Chris Bolgiano and Marcia Bonta talk about some of the threats to natural world they love so much, and what to do about it (Part 2 of 2)
In this second part of our phone conversation, Chris shares some instructive and sobering tales from her years as an environmental writer. Topics include: what we can learn from German foresters; anti-Appalachian prejudice in the nature-writing community; mountaintop removal and the insidious ways of Big Coal; global climate change and how — or whether — to talk about it; Big Wind vs. distributed generation; rooftop solar and the feed-in tariff system.
Links:
- Chris’s article “In the fatherland of forestry: Baron Alexander von Elverfeldt’s forest management approach”
- Gifford Pinchot (Wikipedia)
- Nature writing according to the Wikipedia
- Orion Magazine
- Mountaintop removal coal mining (Appalachian Voices)
- The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation’s Appalachian Wildlands Initiative
- Judy Bonds – Goldman Environmental Prize
- “Climate Change Study Foresees a Warmer, Wetter Pennsylvania”
- “Gone With the Windmills?” (Chris’s article on wind turbines in national forests, reprinted at Via Negativa)
- “A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his 10 million solar roofs bill” (Grist.org)
- Marcia’s article on the “green” house we built in Plummer’s Hollow
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)
I would like to contact Chris how can I contact her? do you have some ID of her or some other contact information.
Yes, sorry I didn’t repeat the website links from last week’s edition. Chris’s website has a contact page with email and postal address.
Kia ora Dave,
Even though I sigh with sadness at how much, and what, is under attack, it is good to know people are out there keeping these issues alive. It does my soul good to know there are those fighting the good fight. Here in New Zealand it is frightening what “economic necessity” does with a buisness friendly and supportive government. I would have expected more from Obama on the face of it, but in reality it is still the same machine he drives. Thank you.
Cheers,
Robb
Glad you enjoyed it, Robb. It’s been distressing for me to read your posts about the new NZ government’s proposal to open up wildlands to exploitation — and how indiffernt the public seems to be to the prospect. We like to think of New Zealanders as being a bit more enlightened, somehow. Kind of like the way a lot of people overseas regard Obama…
Great stuff, once again. I’d never thought about the Europe/US comparison in quite these terms.
Both this podcast and the previous one ended mid-sentence for me – I wonder what’s going on?
Geez, I don’t know! They must not be loading completely for you somehow. If you’re not hearing the music at the end, you’re not getting the whole thing. I have been checking before I publish the post to make sure the whole file is uploaded, too.
Are you using the player on the site, or the download link?
On the site. And I’ve just tried again and it was fine. So this is happening on my home computer but not my work computer, and it’s been just on the last two podcasts, not the previous ones. I’ll try dowloading first next time and see if that avoids the problem. I think I’ve only missed a few words. Odd, though.
Well, the one thing that’s changed is that I’ve enabled the plugin to gather download statistics, which it does by essentially wrapping the file URLs with its own link. I did that last Tuesday. I have no idea whether or how that could be causing your problem, but if it persists, I wouldn’t be above temporarily eliminating this re-routing and seeing whether you get better results. Because they are quite minimal stats and not worth compromising any functionality for.