Writing on wildlife, technology, and nature
The wildlife recoveries I tracked in Tenacious Beasts offer lessons from conservation success stories. Some species need only one thing from us: STOP KILLING THEM! This is true of whales, beavers, wolves, and many others. Once we stop killing them, the species returns rapidly. Other species require considerable intervention to help them return. California condors, …
Continue reading "How Much Should We Interfere in the Lives of Wild Animals?"
Penn Cove is a tranquil scoop of ocean situated on the eastern flank of Washington’s Whidbey Island. Douglas fir and Sitka spruce ring the cove giving its shores the signature, emerald hue of the Pacific Northwest. The town of Coupeville presides over the southern edge of the three-mile bight. The restaurants and shops on one …
Continue reading "Remembering Tokitae: What Killer Whales Can Teach"
The wolf is a lightning rod in discussions about wildlife recovery. Theodore Roosevelt called them "beasts of waste and desolation." If you can have a conversation about the wolf and not raise any tempers, you are doing well. When I had to pick the animal that would open my new book, Tenacious Beasts, I swallowed …
While everyone has been preoccupied with Covid-19, clean energy technology's rapid advance has continued. A thirty-year contract for a giant solar plant planned in Abu Dhabi got a record low bid of $0.0135 per kWh in April this year. This latest benchmark continues a shocking decline in renewable energy prices over the last decade. The …
Continue reading "Wizards, Prophets, and Profits…. (on the Way to Clean Energy)"
Charles B. Hayes is a philosopher, naturalist, poet, and outdoorsman. He spent the summer of 2019 with the Mountain Legacy Project helping to reproduce photos taken in the Canadian Rockies a century ago. This comparative record provides an invaluable data set for tracking climate change and human use of the landscape. Charles' reflections on map-making …
Continue reading "History, Wonder, and Care in the Canadian Rockies, by Charles B. Hayes"
Guest post by Albert Borgmann: Is the Plastocene ending? It may well have both crested in power and reached the foundations of transformation as we can see in Christopher Preston’s The Synthetic Age. But the Plastocene will definitely not pass in time to yield to a renewal of reality that will stave off the worst …
Continue reading "The End of the Plastocene and the Renewal of Reality"
Christopher J. Preston 