Environment and Climate

Exploring my roots on two wheels

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Have you ever arrived in someplace new and felt like you have been there before? I think we carry memories of our ancestors in our genes. Given what people are learning about how environment and behavior affect how genes are expressed, and given that expression of genes might affect how people pass them on to their offspring, I think it’s no longer a big stretch to say that we carry bits of the environment of our ancestors in our DNA. I felt it in Scotland. In Ireland. And in Germany. And I definitely felt it in the Netherlands.

Cycling the pathways that connect Dutch villages sometimes felt like riding a ribbon through a series of fairytales featuring my great-great grandparents.

Based on my 23andMe results, about 50% of my DNA originated in people who came from northern western mainland Europe, in the region that is now western Germany and The Netherlands. (The other 50% is a mix of ancestry from Sweden, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales). This is not a surprise. My maternal grandfather was born in and spent the first 10 years of his life in the region that now forms the western border of Germany and the northeastern corner of Holland. My maternal grandmother’s family also originated in northwestern Germany before they became farmers in ‘South Russia’, what is now the Ukraine.

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Tending to your inner landscapes

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This is a post about gardening. Sort of. I started writing this post years ago, but like many of my posts, it was abandoned as I pursued more pressing needs. But some of those half-completed posts are ready to get hosed off and sent out into the world – especially as we begin a new season of tending to growing things.

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A swallowtail enjoying the red valerian.

You might know an old lady who’s crazy about her garden. She’s that lady with the wide-brimmed straw hat and strands of frizzy gray hair hanging out in all directions. She wears floppy, long-sleeved shirts, cushy, mud-covered crocs, and always has dirt beneath her fingernails. She’s out there every day when the weather’s nice enough, tending to her garden, chatting with passersby as she digs up another bed or pulls out another patch of weeds.

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Saving NCAR: Why Climate Science Matters

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At the NCAR Mesa Lab in Boulder, Colorado on a sunny autumn day. The NCAR Mesa Lab has been slated to close with the dismantling of NCAR and the end of support for climate change research in the USA.

Deleting the word climate change from thousands of government websites will not erase the fact that we are in the midst of a global change that threatens every aspect of our civilization. Deleting climate data will not stop the Earth from getting warmer. Current federal policy around climate change is tantamount to covering your eyes and ears and singing at the top of your lungs as you pretend gravity doesn’t exist and step off a cliff.

In December, the current US government announced plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). NCAR has long been the global flagship for climate research. Nearly every one of my colleagues in climate science has passed through there at one time or another – for conferences, seminars, summer research opportunities, and professional development. The NCAR Mesa Lab in Boulder, CO, has led the world in helping us understand the impacts of global warming.

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In the footsteps of the dinosaurs

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The desert always help me step deep back in time. I love that I can walk in a place that has been shaped by wind and water and deep earth processes more than by life itself. These landscapes were sculpted long before there was even a whisper of human evolution in the global gene pool.

Arches National Park in southwestern Utah in late May is sunshine and blue sky and bright red rocks that cast long shadows in the mornings and evenings. It’s also small white puffy clouds and heat that bakes you from all directions. We are in the park before 7am and out on the trail not much later, so we can be done before running the risk of evaporating right off the sand and rock.

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Protecting our National Parks is an Act of Patriotism

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Some of my first memories involve riding on my Dad’s shoulders as we hiked past stinky geysers that shot mist and clouds high above our heads. I also remember staring into the abyss of a yellow-walled canyon, while water foamed and gurgled nearby, then raced over the rim. At night we had the thrill of sleeping in a log cabin with bunk beds – but Mom said I was too small to sleep in the top bunk. I was almost three years old the first time I visited Yellowstone National Park, on a road trip with my parents from California to visit my grandmother in Ohio.

Returning to Yellowstone’s stinky glaciers at a much later point in life.

We also took a helicopter ride over the Badlands (which were several years away from becoming a national park at that point). I remember wearing headphones that pinched my head as we swooped over a landscape that, to me, looked like a layered ice cream sundae.

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Neck deep in mud: how we move forward

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“There is the mud, and there is the lotus that grows out of the mud. We need the mud in order to make the lotus.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh

(As a reminder, from my Disclaimer page: this site is not an official site of the University of Northern Colorado. The views expressed here are entirely those of the author, and do not represent the views of the University of Northern Colorado, the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science at UNC, nor any other program or individual at the university or elsewhere.)

No time to read? Here’s the summary: We need to act as a collective to battle authoritarianism and climate change. We need to act now. White people, especially, have a responsibility to act. This is a clumsy, chaotic, stupid coup – there is still a chance our democracy will live another day. I have to hope that a lotus will grow from the mud. See the bullet points at the end calling for action. And continue to exercise your First Amendment right whenever you can.

The lotus emerging from the Mekong Delta.
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Resilience Amid Disruption

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(As a reminder, from my Disclaimer page: this site is not an official site of the University of Northern Colorado. The views expressed here are entirely those of the author, and do not represent the views of the University of Northern Colorado, the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science at UNC, nor any other program or individual at the university.)

Call to Action (if this is too long for you to read): Do one small thing to build resilience. And please share a good recipe for chocolate chip cookies that doesn’t require eggs.

Do you ever feel your words drowning before they pass through your lips? Like the rain beginning to fall just before sunrise. There’s something there that needs to shine out, but it gets lost in shadows. That is where my voice has been these past several months, lost in the shadows.

The world has zapped my energy. Floods, fires, drought, heat wave. Along with other climate scientists, I have spent the last 25 years shouting ‘the sky is falling’ over and over. Now that it is falling, many choose to be blind – afraid that recognizing it for what it is will ruin the world we’ve worked so hard to build. Sorry. The ruin is happening now because not enough people (especially people with power and money) have paid attention.

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Termites and Gibbon Songs in Cat Tien National Park, Vietnam

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We sat on long benches in the middle of large flatbed trucks with 50 of our closest friends as we trundled along a lightly paved road in the fading dusk. Our night safari tour guide at Cat Tien National Park stood at the front of the flat bed, leaning on the back of the cab of the truck, his searchlight scanning the landscape and the lower branches of trees that sometimes came rather close to our heads. Large termites, drawn to the light, joined our tour.

The termites come out to interact with tourists on the night safari at Cat Tien National Park.

They landed in people’s hair and pelted us on the forehead and cheeks. We should have known that this would be our closest wildlife encounter. But no one wanted photos of the bugs. Cell phones were trained on the landscape beyond, where we occasionally spotted deer – large and small – grazing in the wide-open grassland. I only managed to get photos of the termites.

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Snapshots from another sinking city

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My room on the 9th floor of the Sheraton had a view out across Sông Cần Thơ River that runs along south side of the city of Cần Thơ. After a morning at Cần Thơ University listening to students’ proposals to build climate change resilience, my brain felt tired but inspired. Foremost on my mind was this: What is it that gives you hope when your world is sinking? How do you plan for a future that might be underwater?

Sunset over the city of Cần Thơ in the Mekong Delta.
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The Garden City at the ITCZ

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Is it possible to create a world where 10 billion people (the estimated number of people on Earth in the year 2100) and nature live sustainably and in harmony with each other? I wondered if Singapore might have some answers for me.

Singapore’s distinctive sky line at sunset.

When I left the US for Vietnam more than three months ago, I hadn’t anticipated I’d end up in Singapore for a couple of weeks. I only had a 3-month work visa for Vietnam, so I knew I would likely have to go somewhere to renew it. Other Fulbrighters suggested Singapore for the quick turnaround time on visas at the Vietnamese embassy. I was also curious about this tiny country that is also a very large city of six million people on the tip of the Malaysian Peninsula. This is a country that has become a global center for business, commerce and culture, and espouses its commitment to sustainable development goals. But it’s probably most well known among tourists abroad for its gardens, its ‘Supertrees’, and buildings that drip with green foliage in the city center.

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