Sometimes climate change seems like a downright good idea.  The global re-boot of conditions on Earth is a take-all-prisoners phenomenon.  Confronting its challenges requires absolutely everybody into the pool.  I wondered, for example, at the sheer marvelous variety of the speakers lined up at the Bay Area Open Space Council‘s annual conference last week.  Other [...]

We tend to think of the things of man and the things of nature as separate.  The way we categorize say waterfalls, mountains, and birds as existing in a realm apart from furniture, paintings, and clothing could supply a generation’s worth of doctoral dissertations.  One place where “natural” and “cultural” come together in an institutional [...]

This past weekend the National Park Service (NPS) hosted me at Grand Canyon, and I gave the keynote talk for its Earth Day celebration to a crowd that hailed from all over the world.  It wasn’t the only vertiginous aspect of the trip.  I hiked down into the canyon one day with rangers Marty Martel [...]

Crazy gorgeousness, check.  At Duxbury Reef in Bolinas early yesterday morning, a super low tide pulled back the covers not only on all those squirmers and clingers making colorful hay in the kelp, but revealed the geological formation that makes this reef the biggest rocky intertidal in the West.  Duxbury is right at the conjunction [...]

I shared a booth with three other writers at the Tucson Festival of Books recently – an enormous and idiosyncratic celebration each year on the campus of the University of Arizona right in the heart of town. Between the four of us, we just about represented the main issues in life. There was Mary Paganelli, [...]

Realizing the Vision Change Our Story Mind the Gap The Spine of the Continent: Protecting Grizzly Bears The Spine of the Continent is a landscape conservation initiative named for the entire Rocky Mountain expanse from the Yukon down through Mexico. Grizzly bears are a key species in this area. By Mary Ellen Hannibal February 2013 [...]

JOHN DAVIS SETS OFF TO HIKE, PADDLE, AND BIKE THE SPINE OF THE CONTINENT By Adventure Ethics John Davis paddling in Congaree National Park. Photo: Susan Baycot Climate change, development, ranching, and oil and gas exploration tend to get a lot of ink when it comes to threats to wildlife in the Western United States. [...]

Robert Paine is a super-famous ecologist, the first person to really nail down the process known as a “trophic cascade,” by which top predators have a forcing effect that deeply impacts the entire food web.   Many years ago Paine did an experiment off the North Pacific coast, removing sea stars (formerly known as starfish, but [...]

Over the next several weeks I’m going to intersperse my usual kinds of blogs with a series featuring Michael Soule.  Michael is widely considered the “father” of conservation biology, a field he helped establish in order to bring scientific rigor to conservation practices. I profile him in depth in my book, The Spine of the Continent. [...]

The other night an old friend from LA was in town and came to dinner.  He’d just finished adapting a nonfiction memoir for the screen – that’s what he does for a living.  He said he was pretty satisfied with his work, and had “followed the Joseph Campbell hero stuff” carefully, so he feels the [...]