Sleeping Giant

By: | September 20, 2013

1024px-Giant_Mine_3Canada’s oil sands region has been gaining international recognition as a monstrous environmental liability, its vast tailings ponds made beautifully ghastly by Ed Burtynsky’s aerial photography. By some measures, though, Canada’s most polluted site is located less than three miles from where I put my son to bed, with a cup of tap water, every night.

I live in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, a gold mining town until a decade ago, when the gold was phased out in favour of diamonds. The danger in this town is enough to kill everyone in the world more than once, so out of a regional population of 17,000 there’s plenty to go around: 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide in water-soluble dust, just biding its time in the underground chambers of Giant Mine, walking distance from where I sit. Seven hundred tonnes of it still lurk in the abandoned gold-roasting complex above ground. Belatedly, “Caution” signs have appeared, to dissuade people from walking their dogs on the grounds. Continue reading →

Q&A: Big Bang Theory

By: | September 19, 2013

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For most of the interviews we do, sources will be disappointed by what comes out. And we journalist are mostly okay with this because those are the rules of the game. But every so often a person gets a little robbed. And I, the journalist, feel like a crook. The following is a Q&A I did for Scientific American with Eric Kaplan, writer and producer of Big Bang Theory on CBS. It wasn’t SciAm’s fault they only had space for a snippet of this conversation – they told me as much beforehand. How was I to know he was so surprisingly thoughtful and not-surprisingly funny? So here it is, unabridged, for the dedicated LWON readers.

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After the Devil, the Deluge

By: | September 18, 2013

9097701161_a996c25136_hFirst, if you please, a moment of silence for the thylacine.

The Tasmanian tiger, last seen in the wild in 1930, was once Tasmania’s top predator, snacking on possums, wallabies, and the unlucky Tasmanian emu. (Despite persistent rumors, the thylacine did not drink blood. Sorry.)

When European settlers arrived, bringing feral dogs, habitat destruction and bounty hunters, the thylacine declined in Tasmania and on the Australian mainland, and all but a few diehard thylacine believers agree that the thylacine is gone. (It may not be gone for good, but that’s another story.)

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Hell Is Murky

By: | September 17, 2013

bloody-handprint-shower-curtain-design

A woman with red hair was charging up the stairs towards me. I stepped aside to let her pass, and then, because she wasn’t wearing a mask, I reversed course and followed her. Good choice on my part: She turned out to be Lady Macbeth.

For more than an hour I had been wandering the halls and rooms of the McKittrick Hotel, in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, turning pages in a desktop ledger, pulling books off a bedroom shelf, fishing candy from the glass jars behind a pharmacy counter, losing myself in a maze of Birnam wood. I later learned from the family members and friend who also attended the event that evening that I had missed the rave/orgy. (Twice.) By the time I caught up with Lady Macbeth, I was wondering if I would ever be able to make a narrative out of what I was experiencing. I had also begun to wonder why I would want to.

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Birth Of The World’s First Underwater Museum

By: | September 16, 2013

1-sculpture-modern-art-jason-decaires-taylor-sculpture_0A few months ago, I got my dream assignment. Well, okay, it wasn’t really an assignment – I cajoled an editor into letting me write about Cancun’s famous underwater museum, Museo Subacuatico de Arte, or MUSA. The idea isn’t really new – put some stuff underwater that fish like to hide under and watch as fish populations bloom. But Cancun has taken another twist – make the objects themselves so beautiful that people will come to see them even before the fish do.

It was a good story and a fun update on a well-covered topic. But I walked away feeling like something was missing. Today I want to give you the story behind that story. The story of the three dedicated – nay, heroic – people who made the place happen. There was Jaime Gonzalez, a biologist and hard-nosed bureaucrat sickened by the damaged reefs in his country; Roberto Diaz, the entrepreneurial tour operator and closet artist who knows everybody in town; and Jason Taylor, the outsider with a new idea and the talent to pull it off. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | September 14, 2013

2 giantbeetles9 to 13 September

This week began and ended with bugs: guest poster and insect illustrator Mayaan Harel dissected cultural notions of disgust, which she had to overcome in order to pursue her chosen field. I revealed my abiding desire and thwarted quest to eat them.

Roberta watched avian tornadoes.

Helen found a museum that houses, alongside other unexpected treasures, the world’s only submarine piano, a “hot gasoline balloon” for deep-sea exploration, and a silk map for downed pilots.

And Ann gave us Herman Heyn, a sidewalk astronomer in an off-kilter town, who soothes Baltimore’s existential fears night after night: those stars, they’re real, they’re really there.

I, entomophage

By: | September 13, 2013

eating-bugI spent the summer cultivating an increasing desperation to eat an insect.

The first hankerings developed as I spent a couple of months researching and editing a feature on entomophagy for New Scientist — after sifting through enough butter roasted locust risottos and lemon pepper cricket broths, the idea went full spectrum from hilariously gross to somewhat intriguing to egg-and-bacon sandwich for a hangover. By the time the feature came out, I was full-on jonesing. Continue reading →

Down by the River at the Navy Museum

By: | September 12, 2013

Navy-MuseumI love museums, and my hometown, Washington, D.C., is full of them. You’ve heard of the big ones—the Air and Space Museum with the Wright Brothers’ plane, the Natural History Museum with its elephant and dinosaurs. We’ve got privately-owned tourist bait, like the Spy Museum and a branch of Madame Tussauds. Then there’s a pile of more obscure museums for everything from textiles to bonsai to individual government agencies.

One of those lesser-known government museums is the National Museum of the U.S. Navy. The museum is in the Washington Navy Yard, a former shipyard—and still a Navy installation— in Southeast D.C., on the Anacostia River.

The Anacostia, a tributary of the Potomac, is flat and tidal, which is why the Navy could build ships there. But that’s also part of the reason why it’s so darn polluted; its waters are slow and they rise and fall with the tide, rather than carrying all the crud out to sea. In recent years, the river has started to transform. There’s a new path along the right bank and way less trash than there used to be, although you still shouldn’t swim in it or eat the fish. On the walk to the museum with a friend, I saw gulls, cormorants, and two ospreys. Continue reading →