Getting to Know the Local Environmentalists, Part 1: Under One Sky

Last week I attended "Under One Sky: Climate Change and Your Back Yard." It was a climate change discussion sponsored by the Environmental Forum of Marin and Transition Mill Valley at the Throckmorton Theater in Mill Valley. As I walked in the door, I was handed a flyer for "Norman Solomon for congress" by a grizzle-bearded gentleman that told me the candidate isn't accepting any corporate campaign contributions. "Sounds good to me," I thought as I took the flyer, "and also impressive he has dedicated volunteers that aren't dressed and groomed like Jehovah's Witnesses." I looked at the flyer while waiting for the event to start, and liked what I saw. Before sitting down, I spoke to a woman about what "Transition Mill Valley" was, and she told me about some of their upcoming events.

After some preliminaries and inspiring music (this youtube video isn't what they played but you'll get the idea), John Wick of the Nicasio Native Grass Ranch and the Marin Carbon Project gave a very enjoyable and detailed presentation of his work on ranching, carbon sequestration, and

Fall Colors... in July

The fall colors start on the coast in July. This year, I first noticed poison oak turning red on July 25th. Not a lot, but individual leaves on certain plants. The grass was already yellow, and the smell of mid-summer dust on the trails was in the air.

California Bay are evergreen, however there always seem to be scattered yellow leaves within a tree's canopy, which remind me of Christmas Tree decorations. These yellow leaves seem to fall more in earnest in August, piling up on the ground and on the trails beneath the trees and drifting into mini-debris jams at the riffles in the creek. It doesn't seem like the foliage in the tree looks any different, even though the yellow leaves seem to fall more frequently now than in early summer.

California Buckeye is

Tiptoeing up a mountain

The most careful mountaineers are the ones that wear sandals. I realized this two weeks ago when I was on my way up Mt. Warren, in the Inyo National Forest just east of Yosemite National Park--in my Chaco sandals.

Rising Air

This is the wettest place I've ever lived--over 44 inches of rainfall per year on average. Even a year with only half of average rainfall here would be wetter than the average rainfall of any place I've ever lived. This is the farthest west that I've ever lived and the farthest north I've ever lived in this hemisphere.

On the isohyetal map of West Marin in the "Natural History of the Point Reyes Peninsula" by Jules G. Evens, it shows 50+ inches of rainfall in the Kent Reservoir watershed. It really increases dramatically from Pt. Reyes, with only about 12 inches of rain a year at the lighthouse. I've moved from a rain shadow, where a reversed-but-similar-magnitude gradient exists east of the Sierra crest (close to 40 inches near the crest to 12 inches near Lee Vining), to an orographic hotspot. I'm now living on the wetter end of that gradient.

Peter was telling me about how the wettest area in Marin County is

Watershed Stories

For most of the last sixteen years I lived twelve miles from the divide separating my terminal-basin watershed from that of the Pacific Ocean. I am a mountaineer, striving to live like John Muir did. The high peaks that he climbed at the top of Yosemite's watershed sheltering the living glaciers so intently studied by him were the same ones that I climbed at the top of mine.

I lived so close to that divide that I climbed many of those peaks from my home without the aid of fossil fuel--once I

The Obama Administration creates another job overseas

May 4th, 2011:

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Japanese Nuclear Disaster at Fukushima

I'm not a nuclear expert, but I do specialize in environmental impact avoidance, mitigation, and restoration. So I'm always looking at the relationship between humans and the environment, especially during disasters.

As we watch the nuclear disaster go from bad to worse following the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, I've been shocked and disappointed by the efforts of the media to downplay the risks. It reminds me of the propaganda of the Bush Administration leading up to the Iraq war--easy to see through as B.S., if you are paying attention.

Expert after expert from the nuclear industry has appeared on CNN and the other news networks telling us not to worry, downplaying the disaster with almost a cavalier attitude. It seems like in the absence of reliable information, the one talking point everyone agreed on was to try to avoid saying anything that could cause a panic--regardless of whether panicking was necessary or a good idea.

The news reports go from bad to worse and the information gets revised daily.