I use this blog to showcase my writing. One of my most satisfying outlets is the writing I do for Chris Morgan's podcast The Wild. Chris is a wildlife biologist who left England for the Pacific Northwest around the same time I left for Colorado. We are the same age and, though we did not …
An Ethicist on Both Sides of AI
It doesn’t feel like something I’d embrace. I’ve spent my working life becoming an expert on the ethics of emerging technologies. I’m not exactly a luddite, but I’m cautious. I wrote a book for MIT Press, The Synthetic Age, that sounded a warning about trying to ‘outdesign evolution,’ ‘resurrect species’ and ‘reengineer our world.’ The …
Carbon Capture revisted
I posted this article when it came out last year. I'm happy to say it just won the Los Angeles Press Club Journalism Award for 'solutions journalism' in the health/science category. The issue I tackle is not just central to carbon capture. It's central to much of what's ailing society. Trust. Enjoy “‘Climate Delusion’ Or …
Can Climate Manipulation Save Nature?
The planet looks like it has been badly handled by a fiddling giant. Our sticky fingerprints are all over it. Chemicals, dams, and rats imported in the hulls of ships have reshaped everything under the sun. The recent photos from Artemis II might have shown a familiar blue planet, but zoom in a little closer, …
Our Place Among the Deer
Sarah Aronson is the talented host of Grounding, a podcast on climate change and mental health. I met Sarah eight years ago when she was the anchor of The Write Question, a Montana Public Radio show on books. We had a wonderful conversation about a work on nature and technology I had just published, The …
Where The Buffalo Don’t Roam
The return of a missing species can pay huge ecological dividends for a landscape. But sometimes people bring wildlife back for other reasons. The Kalispel people brought buffalo back to a ranch on their tiny reservation near Usk on the Pend Oreille River in the 1970s. The one-hundred-and-fifty bison live behind fences in a field …
