An essential principle of wildlife recovery is that animals must be free to move across the landscape. The ability to roam is necessary to search out unoccupied territory, to track down resources in a changing climate, and to secure an influx of fresh genes when breeding. My piece in the Fall issue of Sierra Magazine …
Can Carbon Capture become Respectable?
Last summer, I visited America's first commercial carbon capture plant in Tracy, California. Heirloom Carbon use ground up limestone to capture 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. It's a trial run for a plant planned for Louisiana that could ultimately capture 300,000 tons each year when fully developed. The strangest thing about a technology …
What We Know About Cow Language
Last March, a friend in the Netherlands told me about a researcher nearby who had discovered that cows don’t reply to each other’s ‘moos’ right away. It can take a minute or two for them to respond. They are paying plenty of attention, but their linguistic rhythm is different from ours. This got me intrigued …
Extinction Remains Forever
Wouldn't it rock to bring back the woolly mammoth, the passenger pigeon, or the dodo? It's blockbuster movie material and has proven to be highly fundable. But there are problems. The main one is the technology can't do quite what it promises. I have been working in the ethics of biotechnology for a decade and …
Where Compassion and Conservation Meet
It has been a year since a humpback whale calf named Tango was struck and killed by a boat near Juneau. I stopped by a small island to look at the beached carcass three weeks ago. The skin had turned orange-brown, sagging beneath a rib cage gradually collapsing onto the beach. Tango's death troubled Heidi …
News About Grizzlies
I recently shared my BBC story about how bison are helping creeks recover on the Montana prairie. The gist is this. Bison are tough critters who don't spend much time wallowing in the creek bottoms. As a result, they don't damage streamside vegetation like cattle do. The creeks stay greener and hold water for longer …
Christopher J. Preston 