Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Mary Pilon Dec—27—2017 10:13AM EST About 15 years ago, Cynthia Beal, a 30-year veteran of the natural-food movement and then-owner of the Red Barn Natural Grocery in Eugene, Oregon, sat down to work on a science fiction novel. As she wrote, she began to contemplate life — and death — in the 2040s, a date…
Cape Town’s main water supply, at the Theewaterskloof Dam, is running dry, and the city may soon have to turn off its taps. Photograph from AP PUBLISHED February 2, 2018 Editor’s Note: On Monday, February 5, Cape Town officials announced that the city had gotten “a slight reprieve” and that “Day Zero” had…
In just the past few months, the vagaries of climate change have affected everything from the California avocado crop to South African wine production. Now, sad news from the Louisiana bayou suggests that not even hot sauce is immune from the consequences of extreme weather and rising sea levels. Since 1868, Edmund McIlhenny and his…
Pressure and wind visualization of storm off the coast of New England on Thursday. (WindyTV.com) Unforgiving cold has punished the eastern third of the United States for the past 10 days. But the most severe winter weather will assault the area late this week. First, a very large and powerful storm will hammer coastal locations…
Image: Maxpixel I was hoping to start 2018 off with a positive blog, like some of my colleagues, but then I glanced at my feeds and saw ‘chocolate extinction’ all over them. Apparently, news broke over the new year that chocolate was going to go extinct in mere decades, as climate change threatens the survival…
Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images Last week, at a New Orleans conference center that once doubled as a storm shelter for thousands during Hurricane Katrina, a group of polar scientists made a startling declaration: The Arctic as we once knew it is no more. The region is now definitively trending toward an ice-free state, the…
In a remote region of Antarctica known as Pine Island Bay, 2,500 miles from the tip of South America, two glaciers hold human civilization hostage. Stretching across a frozen plain more than 150 miles long, these glaciers, named Pine Island and Thwaites, have marched steadily for millennia toward the Amundsen Sea, part of the vast…
Photo: AP The White House’s effort to head every science-adjacent agency with science skeptics continued apace today, when the Senate held a confirmation hearing for Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), Trump’s pick to lead NASA. You’ll be shocked to learn that his views on climate change do not exactly comport with the overwhelming scientific consensus on the…
The catastrophic weather in Texas has thrown the spotlight on the federal government’s troubled flood insurance program, which is nearly $25 billion in debt after huge payouts following Katrina, Sandy and other devastating hurricanes. But as Houston starts the long process of recovering, lobbyists in Washington have already maneuvered to slow lawmakers efforts’ to overhaul…
Illustration by Sean McCabe Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, wants you to know that he was responsible for persuading President Trump to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. Pruitt has never said that explicitly, of course – he understands that if he wants to keep his job, he needs…