last month, you can now furtively smuggle money inside the image of your choice like you’re a WWII spy sending microdots full of secret documents on a “Wish You Were Here” postcard. “Bitcoin cash users can send transactions in a steganographic manner with the wallet hiding funds in plain sight,” reports Bitcoin.com. It’s more evidence for the resurgence of steganography – the ancient and fine art of smuggling secret messages on apparently innocent carriers – made newly relevant by the demands of the digital age.

If you’re curious about steganography and why it’s in a renaissance, you might enjoy my story from earlier this year. Continue reading →

This Is America

By: | September 21, 2018

For years I’ve been reading about mass shootings. School shootings. Campus shootings. Shootings in bars. Shootings at concerts. Las Vegas. Orlando. Virginia Tech. Sandy Hook. Parkland. The stories keep coming, and each new one elicits horror. We can’t help but be dumbstruck by the senseless carnage. But there’s also some small measure of relief. Not me. Not my town. Not my school. Not this time. You can’t sit and bask in that relief, however, because there will always be more shootings. “There but for the grace of God go I,” I always think. I’m not religious, so it doesn’t make much sense to bring God into it. But sometimes humans don’t make much sense.

On Wednesday a man in Middleton, Wisconsin, took a semi-automatic pistol to work and shot four people before police arrived and killed him. As far as mass shootings go, it was no big deal. Four wounded, none dead. But it hit close to home because it happened in my community, ten miles away from my house. Continue reading →

Redux: Ass Holes in the Desert

By: | September 20, 2018

I wrote this earlier in the year, when there was a proliferation of assholes along the border. Since then, I had a chance to peruse the area. Yup, they’re all still there. 

Non-native species get a lousy rap. Now don’t get me wrong, often they deserve it. Between the nutrias, peacock bass, eucalyptus trees, and lionfish of the world, environmentalists have a right to be a little xenophobic sometimes. But there are a few exceptions. Honeybees, for instance, are quite handy. Plus Emma’s wattle-necked softshell turtles, if for no other reason than their amazing name.

And then there are the ass holes of the Sonoran desert.

The border between the United States and Mexico has countless ass holes these days – far more than we had 50 or even 20 years ago. In fact, you could say that ass holes are on the rise. And while some people may be concerned by the number of ass holes along the border, I have begun to see it as a new reality. It’s something that we simply have to get used to.  Continue reading →

Be an Arc Bender

By: | September 19, 2018

a drawing of a dandelion breaking through concrete with the word "ARISE!" in red 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 here in the United States, via intense hurricanes and wildfires; overt racism and fascism have come out of hiding to parade in the streets; children are being locked up in cages; and the rich keep getting richer while everyone else gets poorer—just to get the list started. My friend wants to do something about all this. 

Continue reading →

Ed Marston Showed Up

By: | September 18, 2018

The end of summer is always a little sad, but this year it felt especially so. During the last three days of August, three people I care about died unexpectedly. I want to tell you about one of them.

Ed Marston died of complications from West Nile virus on August 31. The last time I saw Ed was at a community arts event in my town a few weeks before his death. He looked healthy and fit and we talked at length. He told me he was he was back to hiking and feeling recovered from his heart attack earlier in the year. The surgeon who’d done his bypass surgery was a Vietnamese refugee with a remarkable life story, and Ed spoke fondly of her and her many accomplishments. I had no idea that I’d never see him again.

Marston moved to our little rural county in western Colorado in 1974 with his wife Betsy and their two children. A former physics professor born and raised in New York, Ed was transformed in his adopted home. He and Betsy founded two newspapers in the mid-70s and early 80s and in 1983 Ed became the publisher of High Country News, with Betsy at his side as editor. The duo built HCN into a must-read publication covering topics like endangered species, public land use, climate change, the environment and federal land agencies in the West.

During the 19 years that Ed served as publisher at HCN, he mentored and trained countless journalists. But that’s not how I knew Ed. I knew him as a pillar of our small and quirky community. He wasn’t the guy who bitched and moaned about the state of things. He was the one who rolled up his sleeves and got to work doing something about it. Continue reading →

Time Will Tell

By: | September 17, 2018

Sometimes I lose track of time when I’m in the water. There are days when it seems like I’ve been paddling through whitewater for hours, the wind makes my ears feel like icicles, and my arms are burning. When I get back to the car, only fifteen minutes have passed since I started surfing. Then there are days when the sky is blue, the waves are just right and there’s a friend to chat with between sets. On those days it seems like I’ve hardly been in the water at all. And on those days I have sometimes been late to pick up my kids.

A few weeks ago, I remembered I had an old-school solution: a watch. I’d gotten one a few years ago to address this same issue, but I’d hurt my back last spring. Unused, the watch had migrated to the back of a drawer. Last week, I dug it out and my husband kindly put in a new battery. The little black numbers reappeared. I fiddled with the buttons until the watch caught up with the time it was now. Continue reading →