
I need to start taking the real camera on these hikes. This is a crappy phone camera photo of one of the dozen or so species of plants in bloom in the hills around here right now. It’s Eschscholzia parishii, a close relative of the California
… (continues)
This is the Desert Protective Council’s most recent Educational Bulletin, Ten California Desert Plants That Should Be Protected Under The Federal Endangered Species Act, by Jim Andre of the Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center and
… (continues)
Earlier today. I hiked here a couple years ago with Larry Hogue and Florian. It hasn’t changed much. That’s good.
In May 2008, as long-time readers of this blog know, I left the San Francisco Bay Area where I had lived for a quarter century and moved to the Mojave Desert. I remember the next month through a bit of a veil. There was a lot of work hauling
… (continues)
We woke too late on Saturday to head for the desert, so we went the other way: out to the Pacific Coast Highway and up Topanga Canyon. Two years I’ve lived here and it’s less than twenty miles, and still I never made it there until this weekend. It
[A sneak preview of a piece I wrote this week for the Desert Protective Council’s upcoming Educational Bulletin. I cribbed a few sentences from my earlier post on ancient blackbrush forests.]
As the reality of human-generated climate change grows
… (continues)
The first time I awoke in the Mojave I was cramped uncomfortably into the passenger seat of my girlfriend’s Honda in a roadside rest area on Route 58 near Boron. It was not yet light. I had agreed to drive her car from Los Angeles to the Bay Area
… (continues)
One of the steadiest jokes in the plant world — for rather nerdly definitions of the word “joke” — is the degree to which a person must constantly relearn the proper Latin names of plants. Just as soon as you get used to calling something a
… (continues)
If you want evidence to support my increasingly frequent contention that environmentalists as a whole really don’t care about arid environments, it’s instructive to look at a bit of jargon in use over the last few decades.
The jargon is used to
… (continues)
From the US Geological Survey:
… (continues)Tree death rates have more than doubled over the last few decades in old-growth forests of the western United States, and the most probable cause of the worrisome trend is regional warming, according to a U.S.
[This post was at first a comment on the Vilsack thread, and after a couple requests to promote it to post status I am doing just that, after correcting a couple of typos. Hope someone finds it useful.]
Unlike a lot of environmentalists I don’t
… (continues)
A kind reader sent me the article I asked for in this post, and I’ve filed it away in the database. Most of the writing I do as regards the paper will be for the book, but it’s relatively big news and I just have to engage in the sobersided,
… (continues)