Posts by Staff Reporter
Dear Reader
A note from Ecology Center Executive Director Martin Bourque.
Essential Reads
The Contributions of Ruby and Arthur Van Deventer With an essay by David Rains Wallace Edited by Rick Bennett and Susan Calla Heyday Books (2009), $35. When California’s leading botanist Willis Linn Jepson met Ruby Van Deventer in 1936, the wild and practically roadless northwest corner of the state presented the most conspicuous gap in [...]
Essential Reads
New books on birding, eco-entrepreneurship, and the future of sustainabilty
Letters to the Editor
Regarding: Cutting the Grassroots, Fall/Winter 2008
Shell Seeks Vallejo Foothold For Overseas Gas
A proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility on Mare Island in San Pablo Bay would pose major health and safety threats while increasing California’s vulnerability to the natural gas market, say energy consultants.
Stockton’s Water “Not for Auction”
Residents of Stockton, California, have demanded the right to vote on a multimillion-dollar proposal to contract out operation of the city’s water system in what would be the largest water privatization on the West Coast.
Hope for Renewables
A groundbreaking California law requires all investor-owned utilities to increase their renewable energy use by 1% per year, eventually to 20%.
Medicine Lake
The US Department of the Interior is set to decide by November 1 whether to reverse a Clinton-era denial of geothermal development in the Medicine Lake Highlands, a caldera sacred to the Modoc, Shasta, Pit River and other Native American tribes.
Urban Ag Showdown
Student activists say they are ready to apply “political pressure,” including civil disobedience, to stop the University of California Berkeley from paving over Albany’s Gill Tract, the largest piece of undeveloped agricultural land in the urban San Francisco Bay Area.
Big-Picture Choices
Is an ice cube tray with round holes more energy efficient than one with rectangular holes?
Winter on the Farm
In winter, our farmers take a breath, pick and sell in the rain, organize boxes, prune, weed, fix the plows — and plan and plant for spring, summer, and sometimes years ahead.
The Dirt on Biodiesel; Informative, Rousing
The Dirt on Biodiesel Daniel Duart’s article [“Liquid Solar,” Summer 2002] on the use of biodiesel crops raises a question about fuel cycles, or chains. Because soil loss has been a major problem in North America for over 100 years, the real prospects for practical large-scale bio-fuels cycles will be limited. Take, for example, the [...]
Only Who Can Prevent Forest Fires?
If you believe what the US Forest Service interrogators first said, Terry Lynn Barton started this summer’s big fire in Colorado’s Pike National Forest by burning a letter from her estranged husband.
County May Pay $20 Million for Timberland
The Mendocino Redwood Company (MRC), owned by the Fisher family that owns the Gap clothing chain, has obtained little-known development rights that boost the price of over 3,000 acres of timberland sought by Sonoma County for open space, Terrain has learned.
Plan to Bag Gualala, Albion Rivers Could Exploit Free Trade Laws
Luxembourg-based World Water SA has become the first multinational to seek water rights to northern California rivers, setting up a key test of local sovereignty in the face of international trade agreements, say public interest advocates.
