That first ember of excitement you feel burning inside from the moment you decide it’s time for a new adventure is an invigorating feeling. From the initial destination-dreaming phase to signing the trip form’s bottom line, you can sense the flames of positive energy building. You start to prepare yourself by reading about and researching [...]
Posts under ‘Miscellaneous’
Happy Birthday, Global Warming
Happy 35th, global warming. No, I’m not implying that the earth started to warm up just 35 years ago, but that this month marks the birthday of the two-word term.
On August 8, 1975, Wallace Broecker published a paper titled Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming? in the journal Science. [...]
Animals Just Want to Have Fun
In a fourth grade science unit, I can remember my teacher telling the class that making and using tools was one of the most significant things that set human beings apart from all the other animals on the planet. But that was before YouTube (or even the Internet, for that matter!). Now, thanks to such [...]
Biodiversity, By Design
We humans have drained half the world’s wetlands and fully exploited or overexploited 75 percent of its fishing grounds. There are other sobering statistics our behavior has caused: every day, 130 species of plants or animals become extinct — a rate that’s probably more than a thousand times higher than the number the Earth would [...]
Send in the Crows
Three animal or plant species are going extinct every hour, according to a report presented by Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, an international treaty that is part of the United Nations Environment Programme. Most of them are quickly disappearing because of human activities: clearing of land for farms or cities; [...]
There’s An App for That
A quick count of the field guides lined up on the bookshelves in my office currently numbers about 25 tomes. Some are quite hefty at several hundred pages, and some are nothing more than large-format, laminated sheets.
If I look in the glove compartment of my car, I could probably dig up a few more, which [...]
