A couple of weeks ago, Orion announced that my recent book, THE VIEW FROM LAZY POINT; A Natural Year in an Unnatural World (Picador, January 2012) was among the finalists for the 2012 Orion Book Award. On May 3 THE VIEW FROM LAZY POINT was named the winner! View the announcement here. I could not […]
The View From Lazy Point
Tutorial: Global Warming And The Future Of Agriculture
Adapted from: 2011. The View From Lazy Point. Henry Holt Co. New York. Out of about 300,000 named plant species, we get 90 percent of our food from just 103 species, and we get 70 percent from just three: wheat, corn, rice. But—between 200,000 and 400,000 varieties of rice exist in the world. Some grow […]
Tutorial: Warming Air, Rising Seas
Adapted from: 2011. The View From Lazy Point. Henry Holt Co. New York. Twenty thousand years ago when the Ice Age froze an enormous quantity of Earth’s water, sea level was nearly 400 feet (about 120 m) lower than today. Vast areas that are now seafloor were plains grazed by herds of animals. But the […]
Tutorial: Warming 101
Adapted from: 2011. The View From Lazy Point. Henry Holt Co. New York. Learning how to start and control fire changed human evolution. But humanity did not change fire until the Industrial Revolution. For hundreds of thousands of years, using fire always meant an open flame. Much later, someone realized that the steam from boiling […]
Tutorial: Reefs Need Parrotfish!
Adapted from: 2011. The View From Lazy Point. Henry Holt Co. New York. A seaweed-seeking parrotfish is grinding into a coral with its fused, beak-like teeth. Each time it hits the coral, I can hear it from ten feet (3 m) away. Any coral a parrotfish ingests returns as fine sand. Enough parrotfish, over centuries, […]
Tutorial: Coral Bleaching
Adapted from: 2011. The View From Lazy Point. Henry Holt Co. New York. Hard corals first appeared several hundred million years ago. That’s a long time ago. But forms that could attach to each other and build reefs didn’t evolve until around 25 million years ago. That’s still a long time. A coral reef is […]