I just finished an interesting book with a provocative title. How to Clone a Mammoth, by Beth Shapiro, is a readable, sober assessment of de-extinction, the idea of bringing back extinct species through a variety of techniques. She defines very clearly at the outset that the purpose of de-extinction is ecological – to restore critical … Read more
Last week, I got a great new book from Amazon. I had pre-ordered it months ago, so when it finally arrived, I was delighted, and dove right in. Within 24 hours, I had finished it. It’s the story of how my friend Forrest Pritchard re-made his family’s farm into a sustainable enterprise by going organic. … Read more
Last week, I finished reading Living in the Appalachian Forest: True Tales of Sustainable Forestry, by Chris Bolgiano. It’s a grab-bag of stories from the forested mountains of the south-central Appalachians, ranging from Pennsylvania down to Kentucky and maybe Georgia, too. West Virginia and Virginia get the most attention. The driving question behind the book … Read more
In the delivery room last week, while we waited for Lily’s labor to ramp up, I finished reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. I think it was one of the most insightful, important books I’ve ever read. I was pre-disposed to like it, because I really enjoyed Pollan’s earlier book The Botany of Desire, … Read more
Once again, we roll around to another Earth Day. I find myself in a more-contemplative-than-normal mood this year, and I’d like to take this opportunity to share a bit about what I’ve been thinking. This is a post about the personal side of geoscience – taking data, and its logical implications, and smashing it into … Read more
The root of every issue that we collectively term “environmental problems” is human overpopulation. It wouldn’t matter if everyone on Earth drove a Hummer and used incandescent light bulbs and dumped raw sewage in their local watershed — if there were only fifteen people on the Earth. But the reverse is also true: if everyone … Read more
A diagram on “how science works” betrays an “experimentalist” bias. This sets Callan off on a rumination on the much-maligned validity of historical science, and that leads to a discussion of the Big Experiment, which is humanity’s influence on the Earth system.
The final book I read over the break was Dirt: the Erosion of Civilizations, by David Montgomery. Montgomery got a MacArthur “Genius” Award for his soil work, and I use an article he wrote for GSA Today (2007) as one of the assigned readings for my Environmental Geology course. In Dirt, he lays out the … Read more
The final book I read over the break was Dirt: the Erosion of Civilizations, by David Montgomery. Montgomery got a MacArthur “Genius” Award for his soil work, and I use an article he wrote for GSA Today (2007) as one of the assigned readings for my Environmental Geology course. In Dirt, he lays out the … Read more
This recycling collection can in Istanbul amused me: