Nitrogen in the Mississippi

NOAA forecasts average-sized 'dead zone by Bill Schlesinger I found a glimmer of good news last month amongst the scientific literature that I follow regularly.  Jien Zhang and his colleagues…

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Pogo is Worried

Okefenokee Swamp by Bill Schlesinger In the South of Georgia, the land of Pogo, lies Okefenokee Swamp, its waters held back from drainage to the sea by the presence of…

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The Thanksgiving Feast Python for bacon by Bill Schlesinger With the arrival of the pilgrims in 1620, the invasion of exotic species in North America began in earnest—annual grasses in…

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Hydrogen Fuels

by Bill Schlesinger "Up, Up and Away, my beautiful, my beautiful balloon." The Fifth Dimension, 1967 Hydrogen, like helium, is lighter than air.  You can fill balloons with hydrogen, and…

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Unextractable Fossil Fuels

"If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success." John D. Rockefeller by Bill Schlesinger Since the advent…

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Nuclear Winter

by Bill Schlesinger And you tell me over and over and over again, my friendAh, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction P.F. Sloan, 1964   In these months after…

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Plastics Everywhere

Plastic waste mountain by Bill Schlesinger With increasing frequency, we hear of the accumulation of plastic waste and its persistence in the global environment. This is not a newly emerging…

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Soil Carbon Sequestration

by Bill Schlesinger A lot of folks wonder why I am not a big advocate of soil carbon sequestration to mitigate climate change.  After all, it is widely recognized (and…

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Monarchs

by Bill Schlesinger Those of us who collected butterflies as kids know that their populations are much lower now than in the 1950s.  Our data are only memories, now reinforced…

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Arboreal Dimensions of Biodiversity

by Bill Schlesinger (Coauthor of this guest blog, Charles Cannon is Director of the Center for Tree Science at the Morton Arboretum, Lisle, Illinois.) Ecologists and conservation biologists often characterize…

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