Same River Twice

By: | January 10, 2017

Since last week, we’ve been watching the weather forecast with something that’s almost joy, but won’t quite let itself be. Often, the weekly report has a beaded string of sunshines, with different ways to describe them. Abundant sunshine. Plenty of sun. Hot. Sometimes, there are clouds. But even when the slot machine lineup of my weather app has a series of rainy days, I’ve learned to wait until I see the silver falling. Ever optimistic, the forecast will show those lucky rainstorms even when the chance of rain is as low as 10 percent.

But now, we’re deep in the river. An atmospheric river carries moist air—a strong one channels as much as 15 times the flow at the mouth of the mighty Mississippi. This influx of water vapor can result in a series of storms that can last for days, or even weeks. (There’s a cool graphic of how they work here.) Over the weekend, forecasters were predicting that this was going to be the most powerful series of storms in a decade. Snow, rain, flooding—some forecasts predicted the Santa Cruz Mountains alone could get 10 inches of rain. Continue reading →

Just Have Lunch

By: | January 9, 2017

I wish I could remember – but I can’t  – the woman who told me a story about how she and other women in her profession had regular lunches, casually, unofficially, no agenda.  Was she a lawyer? A writer? An astronomer?  Just don’t remember.  The thing I’m sure about is that the point was not that the women met for lunch, it was that the men they worked with noticed that they met.  The men didn’t get snippy, didn’t make comments, just noticed:  something like, “saw that you were at one of your lunches.”

Now there’s a thought.  I’ve spent a certain amount of my career writing about women in science and the gender-related issues they deal with, including how to get attention paid to their research, how to get taken seriously, and how to get enough power.  Why even be in a profession unless your voice gets heard and you can do things that you’re good at, things worth doing, the things worth your time on earth?  Even the paleolithics wanted to have the things they made (I stole this idea from Jacob Bronowski, around minute 14:45), show the shapes of their hands.  Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 7, 2017

A humpback whale spy-hopping.January 2-6, 2017

To assert one’s humanity is to make choices, even when that choice is to die, says Jenny. “When the time was right, the woman nodded to her doctor, who deactivated the pacemaker that was pumping blood to her heart. The woman died quietly with friends close, exactly the way she’d intended.”

Ann finds the connection between history and storytelling in the Native American accounts of tsunamis, passed down the generations. Then she consults historians about the narrative enterprise. “The proper arraying up of evidence, with narrative devices, in stories about the past—this is how we make meaning.”

Helen feels that Moby Dick is misunderstood. It’s a book about whales, not about manly feelings. “The narrator comes down confidently on the fish side of the fish-or-not debate, which is not how we divide up animals these days, but hey, categories are fuzzy.”

Craig makes films about the rare remaining wilderness regions that remind us humans are not all there is. “Billions of butterfly wings flapping at once changes the way air moves, the way clouds gather and part. Countless voices can move this human machine, can give it a heart.”

Panama’s Gatun Lake plays host to an invasive fish. Ecologists have returned to replicate a 50-year-old study of the species’ introduction. Turns out it’s permanent. “As a voracious hunter, the peacock bass had easy access to all the prey species that never co-evolved with something that would chase them.”

Photo: Helen Fields

The Freshwater Bullies of Gatun Lake

By: | January 6, 2017

The crocodiles should not be a problem. Yes, the population has spiked after being placed under protection, and there have been some attacks recently. But those attacks tend to happen when somebody steps right into the water. The crocs all hang out in the shallows. Stay out of the water and you should be fine. So said the team of forest rangers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Diana Sharpe looked down at her mesh beach seine—the big, soft net she would use to drag across the water just off the beach and catch the little shallow-water fish for sampling. She looked over at her little tin boat with its outboard engine.

“We just tried to basically be very vigilant. We saw lots of crocodiles, but if we came to a spot where we were planning to sample and we saw footprints or evidence of crocodiles we would leave and try another spot,” says Sharpe.

Gatun Lake, which comprises 33 of the 77 kilometres of the Panama Canal, has a peacock bass problem. The locals don’t see it as a problem—even if they happen to know it’s not native they defend its value as a great sport fish—but it’s the kind of apex predator the Panama Canal region had never seen. That is, until 1967, when a business man’s pond, stocked with a hundred of the South American fish for his employees’ enjoyment on weekends, overflowed during a heavy rain. Little juvenile peacock bass escaped into the Chagres River and from there into Lake Gatun. Continue reading →

Reason for Hope

By: | January 5, 2017

I joined a film crew several years ago in Chilean Patagonia where we put together a  flick opposing dams along the turquoise rivers of the Aysén region. At the time, stopping the advance of some of the biggest investors in the world seemed impossible. But soon more films were made, protests ignited across the country to save its wildest rivers, and a $10 billion mega-dam project was halted.

I can’t claim more than a bit part, a grain of sand, but somehow all of the grains add up. Continue reading →

A Book About Whales

By: | January 4, 2017

A humpback whale spy-hopping.

A little before Christmas I saw a stage production of Moby Dick. It was a wonderful production, by the Lookingglass Theater Company from Chicago, so creative in how it showed the depicted life at sea and on land. Actors climbed around in the rigging and dangled by their ankles. While the ship’s crew was thoroughly male, women portrayed the whales and the sea.

I wanted to go for two reasons: I like seeing people tell stories in innovative ways, and Moby Dick is my favorite book. I’m not sure I read the same Moby Dick as everyone else, though.

As I watched the actor playing Captain Ahab emote at length about his lust for revenge or whatever, I realized that the person who adapted Moby Dick for the stage made a very common mistake: thinking Moby Dick is a book about revenge or madness or evil or something.

No, no, no. Moby Dick is a book about whales. Continue reading →

Redux: Storia

By: | January 3, 2017

22352352993_7076a83900_zIf you know a non-English European language, you probably know that “history” and “story” are often the same word.  I don’t know how this happened but it seems deeply wrong.  I was outraged. At the least, it seems to undermine the authority and credibility that history claims, as opposed to the making-shit-up that stories do.  Turns out I was wrong about everything, about the deeply-wrong part and especially about the authority-of-history part.  Sometimes I purely love being wrong.

Anyway, please enjoy my wrongness too.  The first wrong thing was originally published May 29, 2015.  The story it talks about was published September 14, 2015.  And the wrongness was finally put right, this time with experts, on August 25, 2015.

A Matter of Choice

By: | January 2, 2017
Image by Emily Quintero

My friend, I’ll call her Anna, is dying today. She was dying yesterday, too, and tomorrow she’ll be even closer to death than today. That’s true of all of us, I suppose, but she’s on the fast track: Her gut is so clogged up with cancer that there’s nothing left to do for her but pump her full of powerful pain meds and wait. She is thirty-something and has a gentle husband and a daughter not yet four.

A couple of weeks ago Anna’s gut seized up like an engine drained of oil. Normally, smooth-muscle contractions known as peristalsis propel food in waves through the digestive tract. In Anna’s ravaged body that process, finally, shut down. She’d already endured the excruciating pain of intestinal blockage; her life had more or less become a series of agonizing bodily failures. To “cure” her this time meant abdominal surgery, her fourth since her original cancer diagnosis. The surgeon had to divert the stopped-up bowel by installing a tube to the outside with a pouch that would sit against her abdomen to catch waste. When I hugged her, she held back: “I’m disgusting,” she said, and averted her red-rimmed eyes. “This is such a nightmare.”

My poor friend had already been through enough misery, including round after round of chemotherapy. Chemo seems so barbaric, doesn’t it? A toxic mixture dripped into the veins to beat the crap out of cells—but it doesn’t know sick cells from healthy ones and so pummels indiscriminately. You get horrible side effects and no promise of a true cure. Researchers are starting to use more targeted therapies formulated exactly for an individual patient, but such drugs haven’t been terribly effective on colorectal-cancer patients. Still, Anna tried a combination of therapies for a short time, just in case. But no matter which treatment, one side effect was to exhaust her such that she could barely lift her daughter into her arms. Continue reading →