Alumnus John Muir Laws, CRS '89, featured in The Washington Post:
He took his first hike into the Sierra Nevada, the landscape of his obsession, while still in the womb. His parents named him John Muir Laws. He once spent a week searching for a single perfect orchid to paint. He says, "I am constantly amazed by things." Such as? "The diversity of chipmunks." He is not joking. He cares about newts. If asked, he does an excellent imitation of a startled vole. He has opinions about beetles.
This fall, he published "The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada." It is 366 pages long and contains 2,800 illustrations, each painted by Laws. The new field guide, already praised by outdoor connoisseurs as a naturalist's bible, begins with "Small Fungi Growing on Wood" (specifically, Calocera cornea, the staghorn jelly fungus) and ends with stars (the night sky at winter solstice, Dec. 22). It is small enough to slip into your pocket but includes 1,700 species of flowers, trees, bugs, frogs, snails, skinks, birds, fish, rodents. It took him six years. The world needs more of this -- this kind of sustained, informed, deep gee-whizdom....
By Bill Dennison, Cal Forestry alum & past president of the California Forestry Association
The U.S. Forest Service recently became the first federal agency to register with the California Climate Action Registry, a first step to track greenhouse gas emissions attributable to global climate change from U.S. Forest Service operations.
But it's not nearly enough.
Continue reading "Opinion: Thinning trees helps environment" »
A new book co-edited by a CNR alumna attempts to answer a question familiar to anyone concerned with climate change:
"What can I do?"
Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement, co-edited by Sissel Waage, ESPM Ph.D. '00, features a wide array of authors ranging from activists to scholars to students, who each discuss what the average person can do to turn their private concerns into public action.
The book recently received a positive review in the LA Times.
Continue reading "What you can do to fight global warming and spark a movement" »
Nina "Maggi" Kelly, along with eight other former Cal student-athletes, has been selected for induction into the California Athletic Hall of Fame.
Kelly is an associate specialist in Cooperative Extension, adjunct associate professor of ecosystem sciences, and director for the Geospatial Imaging & Informatics Facility.
She played for the Cal women's water polo team at the club level from 1983-87 before it was elevated to varsity status. A member of the U.S. National team for 10 years (1987-94, 1997-98), she competed in four World Championships and was named the USA Water Polo Female Athlete of the Year in 1992. Kelly was also the top U.S. goal-scorer at the World Championships in Rome in 1994.
Inducted into the U.S. Water Polo Hall of Fame in 2006, Kelly was a part of three national club championships while playing for the Bears. After receiving her bachelor's degree in geography, Kelly earned a master's degree from North Carolina in 1991 and a Ph.D. from Colorado in 1996.
From the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle:
Some of the world's best evidence of global warming was buried under 18 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada last winter, and [UC Berkeley Forestry alumna] Connie Millar was determined to dig it out.Millar, a veteran field scientist for the U.S. Forest Service, sweated uphill with three colleagues on a July morning, headed deep into Lundy Canyon, just north of Mono Lake, one of the few access points to the Sierra crest along its rugged eastern flank....
This story also quotes Forestry alumnus Bob Coats.
Read the full story: WATER SIGNS
Miniature rock glaciers. Drying meadows. Warming lakes. High-elevation studies try to predict the impact of climate change
From the SF Chronicle's science writer Carl Hall, featuring CNR alumnae Ann Dennis and Connie Millar:
Stately corpses of bristlecone pine trees, some dead for 2,000 years but still refusing to lie down, stood watch last week as botanist Ann Dennis and a crew of naturalists stepped off plots on the shoulders of 14,246-foot White Mountain Peak near the Nevada border.Working more than 10,000 feet above the sunbaked floor of the Owens Valley, the scientists were transforming one of California's highest mountaintops into a living laboratory of climate change.
Dennis and her colleagues are part of a global network of mountain-climbing researchers, all using precisely the same methods to observe the impact of global warming at high altitudes on five continents simultaneously....
