A spambot recently left the following comment on one of my water posts: water conservation should be done because we are already having some water shortage these days It was accompanied by a link to a web site apparently selling products intended to alleviate gastrointestinal distress. Less flushing, I guess?
This was the best nighthawk week I’ve had in my yet young birding career. I’ve sort of vaguely watched birds since I was a kid, something I picked up from my mother. When Lissa and I got married, mom and dad passed on their Peterson’s guide, and we made a tradition of taking it with …
To track my favorite topic, I have a Google news alert set on “Colorado River”. I’m trying to track water policy issues, but every year beginning in spring that news is accompanied by a macabre uptick in stories about people falling into the river, flipping their boats, going missing, and frequently drowning. Crews search for …
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 …