Along with the possibiilty of the extinction of manking by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm -- substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heridity upon which the shape of the future depends.

Carson was thinking of DDT, but she could easily have been describing the endocrine disruptors of today, many of which we consume in our food, and which are believed (by researchers such as Bruce Blumberg) to have a generational effect. Our consumption of substances such as BPA, for instance, could mean permanent alternation of the genetic code of our grandchildren. Think of it! 

[from a compelling new biography, On a Farther Shore, by William Souder]

Here's one of Grechen's best, w/a variation for our times, for Shepherd's Pie:

First,make her basic ground beef, which takes one lb lead ground beef; two cloves garlic, 1/2 cup finely chopped onion, some bouillon. Cook the beef w/garlic and onions until its browned. Pour or skim off the fat. Add 2 tablespoons flour, salt to taste, and a small amount of fresh rosemary. When it's cooked, dehydrate, which can be managed by spreading it out on a baking sheet and leaving it in an oven set at low, for about six hours, with the door ajar. Leave a little moisture.

On the trail cover with water, bring to a boil, simmer ten minutes. In a second pot, boil water and make instant potatoes. Put the potatoes atop the shepherd's pie, then add grated parmesan on top. No one will be hungry after, guaranteed.

All this to reveal that yes, I'm back on the PCT, on a stretch from the desert (Anza-Borrego) to the mountains (the San Jacinto, high over Palm Springs) and back to the desert. 100 miles.

Must add my variation. For a friend who after all too many antibiotics can't handle onion, garlic, or other strong flavors, began by cooking three sweet peppers in a light oil until softened. Brown the beef, add a couple of tablespoons tomato paste, then some Italian herbs -- parsley, basil, thyme. Then as before. 

Came out better than Heather's! Flavorful, delicate, charming. Live and learn. 

Any particular storm come to mind? 

Looks a little like this, a few miles to the south....

Take about a week. Will leave some posts, to provoke some thoughts, I hope. 

How do you find your stories?

"I sometimes find story ideas in the Metro section of the newspaper, one-inch items with headlines like, “Man Nails Girlfriend’s Fish to Floor.” The short-shrift given to these stories will spark my wondering, what is this about? Usually the story doesn’t make complete sense; I want to look more deeply. I wrote about mushroom foragers in Alaska after reading one line about them in Bon Appetit. The reference started a little itch that I needed to scratch; the scratch bloomed to a topic, the topic to a pitch, the pitch to a story. Follow that itch."

I love that she writes both fiction and non. Gotta love those smarts. Here's a book of her stories from an interesting Portland-based press called Dymaxicon. 

No one knew quite how old it was because it had lost its heartwood, but Michael Lear, a tree expert with the National Trust, visited Pontfadog in 1996 and wrote to Josie Williams: "Using Forestry Commission techniques, the youngest it can be is 1,181 years, the oldest 1,628 years. "I cannot find a record of an oak tree of any of the 500 species internationally which has a greater girth anywhere in the world."

Yet, for all its local renown, the Pontfadog oak was barely known outside the small Ceiriog valley and the community of ancient tree experts. It was mentioned by George Borrow on his journey across Wales in 1862 but, like most other ancient trees in Britain, it was never fenced off or protected, and no one was ever asked to pay to see it – although Huw Williams's grandmother used to put out a collection box for the local Cheshire home, sometimes raising £5 a year. "It was just our tree, part of the landscape. We were very proud of it," said one woman from the valley the next day. Last week, some of Britain's specialists on ancient trees gathered at Pontfadog for a post mortem.

"It was the national tree of Wales and one of the oldest oaks in Europe. I'm desperately trying to find people who can help in propagating from the tree by either grafting or micro-propagation in order to maintain its genotype. Kew Gardens have said they are interested," said Simpson.

In fact, the tree could have been saved for many more years. Last year a group from the Ancient Tree Forum visited Pontfadog and, seeing it was vulnerable to a big wind, put together a list of actions costing £5,700 that they thought might have protected it. Despite a petition of 6,000 signatures to the Welsh assembly, no money could be found.

Wonder if tree lovers in this country could call on a group such as the Ancient Tree Forum to save a great old tree, if they feared one was in trouble somewhere in this land.  

Clare O'Connor writes for Forbes:  

"Even more impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to boycott business practices that violate your principles rather than single companies. One of these campaigns, Demand GMO Labeling, will scan your box of cereal and tell you if it was made by one of the 36 corporations that donated more than $150,000 to oppose the mandatory labeling of genetically modified food."

What can you say about this software but -- that's cool. (Well, we could add that the Koch industries take in $98 billion a year, according to Forbes.) 

[Fascinating post by Andrew Freedman with great videos from Mel Shapiro and team.]

In the vernacular, Shapiro remarked to an interviewer at the US funded research station NCAR:

Then, a few hours before landfall, Sandy began a sharp curve toward the west, moving toward the heart of the approaching midlatitude trough of low pressure. In Shapiro’s view, this marked an apparent warm seclusion trying to take place on top of the storm’s fast-decaying warm core.

I asked Shapiro how often he’s seen a storm like Sandy. He replied, “Never.”

Gives an idea: Shapiro's motion graphics are far more compelling (if a little cumbersome to load). Final image, which graphs Sandy's "vorticity," is perhaps the most compelling of all.

As Climate Central reported on May 3, there is no single, agreed-upon answer to when CO2 concentrations were last at this level, as studies show a wide date range from between 800,000 to 15 million years ago. The most direct evidence comes from tiny bubbles of ancient air that act as time capsules, sealing ancient air in the vast ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland. By drilling for ice cores and analyzing the air bubbles, scientists have found that, at no point during at least the past 800,000 years have atmospheric CO2 levels been as high as they are now.

A 2011 study in the journal Paleoceanography found that atmospheric CO2 levels may have been comparable to today’s as recently as sometime between 2 and 4.6 million years ago, during the Pliocene epoch, which saw the arrival of Homo habilis, a possible ancestor of modern homo sapiens, and when herds of giant, elephant-like Mastadons roamed North America. Modern human civilization didn’t arrive on the scene until the Holocene Epoch, which began 12,000 years ago.

Best reporting on this may come from National Geographic, fittingly. Can we leave aside the politics and the science for a moment? Just a moment. Put ourselves in this moment, approx 3 million years ago. Ask what it felt like outside:

What was Earth like then? In Africa, grasslands were replacing forests and our ancestors were climbing down from the trees. (See related: "The Evolutionary Road.") On Ellesmere, there were no longer alligators and cypress trees, but there were beavers and larch trees and horses and giant camels—and not much ice. The planet was three to four degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the 19th century, before man-made global warming began.

If anything, those numbers understate how different the Pliocene climate was. The tropical sea surface was about as warm as it is now, says Alexey Fedorov of Yale University, but the temperature gradient between the tropics and the poles—which drives the jet streams in the mid-latitudes—was much smaller. The east-west gradient across the Pacific Ocean—which drives the El Niño-La Niña oscillation—was almost nonexistent. In effect, the ocean was locked in a permanent El Niño. Global weather patterns would have been completely different in the Pliocene.

Above we see an imagined day from an unimaginably vast plain of time. But looking at that illustration, and seeing but one of those creatures still around, the condor, on a day like today, when the afternoon temp reached 102 in Upper Ojai, a day after 106 in Ojai, twenty degrees over the average temperature, and one can't help but think of what the experts say, the sheer variability of the climate. 

The changes we've experienced, the big storms, the heat waves, the Santa Anas, have been so little as compared to what could be. 

Related articles

Pliocene El Nino

Carbon-dioxide levels are at their highest point in at least 800,000 years

The Last Time CO2 Was This High, Humans Didn't Exist

Ice-Free Arctic May Be Near, Study Suggests

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Extensively quotes from a speech of true outrage and conviction on climate conservation, seventeen minutes long, delivered on the Senate floor by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

Includes this: 

There is only one leg on which climate change denial stands: Money.

Speaking of which...author Jon Moonallem writes in Slate and tells the story of "A Tranquilized Polar Bear Rising Thru an Autumn Sky":

The town of Churchill, Manitoba is a shivering little settlement on the edge of Hudson Bay that, every fall, gets overrun with about 900 polar bears and 10,000 polar bear tourists. Polar bears routinely wander into town—they especially love hanging out by the elementary school. When they do, folks call 675-BEAR and a squad of bear patrol officers tries to herd the animals back onto the tundra, firing off pyrotechnics and noise-makers. Bears that won’t budge are tranquilized and transferred to a Quonset hut near the airport, a facility sometimes referred to as the “Polar Bear Jail.” Each bear serves a month sentence—enough to dissuade it (hopefully) from entering town again—then it’s drugged again, packed in a net, and airlifted under a helicopter to a safer area north of town while crowds of tourists gather to watch. It’s a breathtaking thing to see: a polar bear lifting off the ground and flying away.

"We're seeing fires burning like we usually see in late summer, at the height of the fire season, and it's only May," said Tom Kruschke.

It's a good example of the complexity of climate change, or a goof on my part, but in either case raises the question -- what is going on with these winds? When I talked to Hall, he suggested that we may see fewer Santa Anas in September and October, and more later in the year. (Though he certainly didn't mention May!) He told KQED's Climate Watch in 2011:

“When you have a changing climate, the land surface is warming up a lot more rapidly than the ocean, and that tends to weaken this mechanism,” Hall told me. That could mean fewer of these seaward blasts, at least during the winter months, as a kind of consolation.

“In trying to understand how fire will behave in the future, we have to look at the effect of precipitation on the fuel loads and we have to be looking at the effect of Santa Anas on fire behavior,” said Hall. “So I think there are some really interesting questions to look at.”

Hall pointed out to me to another of Santa Ana virtues: Offshore winds tend to blow grit and dust into the ocean, adding nutrients, and cleaning the air. Change need not be disaster, in other words.

Another example of this was mentioned in the Los Angeles Times this morning. Despite consuming 28,000 acres of vegetation and forcing the evacuation of 5000 people, this fire hasn't hurt any person, and hasn't destroyed a single house. Given the scale of the blaze, that's darn impressive.

Related articles

You: Southern California fire season off to a sinister start

California wildfires: Pictures and video of devastation as Santa Ana winds fan inferno's flames

Wildfire on California coast: On Day 2, more Santa Ana winds (+video)

Southern California Wildfire Prompting Evacuations

The flâneur [city walker/wanderer] is by definition endowed with enormous leisure, someone who can take off a morning or afternoon for undirected ambling, since a specific goal or a close rationing of tme is antithetical to the true spirit of the flâneur. An excess of the work ethic (or a driving desire to see everything and meet everyone of recognized value) inhibits the browsing, cruising ambition to "wed the crowd." 

Americans are particularly ill-suited to be flâneurs. They're good at following books outlining tours of Montparnasse or at visiting scenic spots outside Paris...but they're always driven by the urge towards self-improvement.

A couple of assumptions are embedded in this concept: that the wandering should take place in the city (as described in Walter Benjamin's epochal Arcades project) and that the drifter, if you will, shall be alone. But is either necessarily the case? Perhaps for Benjamin, an urban philosopher.

It's interesting to posit the counter-example of Jack Kerouac, who certainly made a life and great work out of his wandering, but does have that "driven" aspect that White describes, and even made a bit of sport of his inability to wander idly in his great and underappreciated Dharma Bums. 

A pic of Kerouac typing from the Orange County Regional History Center.

He wrote in that book:

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.” 

Visited with Alice briefly to rave about her great cookbook The Art of Simple Food, from which I have learned so much. (It's also a fav of Michael Pollan's.) She said a new edition will be out this fall.