Articles by Erik Hoffner

Seeking ideas for good green listening

For my personal benefit, and I begrudgingly suppose for the benefit of others, too, I hereby disrupt your happy Gristmillery to ask for your most highly recommended, can't-live-without podcasts (besides Grist's, of course) on the topic of anything green, anything local ag, or anything activism-related. Do leave any suggestions in the comments section, with links, pretty please.

Sobering dispatches from Alaska

The melting and erosion of permafrost is probably the most visible manifestation of climate change in Alaska.

Photo: Seth Kantner, www.kapvikphotography.com

Author and photographer Seth Kantner has a new blog that shares his observations of a changing Arctic in words and images. From trees invading the tundra and freakish weather to the hair-raising loss of the permafrost, it's a must-read. His phenomenal book Ordinary Wolves (one of my favorites of the last 10 years) takes place in the town of Kotzebue on the northwest coast of Alaska (where he's from), where the tundra is literally melting away from underfoot and into the sea.

Drug cultivation in Northern California is a bad trip

Terrain magazine shows how the cozy-sounding northern California agriculture scene is drying up watersheds and poisoning the landscape, all to bring people their drug of choice. Installment one on the boom in illegal water rustling for wineries starts like this:

After one of the rainiest years on record -- when parts of the valley had been flooded -- Anderson Creek, a tributary of the Navarro River, was dry. "It was as if we were in a drought year," says Hall, a member of Friends of the Navarro River ... But it was no drought. Hall says he observed trucks filling up water from along the creek at Golden Eye and taking it into the town of Philo and other areas where Anderson Valley's growing population of vintners cultivate their grapes.

Worse, lots of these trucks have no legal right to take that water, but enforcement is proving very problematic.

As unkind as this is to the critters who live in the region's rivers, witness the landscape-wide destruction being wrought in rural areas by the illegal cultivation of marijuana, California's largest cash crop:

Further data on the environmental movement’s diversity challenge

Hot on the heels of a recent Gristmill feature by Marcelo Bonta of the Center for Diversity and the Environment on this issue, an article on the environmental movement's lack of diversity appeared in The Oregonian this weekend, which dug into the details close to home:

The 115 staff members for the Oregon League of Conservation Voters, Oregon Environmental Council, Ecotrust, Oregon Wild and the Audubon Society of Portland include two Latinos, two Asian Americans, one Native American and no African Americans, their leaders say.

So yes, green groups can do better in terms of hiring. But Bonta, who's interviewed, makes the case again that these groups need to go beyond recruiting to engage in dialogue on the issue. They'll be very likely to find, and surveys back this up, that people of color are just as committed to conservation as they are.