Coyote Crossing

My name is Chris and I’m aneurotypical

There was a really inspiring spate of stories a couple weeks ago, mainly on Twitter, by people coming out into the open about suffering from depression. Here’s one thread of a number of them.

I understand that my coming out to my regular readers

Scientific illiteracy and he-said she-said reporting

This is a really frustrating bit of recursive scientific illiteracy.

The issue was kicked off by a post which you can find at “friedcranes.org” though due to the cumbersome layout of this page by the time you read this you may have to search a

This is what happens when it rains in the desert

Ya got yer desert trees, most of ‘em legumes, like this ironwood here.

There’s very little usable nitrogen in the soil in the desert. Plants need nitrogen for crucial metabolic processes, chief among them making amino acids and proteins. Without

Up to the elbows

My friend Susan posted a photo on Facebook this week of herself planting a tree in her Minnesota town, part of a campaign to plant a thousand of them. It’s a sweet photo. She squats at the base of the tree, one begloved hand on the ground as if to

Uncertain Future for Joshua Trees Projected with Climate Change

This image, from April 2004, shows mortality of some adult Joshua trees resulting from years of hot-dry climate. During the prior year, this area received only 17 percent of its average precipitation and was 4 degrees F warmer than

Solar Gold: The Ivanpah Spirit Run (video)

Filmmaker Robert Lundahl joined us at the Ivanpah Spirit Run last weekend. This is the result. Edited among images and interviews with Spirit Run participants are snippets of a longer interview with Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center

Some real science on desert energy development

Via Basin and Range Watch’s Laura Cunningham, the Independent Science Advisors draft report to the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan for the State of California. Laura says:

You can’t get better scientists, and they recommend good things,

Carbon sequestration by desert landscapes

…is what this post was supposed to be about, except that I wrote it in a browser window without a backup copy, because I am an idiot, and ExpressionEngine failed to save it properly. I need to reconstruct the entire post, which took a couple hours,

“How to Become a Yucca Moth”: An interview with researcher Jeremy Yoder

As persistent readers of this blog will know I’ve been working for some time on a book on Joshua trees, and one of the more interesting facets of the Joshua tree’s lifestyle is the tree’s reproductive partnership with two species of moths,

Pleuraphis rigida: knitting the desert together

Left: Big galleta fills a wash in the Southern California portion of the Sonoran Desert.

[A preview of a piece I wrote for El Paisano, the newsletter of the Desert Protective Council.]

In April, Desert Protective Council staff and several

Advertorial: Poisonous and Destructive

Commenter Devonian wraps things up in the ScienceBlogs/Pepsi thread on Metafilter:

One of the most poisonous and destructive forms of paid-for content is advertorial: adverts disguised as editorial. It is something that is constantly - and I mean

ScienceBlogs Diaspora RSS feed

[This post has been rewritten to make sense of all the updates.]

Carl Zimmer has started a list of sites where ScienceBloggers who have left due to the ethics violations of their host have landed.

One of the benefits of having all those fine

I don’t see how this could possibly end badly

ScienceBlogs has launched a new food science blog with content written by PepsiCo.

I’d find the utter and complete violation of any semblance of journalistic and publishing ethics utterly laughable, except for one thing: dozens of good people have

The more things change

Francis B. Sumner (1874-1945) — shown above lounging in the Mojave Desert in a 1914 photo by Joseph Grinnell — was a professor of biology at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. He served as vice president of the American Academy for the

Scope yourself out please

I wasn’t actually going to say anything about this here, because — believe it or not — I do have a “Too Much Information” threshold. I went through the procedure and got a clean bill of health and I was going to leave it at that for the next ten

Son of Naming the Joshua Tree

Hey, remember that post I put up a few weeks back about how the story of how the Joshua tree was named is most likely folklore? The one where I said:

But in more than a decade of looking, I have seen not a single reference to the phrase “Joshua

Carnivaled

My post Why Joshua trees are shaped the way they are has been included in the Scientia Pro Publica (Science for The People) Carnival #20, this iteration of said carnival being hosted over at Kind of Curious. The carnival includes posts on topics

Science!

After enough time spent paying attention to a tree species, you tend to come up with a bit of data even if you’re not really trying to.

This Joshua tree is at Keys View in Joshua Tree National Park, right around the southern limits of the

This is different from Obama putting your grandmother on an ice floe.

I told Grrlscientist that I’d have a post up today encouraging you all to go vote for her so that she can get a free trip to Antarctica. This isn’t the post I’d hoped to write about that, but it’s been a hell of a day. So let me just say this: If

Hi-tech explained

Richard Feynman explains the physics underlying the most important technological advance in human history.

… (continues)

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About me

I'm a natural history and environmental writer, an editor and photographer. I've lived in upstate New York, the SF Bay Area, Washington, DC, the Mojave Desert, and Los Angeles. My writing has appeared in publications ranging from Camas and Orion to Bay Nature, California Wild, the Boston Globe, and about thirty daily papers nationwide when I was a syndicated garden writer for the Knight-Ridder chain. No, I never got to meet the talking car.

I've traveled extensively in the Mojave, Great Basin and Sonoran deserts, as well as in the steppes and slickrock country of the Colorado Plateau.

About Coyote Crossing

This blog has existed in one form or another since 2003. At first it was called Creek Running North, after Pinole Creek, near where I lived back then. I moved in 2008 and renamed the site Coyote Crossing, but about a thousand people* still link here under the old name.

My publicist tells me I should mention that my writing here has frequently been called the best on the Internet.

* May not actually equal 1000

All content Copyright © 2011 Chris Clarke. All Rights Reserved.

Banner painting by Carl S. Buell.