PEREGRINE PULP

Some folks really hate Jared Diamond. And those folks love hating Jared Diamond. As any good polymath (with backgrounds in physiology, ecology, evolutionary biology, geography, history, and anthropology, degrees from Harvard and Cambridge, and professorships at UCLA in both medicine and geography) Diamond has written several books. His first popular work came out in 1991 and was titled, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal . He followed that in

Though I bought "A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency" the moment it came out, back in 2020, only now did I finish reading it. (You should go buy five copies.) Obviously, as the title suggests, it's a book about transforming our society with a reorientation toward a concern for climate and addressing the problems we face. In spelling out just how all this will work, the author starts by quoting Gramsci.* And, well, it goes downhill fast from there. Among ma

I always like to recount Suzuki's story about smog. How when shooting an episode of The Nature of Things he and his crew went and sat at...

This week, authorities have given us things like: “July 2023 is set to be the hottest month ever recorded in human history.” “July isn't even over and it's projected to be the hottest month humanity has ever experienced.” “The North Atlantic just reached its highest temperature in recorded history just two days after the Mediterranean Sea reached its highest temperature in recorded history.” I love this. These folks consistently tell us how passionate they are about precision

Oliver Stone just put out a new film promoting nuclear energy, titled Nuclear Now: Time to look again. So, just as he asks, let’s...

As with every fire season in recent memory, we’re being told this one is unprecedented. Fires in Alberta and Nova Scotia are said to be...

I love John Green’s now-finished podcast Anthropocene Reviewed. Love it. It really is everything I want in a podcast. I’ve even been...

You may have heard something about the Sea Star Wasting Disease (SSWD) epidemic that came to the Pacific coast of North America in 2013....

The job would be monitoring a threatened polar bear population. Most of us new recruits were well-educated and comfortable out of doors...

David Suzuki used to have this metaphor he'd use when talking about climate change. He likened the problem and our inaction to a car...

Someone once asked: If I’m not mistaken, you are arguing for humanity banding together to protect ourselves from a plethora of potential...

It's easy to find folks promoting organic. Abundant are claims that organic farming reduces environmental pollutants and greenhouse gas...

Conversations about carbon dioxide and energy have been unavoidable within environmental circles and are increasingly so in the media. In...

Acquaintances of mine share video after video, post after post, and slogan after slogan that, as far as I’m able to discern, rewrite all...

Dear Green Party of Canada, What if you dropped the misinformation, at least for official statements on key platform items. During...

In one of our final courses we were asked for an analysis and reflection of major course projects and themes. Here was mine: The Local Environmental Observation Network in Practice For all time, who you were (sex, age, family, class…) and where you were (out hunting, at school, in jail; at the edge of the Holy Roman Empire or in downtown Tokyo…) had an exquisitely close relationship with what information and ideas you had access to and were able to share. In fact, each phen

Somehow polar bears became the symbol of climate change and species extinction. It makes some sense how this creature arrived at it poster child status. Polar bears are distributed all across the most northern regions of the globe and, given that they are the apex predator in this most climate change-impacted region, folks expected these animals to be the first and most visibly suffering. And now countless news reports, environmental campaigns, and viral social media posts te