Environment | The Ferris Files

Surburb or City? A Shoe-Leather Perspective

My lady Anjali and I just moved to Washington D.C. and I are trying to figuring out where to buy a house. Do we live in the suburbs, or in the District itself? We’re both children of the suburbs but are conducting our search from a sublet apartment in Adams Morgan, a hip neighborhood in the middle of the city. As I walk around to its stores and restaurants, I ask myself: Could I see living in a big city, not as a lark, but forever? […]

Haven’t I Seen You at Starbucks?

A hot commuter cup reveals that our relationship with throwaway food containers has reached a new level of intimacy. […]

What the Garbage Patch Looks Like

Recently, the artist Chris Jordan flew to the Midway Islands to take photographs of dead albatrosses. Why travel so far to take pictures of such a small thing? Jordan wanted to make a point.

The photos he took reminded me of others you might recall. Remember how photos of baby seals were everywhere a few […]

Energy Crowds the House

The University of Arizona's Water Wall

Near the Smithsonian building in Washington, D.C. stands a house with a wall of Coke-bottle plastic. Sandwiched between two layers of plastic is water. The wall’s surface conserves heat and also plays tricks with the light, so you can’t help but reach out and touch it.

[…]

Wisconsin Badgers Toward Cleaner Energy

CO2 is removed in the plant's two tall silvery columns (top).

Today, as part of the Society of Environmental Journalists annual meeting, I hopped a bus and toured three of Wisconsin’s leading renewable-energy projects. Heartened as I was to see innovation in action, I could also tell we’re still in Mile One […]

Raising Your First Tarantula

Skeeter enjoys the mood lighting in her blinged-out terrarium.

A few years ago, my friend Simon mail-ordered a Mexican fire leg tarantula. She arrived in a vial as a wee spiderling, but after several molts and a steady diet of crickets, she measures five and a half inches across. “Skeeter” lives in […]

What New York Throws Away

I live across the street from one of the neighborhood’s grocery stores, a Food Emporium. Every midnight after the place closes, a pile of retired produce and collapsed cardboard boxes four feet tall is left at the curb. Garbage trucks come and take it away, and in the morning delivery trucks arrive with new produce […]

War and Global Warming

My current reading is “Climate Change as a Security Risk,” a sort of threat dossier on a warming world. Amid mountains of dry data, the authors take a few imaginative leaps to picture how the world looks if we start preparing now, and what happens if we don’t. […]

The Long Summer

I just finished reading “The Long Summer,” a book by archaeologist Brian Fagan about how climate change has affected the course of human history. With my home state of California heading into a serious summer drought, a long view of the weather seemed wise. […]

The Ocean: Best of Times, Worst of Times

Today I visited Washington, D.C. to cover the Blue Vision Summit, a gathering of ocean scientists and ocean activists, and rarely have I been so depressed and inspired in the space of a single speech.

Roger Payne addresses the Blue Vision conference.

That speech was the keynote by Roger Payne, the biologist who discovered […]

The Ferris Files