This practice is embedded in some ranches around the West, but it only spreads in fits and starts.Continue readingTo restore western lands, regenerative ranchers keep cattle on the move
“We have to provide a way for firefighters to enter and exit the career in a healthy manner,” says an advocate for improved working conditions.Continue readingFor wildland firefighters, another battle looms: for pay and mental health care to match their growing workload
What it takes to put renewable power on the West’s electrical grids.Continue readingTransmission, transmission, transmission
Amory Lovins, a physicist who co-founded RMI (formerly called Rocky Mountain Institute), is a half-time adjunct professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford and a visiting scholar at the Precourt Institute for Energy. Continue reading’Despair and complacency are equally unwarranted:’ Q&A with Amory Lovins, energy visionary
Years after a devastating fire, a recovering city finds itself a health care desert.Continue readingParadise’s recovery from the Camp Fire became harder when the only hospital left
The data-driven insurance business is in trouble as climate-change-driven disasters arrive with greater fury and frequency. Continue readingFor beleaguered homeowners and their insurers, the fire next time could be a flood
Floods driven by winter storms are nothing new in Monterey County, but the early March catastrophe that swelled the Pajaro and Salinas rivers and drowned farmworker communities exposed the extreme inequality built into flood-control systems. Continue readingWinter storms exposed the unfairness of California’s flood protections. Are marginalized areas closing the gap?
Private citizens were first on the scene to document a massive die-off in Oakland’s Lake Merritt. Their contributions were enabled by the crowd-source observation tool iNaturalist. Continue readingWhen red tide smothered an urban lake, citizen scientists sounded the alarm
Experts believe the Chinese balloon downed over the Atlantic coast this month was snooping on U.S. missile defenses. Part of the landscape for a half-century, they are headed for a costly refresh in an era of rising global tensions.Continue readingSpy balloon controversy draws attention to western nuclear missile facilities
While expensive solutions like new reservoirs and seawater desalination grab attention, California communities are quietly building up their capacity to clean stormwater and wastewater for reuse for irrigation, industry and, yes, drinking water too. Continue readingIn times of scarcity, California’s best new source of water? Reuse.