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Hearing this interview on my local NPR station today reminded me of The One Who Got Away ... the academic version. When I was at University of Arizona during the early days of climate-change, Dr. Diana Liverman was a guest speaker a few times. I also met her -- and more importantly her graduate students -- at conferences. I almost transferred to Penn State, where she was on the faculty, even though PhD students do not really do that. It did not work out, and she ended up coming to Arizona, too late for me to have a decent advisor, though I eventually wiggled my way through . Hearing her cogent discussion on the radio took me way back, but I have no regrets -- I love what I do now and work with her would have kept me in the R-1 orbit . Like many geographers, she is deeply worried but not yet resigned -- we could not continue to teach if we did not retain at least some hope. And like many geographers, her work is deeply interdisciplinary. The interview draws on a recent report -- Trajec...

Our geologic age, that is. Geologists who define ages and epochs according to the rise and fall of organisms have come to realize that one particular species has dramatically altered the earth in ways that will be detectable well into the future. That species is us: Homo sapiens sapiens . As the name implies, higher-order thinking distinguishes us from the rest of our genus, and indeed from the rest of all life. It may be both our doing and our undoing. A lot of that thinking has been directed at the extraction of resources that could be used both for energy and for useful products. Those resources, especially coal, petroleum, and natural gas, provided both concentrated energy and material -- plastic -- that could be used to manufacture almost literally anything. The Anthropocene (human age) is so called because that process of extraction has fundamentally changed the Earth in ways that some humans have difficulty believing. The earth is indeed so vast -- comprising billions of cubic m...

Photo: Tim Peterson, Grand Canyon Trust A week after insulting Navajo veterans of World War II -- the code talkers who helped to win the war in the Pacific -- under a portrait of the odious Andrew Jackson, the president of the United States announced the unprecedented removal of National Monument status from over 1,000,000 acres of land in Utah whose protection had been sought by Navajo and other tribes. Fortunately, the United States does still have three branches of government, and it is possible that a Federal court will agree that that the Antiquities Act does not give a president this authority. Still, as widely reported yesterday, the president is asserting just such authority in Utah, and if successful he may try to do the same in many other states, though not in Montana . In the NPR report above, Matt Anderson argues that President Obama's naming of the Bears Ears National Monument had itself been overreach, and that reverting to BLM status would keep "the areas open ...

The most important qualification for most Cabinet-level appointments in the current administration has been hostility toward the mission of the department or agency to be led, and to the implementation of policies that the Congress has assigned. In most respects, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has fit this mold. As the most anti-stewardship steward of public lands since James Watt, he has been good company for secretaries of State, Education, Environmental Protection who have a similar antipathy toward the programs with which they have been intrusted by an administration that values only chaos and a Senate that does not value its advisory duties. This post, however, is not about Secretary Zinke's failures to protect Bears Ears, or whether he shares the libertarian fringe's fear of "massive federal land grabs." Rather, it is this counter-intuitive story about Sec. Zinke's support of a new  National Monument that would provide added protection to federal lands in his...