Coyote Crossing

The more things change

Francis B. Sumner (1874-1945) — shown above lounging in the Mojave Desert in a 1914 photo by Joseph Grinnell — was a professor of biology at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. He served as vice president of the American Academy for the

More grist for the desert solar mill

The Western Lands Project, a wonderful and effective small non-profit working to protect public lands in the western United States from encroachment and privatization, has just put out its newsletter. Aside from a nice plug for this here site, the

There’s no such thing as desertification

If you want evidence to support my increasingly frequent contention that environmentalists as a whole really don’t care about arid environments, it’s instructive to look at a bit of jargon in use over the last few decades.

The jargon is used to

Things Environmentalists Get Wrong

In the spirit of self-criticism, here’s a non-exhaustive list of things people on the green side of the fence say, with all good intent, that are demonstrably wrong.

“We can protect the environment without jeopardizing economic growth.”
“Never

Is a fish more important than a tortoise?

In Adam Hochschild’s book The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, Hochschild describes a conversation with Alexander Vologodsky, a Russian physicist. Vologodsky had noticed an abandoned settlement as a youth in the extreme north of Siberia,