It’s the 21st installment in the Endangered Species Mural Project! This one happened in Silver City, New Mexico, a beautiful mountain town on the edge of the Gila National Forest,…
For the past few weeks I’ve been carving a 4 foot by 6 foot block of birch plywood, depicting a section of the Columbia River Gorge. I live about half…
250 million years ago an extinction event wiped out 95% of all species on Earth, the greatest such winnowing ever to occur. It’s referred to as the Permian/Triassic extinction, or…
This is the second in a series of posts about a visit to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Eastern Washington state, and the fate of the uranium ores found in…
The sixteenth of the Endangered Species Murals is finished! This big wall is located near the Convention Center in downtown El Paso, Texas, and features five endangered species from the…
I’ve spent the last six days on the Pacific Ocean, in transit from San Diego, CA to Astoria, OR aboard the R/V Falkor, the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s big research vessel….
This is the first in a series of posts about a visit to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Eastern Washington state, and the fate of the uranium ores found in…
I left Portland at about eight o’clock on a Thursday night, after a cruise through the art shows downtown. The sun had set by the time I reached Celilo Park,…
The fourteenth Endangered Species mural is finished! This one is located in the Laurel District of Oakland, CA, and is a little different in theme and execution form the other…
The fifth of the Endangered Species Murals is taking shape in Tucson, on the side of the Solar Culture complex in downtown. The mural is being painted by local artist…
I’ve been at a residency in the grassy hills of northeastern Wyoming for the past few weeks. I realized the other day that I had passed quite close to…
When considering the death of species and the grim biological impoverishment of earth, we have to take the lesser with the larger, and the less lovely as well. Recent news…
Today is September 1st, 2014, and marks the 100th anniversary of the death of the last Passenger Pigeon in a Cincinnati zoo. That last bird, named Martha, represented the culmination…
Fire is part of the suite of factors on the short list for major contributions to human development. When we learned to control fire, we started using it to harden…
Image from Copperflora.org. When I decided to reembark on this series of posts about extinct species, I did a check through my copious bookmarks to see if anything jumped out…
Islands: they’re good places to show up at if you are looking to evolutionarily diverge. If your species manages to arrive at an island with no native predators on it,…
Here’s a list of ten of my favorite quotes pertaining to the state of the world that I’ve gleaned in the past several years: A: “We don’t change our behavior,…
Alas, time’s up for the Christmas Island pipistrelle bat. The tiny winged mammals, endemic to Australia’s Christmas island, are overrun by human-introduced yellow crazy ants, giant centipedes and wolf snakes….
That’s all, folks! The last Jaguar in the United States has been killed. The beast in question, a sixteen year old male named “Macho B”, was euthanized by state biologists…
It’s been a while since I’ve posted any depressing stories about doomed animal life on this blog. Now that I’ve actually gone through with the whole moving-to-portland, thing, maybe I’ll…
I’ve decided that this blog thing might be useful for regular, depressing updates on the subject that I think about most, namely, extinction. To start off with, I think I’ll…