New program for a class visit today - botanic gallery crawl with herbaria books and our set of teaching vouchers, landscape history, plant pressing. Amazing to see our volunteers take such ownership of the program and turn our lab into a creative, collaborative learning space for students.
Moar roast
This winter has highlighted the wide gulf between how much pride and identity this area wraps up in tech innovation - and yet cannot figure out a safe, functional electrical grid
San Francisco skyline in the distance
View of southern SF Bay with Hoover Tower of Stanford campus
Wooded ridge with snow on far ridge of the mountains
Cluster of shooting star flowers
Recent shots from the southern part of the preserve. Incredible visibility... and blooms.
I asked ChatGPT to roast me
“… We’re empowering tribes, land managers and communities to use fire the way it has been used for millennia — as a tool for stewarding our lands and protecting our communities.”
localnewsmatters.org/2026/02/06/b...
New Weather West update is out now! Some relief, at last, from recent record warmth and astonishing lack of Mountain West snow in the coming days as cooler/wetter pattern returns. But just how much relief should we expect? Read more:
going insane watching people call Alex Pretti’s murder the second or third murder by ICE. going insane watching people claim ICE isn’t law enforcement and it’s bad messaging to name them as such. wake! tf! up!
fuller/more eloquent thoughts on this here:
open.substack.com/pub/cohen489...
Microsoft Outlook outage meant no email was sent at Stanford for most of the workday.
This line graph illustrates the percentage change in agency staff levels from the previous year for nine major U.S. federal scientific and health organizations between the fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The agencies tracked include the CDC, Department of Energy, EPA, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF. For the majority of the timeline between 2016 and 2023, the agencies show relatively stable fluctuations, generally staying within a range of +5% to -5% change per year. However, there is a dramatic and uniform plummet starting in the 2024–25 period. Every agency depicted shows a sharp downward trajectory, with staffing losses ranging from approximately -15% to over -25%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows the most significant decline, dropping to roughly -26%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows the least severe but still substantial drop at approximately -15%.
This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again.
www.nature.com/immersive/d4...
Another day on the land. Thank you Pepperwood and the Good Fire Alliance!
A little catch-up on listservs and reading. I think often about the extent of pre-colonial biodiversity in New England, ever since reading Cronon. Loved this analogy of massive alewife and fish populations as part of a nutrient circulatory system.
northernwoodlands.org/outside_stor...
This Bay Area holiday tornado warning 😳
Looking for a snowy holiday? Check out the chances of getting at least one inch of snow within the next week! buff.ly/hJB8H8K
❄️ Latitude matters most for the possibility of snow! If you want the simplest rule of thumb, head north. 🧭🏔️
Amazing Learn & Burn at Pepperwood Preserve last weekend. Grateful for all the Good Fire Alliance does to connect us for these days on the land.
Playing loud ✨️Tom Waits✨️ in the office sort of day
Guest speaking for my colleague's class "Environmental Communication" was the highlight of my week. Students shared so much depth on their place of origin and commitment to justice-centeted work in their intros. The kids are alright.
Walk thru today at venue for our SOAR Annual Symposium with incomparable host Leticia Gallardo. After a year when our network funding felt at risk sometimes, we're about to hugely increase attendance for this annual event with more students, more colleagues at comm colleges, more network newbies.
I woke up today and never suspected I would read this combination of words. 😳
Sometimes when I share what it was like to be a young woman in Geology programs, I mention that between both my undergrad and Masters depts, there was one woman faculty member. One.
I just looked at the current list of TT professors at both alma maters. 20-25 years on, *this is still true.* 😱
It's crazy to me to see the US Forest Service deny the ever obvious health risks with breathing wildfire smoke. We lack good PPE because there is a limited market, it's a limited market because the Forest Service denies there is a problem. Need a demand pull for PPE.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/17/u...
Contemplating fire and fire history in the White Mountains on this hot HOT 96 degree day. Keetch Byram Drought Index highest out of anywhere else in NH and crispy vegetation is showing it.
Ladies' hats with entire taxidermy birds was definitely a Victorian mood!
www.npr.org/sections/npr...
Cats and books, and sometimes cats in books. At the Walters: Paws on Parchment, an exhibition about cats in illuminated manuscripts. (Including inky pawprints across a book.) Aug 6–Feb 15. thewalters.org/exhibitions/...
Off to the land of my birth Massachusetts for PTO. Affogato is my favorite dessert, and at some point this spring IG algorithms showed me this idea to make a "gas station affogato." 😱
I am not all surprised to learn the scene of this crime was somewhere along the Mass Pike.
A lot of going through office paperwork lately in-between website updating. Read an interview transcript on a 1924 diving Olympian who trained at Searsville Lake.
And I found the drilling contract for Baldwin Lake. 👀
I actually winnowed the inbox down to 26 emails. Can't remember the last time messages wasn't in the 100s.
