So, there's an underground oilfield burning away in the Los Padres Nat'l Forest. There's a cool photo of the territory up there in the LA Times article. Weird things sometimes happen underground. Along stretches of the Mojave River after a fire - when they think it's been put out -  the interconnected roots of the cottonwoods and brushy things ( Read more... )

The Great Lakes for sale...not a new concept, exactly, but things are heating up back there again. Water is not "the oil of the 21st century," it's going to be way more than that. When I lived on the Lakes, back in the land of green, farms outside all of our back doors, water falling from the sky in abundance, back in the day I lacked the ( Read more... )

Maybe it's because I live in California, here near the Pacific edge of the Cadillac Desert, but I've been thinking more about "peak water" than peak oil lately.

Have we already gone past peal water? I'm inclined to think we have, but it just hasn't sunk in yet. That's when I'm not feeling more optimistic, I suppose.  If you want to get even more ( Read more... )

November 1 issue of Rolling Stone had a rather interesting article about James Lovelock. It didn’t portray him as a New Age kook but took him at face value and treated his ideas as seriously as anyone’s in this crazy, degrading world.  In my opinion, he a scientist (chemist) with a poet’s heart (that has gotten him in trouble in the past, for ( Read more... )

Food for thought.

I'm not entirely sold, oddly enough.

I think this is a wait and see and keep doing research.

What we do know:

Southern California is not an edenic paradise. It's a dry country. Even the hills running down to the beach tend to be scrubby oak woodland, grassland,  or chaparral. We are subject to regular drought. It's part of our region ( Read more... )