Climate, Sedans, and Bottled Water

17 December 2015 I spent a few days in Beijing last week, the first time since 2005.  I expected to find changes, but I was nonetheless surprised.  Instead of vendors hawking fake Prada bags on the street (they would follow me chanting “Gucci-Prada”), there are now lavish malls selling the real thing.  Christmas trees and …

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More on GMOs

25 May 2015 An update: the Benton County anti-GMO ballot measure 2-89 went down to a resounding defeat in last week's election: you can read an account in the Corvallis newspaper here.  It was not clear to voters that the measure would not ban genetically-related research at Oregon State University (its language indicated a blanket …

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Living in the Anthropocene

26 October 2014, Berlin Last weekend I went to a public forum of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG).  This is a group, mostly of geologists, who propose that the Anthropocene is a new geological era, “an official unit amending the Geological Time Scale.”  The working group also includes some ecologists and climate scientists.  The AWG …

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John Evelyn meets Raymond Chandler

You could smell them before you saw them, what Raymond Chandler called “that peculiar tomcat smell,” so evocative of southern California.  I did not expect to smell them in a forest in Galicia, in northwestern Spain, where I spent a week last September walking the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela.  But there they were, …

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