Articles by Biodiversivist
My real name is Russ Finley. I also have my own blog called Biodiversivist, which contains articles in addition to those submitted to Grist. I live in Seattle, married with children. Suffice it to say that although I am trained and educated as an engineer, my passion is nature. I very much want my grandchildren to live on a planet where lions, tigers, and bears have not joined the long and growing list of creatures that used to be.
All Articles
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Say bye-bye
Check this out.The population of mountain gorillas is so low now that the next human disease they catch may wipe them out. This is probably how most of the megafauna extinctions happened. A warming climate pushed a species into small pockets with low populations. Then people arrived with their novel diseases that finished it off. TB has been found in the bones of mammoths -- the same disease that may finish off the last mountain gorillas.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I read stories on the destruction of our biodiversity reluctantly and with a groan because it is so depressing, enhanced by a feeling of total helplessness. I may post soon on a brainstorm session to try to flush out novel ideas to stop this -- with help from commenters and a poll or two.
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But yes!
I was reading this month's Scientific American last night and came upon an article on ethanol. You can't read it without a subscription, so, sorry about that. Matthew Wald, a reporter for the New York Times, wrote it. Interestingly enough, not everyone at the NYT appears to have the same opinion on corn ethanol.
I was expecting the usual: inaccurate, incomplete, and pseudo-neutral. However, it turned out to be quite good. The article was long (which is a necessity with complicated topics), and the author made no pretense of neutrality.
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Namely, biofuels
I happened to disagree with a very reasonable critique I found on Gristmill last week, and want to use an article called "Stuck in the Middle with Fuel" (a great title by the way) by Eliza Barclay as a foil. It is a perfectly good article. I am using it as an example of traditional journalism only because it was timely and handy. Getting a piece past a battery of editors is one hurdle; having it pass muster on the comments field of the blogosphere is another thing altogether.Keeping with tradition, Eliza must feign neutrality. She begins her narrative by painting a picture in the reader's mind, subtly suggesting that biofuels will rid third world countries of smoke belching diesel trucks:
Occasionally these rural taxis are new vehicles, but most are rickety, rusted, and running on antiquated engines and exhaust-spewing diesel.
Next, she must obtain interviews from experts:
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Like a Top 10 list, without 10
This isn't a top ten list -- I couldn't find that many signs of hope! And yes, I realize that some items on the list are only holding actions. The exercise was a little depressing; I had to wade through a year's worth of stories describing ecological devastation to come up with these.
Given all that, I would still say that 2006 was the best year the cause of environmentalism has seen in decades. I suspect that Grist, along with its readers and commenters, played a bigger part in that than most realize. May that trend continue and accelerate through 2007 and beyond. The list begins below the fold:
