Pretend this Environmental Impact Statement is a national park: A brief tour of a virtual landscape

By: | January 22, 2016

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Behold, the majestic white cliffs. They form ghostly canyons that stretch into forbidding fog. Swallows build mud-daub nests on their walls. Falcons dive from their precipices to eat the swallows. Some say people have vanished here without trace, back during the first days of exploration.

Limestone? you ask. The incised and sculpted leavings of an ancient seabed?

No. Paper. Thousands of pages of stacked paper. But really, we’re not concerned about those cliffs. We must look beyond them: The landscape we’re here to “see” is contained therein, and it looks nothing like this one. Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Lizards of Hastings-on-Hudson

By: | January 21, 2016

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The legend begins thus: In 1967 — or maybe it was ’66 — a pet store truck overturned in Long Island, sending a few dozen finger-length Italian wall lizards scampering into the bushes of Garden City. There Podarcis siculus thrived, slurping up arthropods along rock walls and sidewalks, dodging beaks and claws and tires. Over the decades, the lizards, elegant Mediterranean natives whose emerald torsos taper to long pewter tails, turned up in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, flourishing in drainage ditches and grassy cemeteries. One amateur biologist estimated their dispersal rate at a block per year.

As far as scientists knew, however, the animals didn’t trespass north of New York City. Until, this summer, in Hastings-on-Hudson — the Westchester town, 40 minutes above the city by rail, where I grew up — I saw one.

Continue reading →

The Mark We Leave

By: | January 20, 2016

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Rounding a corner in Manhattan last week, I saw a handprint spray-painted on a wall. It was my hand. I had put it there last summer, my first and only piece of graffiti. It was nothing special, no artistic flair other than my five fingers. I had gloved my hand in plastic wrap and waved spray paint over it, creating a simple stencil out of part of my body, one of the oldest forms of enduring human expression.

The wall of the building had originally been a sprawling gallery of graffiti until, against the wishes of those living inside, the city whitewashed the whole thing. I was staying with one of the residents when the white-washing occurred. She invited me to go to the wall and plant a new seed. She was hoping graffiti artists would soon return and start the process again. A print was needed to kick off the next wave.

Last week, I was glad to see that the seed had taken hold. Several new images had sprung up. Continue reading →

No, Mr. Penn, That Is Not Why We Hate You

By: | January 19, 2016

shutterstock_309953711Like every foreign journalist living in Mexico, I’ve been watching the Sean-Penn-interviews-notorious-drug-lord with a mix of humor and mild disgust. It’s like some kind of adolescent game of Mad Libs. El Chapo meets Sean Penn in the mountains to talk about farts and penises.

I tried to read the article but could only force myself through about half of the horrible, self-indulgent writing. I’m a science writer – unlike my war correspondent colleagues, I don’t have to read every narco story that comes out. And so I forgot about it.

But when he appeared on 60 Minutes the other day and hinted that the real reason journalists reacted so negatively to his “article” was that they were jealous, I finally snapped. The American journalists who work in Mexico covering the drug war are some of the most dedicated, thoughtful and selfless writers I have ever met. Their passion and courage is surpassed only by their Mexican counterparts who also cover the drug war.

Mr. Penn lives under the delusion that the reason so many actual journalists hated his Rolling Stone screed was we are somehow jealous of the scoop he landed.  And I’m sure in his head that makes sense. So let me just clear that up right now before it goes any further.

I am a journalist working in Mexico and I can guarantee you I’m not jealous that I didn’t get to interview Mexico’s most notorious criminal while hiding out in the mountains of Sinaloa. I wouldn’t want that interview. Put another way, there’s no way in hell, heaven, purgatory or anything in between that I would take that interview, even if it was offered.

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I Take Up STEM, I Drop It Again.

By: | January 18, 2016

5076455215_de28db190f_oSTEM is acronymic jargon for the education of kindergarteners through college seniors in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math.  Apparently the education is inadequate and uneven and seen as appropriate for nerdy boys but not girls or persons of color – something like that.  It’s discussed in hushed and worried tones and if you’re interested in science at all, you hear a lot about STEM.  I’m all for it but I leave it to other folks.

I’ve spent a lot of time around African nurses lately.   They come from a lot of countries, mostly sub-Saharan.  They are educated and smart as they want to be; they work 12-hour shifts and most of them have two jobs; they’re tired a lot but are not allowed to be sloppy or cranky.  I admire them greatly.

I was telling one of these nurses that I was a science writer and she said, “Oh, my son is so interested in science!”  He’s in middle school, she said; he’s in science club.  “How are the science classes?”  I asked.  “Ok,” she said, “they’re ok.  It’s astronomy he loves and they don’t do astronomy.”  I told her I wrote about astronomy.  “He reads about it all the time,” she said, “he knows everything about it, he tells me and I don’t even understand what he’s saying.”  I saw my opportunity to do my part for STEM. Continue reading →

Blinded by the light

By: | January 15, 2016

4075828759_d6f7dccbd7_zAt the end of the year, the New York Times Book Review featured the Year in Poetry, covering 2015 collections by poets here and abroad, and other poetry features, including well-known people who talked about their favorite poems. The section’s Letters department always brings a range of opinions; the comments on the poetry issue followed in this vein. Some people were thrilled, others less so. But one interesting letter took issue with the cover itself, which spelled out The Year in Poetry in a series of colored dots.

This letter writer couldn’t read the issue’s title. He is colorblind. Continue reading →

Memories in My Kitchen

By: | January 14, 2016

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It was a year and a half after my internship at NPR, and I was in the habit of calling Joanne Silberner, who was then on NPR’s staff, for advice whenever I got a terrifying new assignment. I suppose this makes her one of my first journalism mentors. At the time, I’d convinced the magazine where I was an intern to send me to Switzerland for a story. I’m sure she gave me practical advice on how to report in the field and get what I needed for my story in a foreign country. But the piece of advice that’s stuck with me was this: Get a souvenir you will use in your daily life.

This led to a pleasant afternoon in Lausanne, in which I went from shop to shop, asking, “Est-ce que vous avez des montres de Tintin?” I used my dictionary and my lousy middle-school French to cobble together the question: Do you have any Tintin watches? Tintin, boy reporter, hero of the Belgian comics I devoured (in translation) as a child, was just the thing to commemorate my first time reporting overseas. Continue reading →

In the Oregon Standoff, Science is a Hostage

By: | January 12, 2016

523679850_1df25124a0_zIn the mid-1990s, when I had half a biology degree and precious few practical skills, I was hired as a field assistant on a desert tortoise research project in southwestern Utah. It was a strange and wonderful job at a strange and not-so-wonderful time: In order to protect the tortoise, a threatened species, the federal Bureau of Land Management had recently limited grazing in tortoise habitat. While most ranchers had accepted government compensation for the restriction of their grazing privileges on public land, a few had refused to accept payment—or move their cattle.

One of them was a southern Nevada rancher named Cliven Bundy. As he told The Washington Post at the time, he was opposed to the “land grab,” and was “digging in for a fight.”

Dig in he did. In the years that followed, he racked up $1 million in grazing fines and fees, and in the spring of 2014, when Bureau of Land Management contractors finally moved to round up his cattle, he vowed to do whatever it took to stop them. After a tense standoff with armed Bundy supporters, the agency backed down. This past January 2, as the country now knows, Cliven Bundy’s sons Ammon and Ryan led anti-government militants in an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon.

It’s been more than 20 years since the Bundys and their ideological allies dug in against the law and the public interest—and science and scientists are still in their line of fire.

Continue reading →