Supplying European farmers with guano would involve transporting large quantities of excrement across the Atlantic, a project that understandably failed to enthuse shipping companies. Charles Mann, in his fascinating 1491, on the slow uptake in Europe of the South American innovation of mining for fertilizer from Peru’s 147 guano islands. Poop jokes notwithstanding, the 19th …
My fascination with tree rings (buy my book!) is mostly about climate stories. But the rings tell other tales as well: According to folklore from the valley Hallingdal, between Oslo and Bergen, a young girl was locked into a farm storehouse to protect her from the Black Death. The pandemic killed tens of millions in …
My Journal colleague Charles Brunt had a fascinating tale in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal about the Bosque del Apache wildlife refuge’s struggle with elk. Located on the Rio Grande in central New Mexico, the Bosque is famous among birders, a winter home to a flock of some 10,000 sandhill cranes. It’s always been my personal …
Continue reading ‘The arrival of the elk – another “what is nature?” story’ »
[A]n informed and properly motivated risk communicator would proceed deliberately and cautiously. In particular, because efforts to quiet public fears about vaccines will predictably create some level of exactly that fear, such a communicator will not engage in a high-profile, sustained campaign to “reassure” the general public that vaccines are safe without reason to believe …
In a Greek forest, tree rings telling a familiar story – a history of surface fire, but a trend toward much more destructive blazes: the size of the area burned as well as the type of fire seem to have changed, with the 2007 event being the most extended crown fire encountered so far. Our …
A forest burns down. Humans rescue fish, keep ’em alive in an Albuquerque warehouse. Maybe 80 years before the drainage that feeds their forest creek recovers. Maybe 200. This is life in the anthropocene: Angela James’ fish tanks don’t look much like Whiskey Creek. But for 68 imperiled Gila trout, the tanks in a northeast …
Continue reading ‘Anthropocene diaries: a fish story I wrote elsewhere’ »
from Dan Kahan: [W]hen positions on a fact that admits of scientific investigation (“is the earth heating up?”; “does the HPV vaccine promote unsafe sex among teenage girls?”) becomes entangled with the values and outlooks of diverse communities—and becomes, in effect, a symbol of one’s membership and loyalty in one or another group—then people in …
As Kevin Anchukaitis put it, the Tree Rings’ Tale told by the olive tree is “Really really really really really really hard” to read. From Cherubini et al: Dendrochronological analyses of olive trees growing on the Aegean island Santorini (Greece) show that the determination of the number of tree-rings is impossible because of intra-annual wood density fluctuations, …
Continue reading ‘The Tree Rings’ Tale, as told by olives’ »
There’s a romance about the tree ring lab, and the culture flowing therefrom, that seems to draw writers like me. It’s probably the same reason the sliced and polished slab of a tree’s trunk, marked with little flag markers pointing to moments in history (“Columbus lands”, “Declaration of Independence”) is such a museum of natural …
Riding my bike this morning, I came across a man with a hawk. I stopped to ask. (How many times do you see a man out taking his hawk for a walk?) It was a Harris’s hawk, bred in captivity, a native of the southern deserts a little far north of its normal range. He …