California Trail by Deon Reynolds
SELECTED WRITINGS:
"Measuring Tahoe's Blues," an essay on the ineffability of measuring things by the point at which they disappear, in High Country News, August 4, 2008.
"Smoking Out Objectivity: Journalistic Gears in the Agnogenesis Machine," in Agnotology: The Making and Umaking of Ignorance, Stanford University Press, 2008. E-mail me if you would like a review copy of my chapter in this new book.
"Blazing a New Trail for Nature" — Could the army of green workers who transformed the U.S. landscape inspire today's ecological revolution? Read my review of Neil Maher's book Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement in the April 17, 2008 issue of Nature. And if you don't have online access to Nature, e-mail me for a copy. I also reviewed this book and the CCC's history from a western perspective in High Country News.
"Who Moved My Glacier?" from the Sunday Opinion page of The New York Times on December 23, 2007.
"Remembering the Gulf: changes to the marine communities of the Sea of Cortez since the Steinbeck and Ricketts expedition of 1940" in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
In The New York Times. For links to all of my stories enter "Jon Christensen" in the author field of an advanced search.
ON PBS NOW:
"How Green?" A Republican congressman and the Idaho Conservation League have joined forces to try to designate the first new big wilderness in a generation in the reddest state in America. But some environmentalists, including singer-songwriter Carole King, oppose the quid-pro-quo compromise, which includes public-land giveaways and concessions to off-road vehicle riders.
ON THE WEB:
Integrate Expectations: An Interview with integration advocate Sheryll Cashin in Grist. Space is the place where race, poverty, and the environment get sorted out, for better or worse. And the spaces where we live, work, learn, and play are the places where integration succeeds or fails, argues Georgetown Law's Sheryll Cashin in an interview I conducted with her as part of Grist's series on poverty and the environment. Getting communities to integrate all of their concerns on the same map using tools like GIS and Google Earth is one important step forward.
BOOK REVIEWS:
In The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review:
Interpretive Work by Elizbeth Bradfield
Historical Atlas of California by Derek Hayes
Seizing Destiny: How America Grew From Sea to Shining Sea by Richard Kluger
The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area by Richard A. Walker
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben
Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease and Knowledge by Linda Nash
Home Ground : Language for an American Landscape edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney
The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism by Aaron Sachs and California's Frontier Naturalists by Richard G. Beidleman
Dam! Water, Power, Politics, and Preservation in Hetch Hetchy and Yosemite National Park by John Warfield Simpson
A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester and San Francisco Is Burning by Dennis Smith
The Man Behind the Microchip by Leslie Berlin
The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906 by Philip Fradkin
The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy by Robert Righter
In High Country News:
Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement by Neil Maher
Wilderness Forever: Howard Zahniser and the Path to the Wilderness Act by Mark Harvey
FEATURE ARTICLES:
In Conservation in Practice:
"Auditing Conservation In an Age of Accountability" Instead of just seeing conservation as a good cause, people are starting to ask, "What are your results?" And conservationists are trying to come up with good answers. (PDF 4.1 MB)
"Are We Consuming Too Much?" It turns out we may be worrying too much about how much we consume and far too little about how to invest. (PDF 172 KB)
"Win-Win Illusions" Over the past two decades, efforts to heal the rift between poor people and protected areas have foundered. So what next? (PDF 1.5 MB)
"Is Conservation Ready for the Light of Day?" from The Uneasy Chair.
"Why Good Governance Matters for Conservation" from The Uneasy Chair.
Elsewhere:
"How to Stop Conservation Donors From Cheating on Their Taxes," with Terry Anderson in The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
"Who Will Take Over the Ranch?" in High Country News, 3/29/04, on changing demographics, the booming real estate market, and efforts to keep ranch land from being carved up in the West.
"Schwarzenegger: The Newest Progressive?" for Writers on the Range with Margaret O'Mara
"Nevada's BLM Wilderness" in A People's History of Wilderness, High Country News Books.
I
am a Ph.D.candidate in History and an associate director of the Spatial
History Project of the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North
American West at Stanford University. I am doing research in the history
of conservation, the science of conservation biology, and measuring
conservation. The working title of my dissertation is "Critical Habitat." It is a history of ideas, narratives, science, and practices of conservation of a species in time and space. The species at the center of this history is the Bay checkerspot butterfly. My adviser is environmental and western historian Richard
White, co-director of the
Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West.
I have been a free-lance environmental journalist and science writer for going on 20 years. My work has appeared in The New York Times, High Country News, and many other newspapers, magazines, journals, and radio and television shows.
I was a Knight Professional Journalism Fellow at Stanford in 2002-2003 and a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University in 2003-2004.
That
spring I helped organize the Sea
of Cortez Expedition and Education Project retracing the journey
that John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts took to the Gulf of California
in 1940. I am currently working on a book about their voyage and ours
and changes in ecology and the environment over the years. You can
read a copy of a talk I have given telling the story of their voyage
and ours in PDF form here: "From
the Tide Pool to the Stars: Sailing with the Spirits of John Steinbeck
and Ed Ricketts on a New Voyage of Discovery Around Baja California." You may also read a PDF preprint of a scientific report on our expedition "Remembering the Gulf: changes to the marine communities of the Sea of Cortez since the Steinbeck and Ricketts expedition of 1940" in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
Before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, I lived with my wife and two daughters in Nevada for 12 years, and we still maintain close ties through family, friends, community, and work in the interior West. The Great Basin Web, which I founded, reflects that love, as does my book, Nevada, with photographer Deon Reynolds, whose panorama of the California Trail graces the top of this page.
The map below — drawn by Lieutenant Edward Belcher, a surveyor on His Majesty's Ship Blossom, which visited San Francisco in 1826 while exploring the Pacific — is the first known map of the serpentine formations at the center of my current research.
RESEARCH PROJECTS:
Spatial History: spatialhistory.stanford.edu
Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West: Recent trends in conservation and development in the western United States.
Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve and Woods Institute for the Environment: Longterm studies of the Bay checkerspot butterfly and feasibility of reintroduction.
COURSES I TEACH:
Journalism 784. Environment of the West (Reynolds School of Journalism, University of Nevada, Reno, Summer 2007). Analysis of the most pressing environmental issues in the West, as seen through the expertise of scientists, policy makers, citizen advocates, and journalists, focusing on the Lake Tahoe basin in the Sierra Nevada. For more information about the course and work by the students in the Interactive Environmental Journalism M.A. Program, click here.
History 53S. What Went Down on the Farm: Stanford Campus as a Laboratory for Environmental History (Stanford University, Winter 2007). Environmental history is made from earth and trees, maps and dreams, plans and problems, a world made and a world that might have been. The 8,400-acre Stanford campus and surrounding community from the foothills to the bay is our laboratory, archive, and classroom for learning hands-on techniques to uncover the past, understand the present, and think about the future anywhere. Sources include archaeology, ecology, university business files, letters, photographs, trees, buildings, and the land.
