The issue of lead wheel weights has become a touchstone for me in thinking about risk perception and how we respond to various sort of environmental contamination. I did a story in 2001 about research by a clever scientist named Bob Root who had quantified the lead wheel weights falling off of our cars’ wheels. …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Lead Wheel Weights’ »
There are birds living inside Denver International Airport. I kid you not. I’m pretty sure they’re house sparrows, but their flighty, and my binoculars are stowed in my luggage, so I can’t give you a positive ID. When last we met our intrepid international traveller (me), he was stuck in Prague, the victim of a …
When I told my friend Page, a veteran of European travel, that I had a connecting flight through Prague on my return to the states, she sent me a link to the Onion’s piece about Franz Kafka International being named “World’s Most Alienating Airport“. I couldn’t help but think about it as I waited patiently …
In my time wandering around Copenhagen, the Little Mermaid statue was not high on my priority list. But Tom Yulsman had arrived early for the conference and done a bit of scouting, which revealed that the statue was in fact on loan to the Shanghai World Expo. In its place down at the waterfront, Tom …
Birdwatching in Europe is a whole new deal for me, fabulously entertaining, because pretty much everything I see wherever I go is new. And since I’m a recently minted keeper of lists, it’s also productive. Most of the time I’ve been in Denmark I’ve been working, so I’ve left the binoculars and bird book in …
These things are blooming like nutso in the countryside around Copenhagen. They average around 24 inches of rain a year here, so it’s not a super wet place, but wet enough that there’s stuff growing everywhere. But not so wet that they don’t have problems with overdrafting their aquifers. Sound familiar? (More when I’m not …
Mexican fans watching Mexico v. Argentina on a giant TV on the waterfront in Copenhagen, June 27, 2010.
I’m headed to Copenhagen next week for a journalism workshop. While the workshop will fill most of my time there, I’ve scheduled a few extra days to play. Suggestions?
David Appell triggered an interesting discussion over at his blog about comparing the Gulf oil mess to other ecological disasters, presaging a nice piece by Justin Gillis exploring a lot of the same issues. As I mentioned over at David’s, this raises what has long been for me a discomfort about the ecological insults we …