Hey it's Earth Day! Or possibly just Earth Week again by the time this gets posted. Seems like an opportune time to discuss burning things down! (And also get back to our irregularly scheduled Okefenokee show.) (This story is a good 4000 characters, so may need a minute to post this thread.) 🪶 ⬇️

fuck yes, only the sum total weight of an affluent society as inequitably cruel as ours could produce sentences as beautifully broken and sick as these

Nordhaus' "modelling assumes that catastrophic risks do not exist and that climate impacts rise linearly with temperature. There is no climate model that proposes such a trend. Instead, climate science forecasts nonlinear impacts and greatly escalating risk." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Prairie trillium flowering, Maple Grove Forest Preserve this morning

Result from the Pisco Formation, please leave all your angry comments below! The Miocene of the Pisco basin is an absolute insane hot spot for marine life, over the course of millions of years the sediments recorded dozens of large mammals, especially whales...

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about axolotls recently

👀🐘

Today on Volts: I talk with my old friend @jigarshahdc.bsky.social about the headlong rush to build data centers, the lunacy of building a bunch of behind-the-meter gas-fired power plants to run them, the benefits of distributed capacity & greater grid utilization, & the need for utility innovation.

The only thing inevitable in the deep sea is discovery. Deep-sea wildernesses are more important than the promise of seafloor mining. news.mongabay.com/2026/04/deep...

😧

You know a Nick vacation wouldn't be complete without some waterway history Have you seen this before? It's Wat Paknam, a pretty famous Instagram spot in western Bangkok Most focus on the giant Buddha statue But another cool thing is that it sits at a major crossroads in Thailand's canal network

2026 is the U.N. International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. This is a great conversation about pastoral mobility, including some fascinating research about how even Elinor Ostrom's take on how people manage common resources is incomplete artofrange.com/episodes/iyr...

Think it’s important that habitat loss and climate change are likely far bigger drivers of declines than any of these. E.g. USFWS has this to say but can’t put a number to habitat loss like it does cats and collisions. How we eat, manage ecosystems is a way humans kill birds

Over 8 billion reasons to ditch fossil fuels in one photo.

New Guidebook is out! Passport to New Mexico Rivers www.nmwild.org/shop/ I wrote about 90% of this and it contains nearly 40 photos of mine. Awesome guidebook to #NewMexico #Rivers. Check it out! #NMwx #NMwater #NMTrue

Needs to be at least one Great Plains town named V (for the geese, cranes, ducks) Tbh probably exists

There's only one ocean! Open your eyes! Look at a globe and learn the truth that Big Ocean doesn't want you to know!

Fascinated by the intersection of Mennonite communities and conservation. Several of the U.S. and global spots I’ve traveled for grassland research, there was a developing Mennonite side to the story. Not to villainize — ultimately these are commodities we consumers are buying. Interesting story.

An mRNA treatment for PANCREATIC CANCER was in trials, among many other uses. Choosing to end this research is choosing to sentence millions to an early, painful death

As far as I know there is literally no reason for this, it is just an incredibly lucky coincidence that we get to enjoy for free

NEW: Microsoft Is Pausing Carbon Removal Purchases The tech giant has been the overwhelming buyer of carbon removal technologies, accounting for 90%+ of industry volume last year. Now sources tell me it’s pausing its voluntary buying. a @heatmap.news exclusive heatmap.news/carbon-remov...

Finally, a pie chart that I like!

Once-Adventurous Salmon Can’t Believe She Ended Up Moving Back To Birthplace, Having A Bunch Of Kids https://theonion.com/once-adventurous-salmon-can-t-believe-she-ended-up-movi-1825827223/

Former NASA climate scientist, now Senior Scientist at Project Drawdown, Dr. Kate Marvel, has a fantastic piece in the New York Times today. This is a must-read if you care about science, the planet, and the future. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/o...

The diversity of North American Blancan-age Camelids is off the charts: llamas, goat-camels, giraffe-llamas, giant camels. They must have been filling Pliocene niches before the Bovids arrived during the glacials. Pencil size chart; not all may have been contemporaneous #paleoart

Cool thread on jumping spider vision. The jumping part of jumping spiders is also pretty awesome in that they use internal hydraulics and tie drag lines before jumping — super accurate long distance jumps without the heavy muscular gear of eg grasshoppers

You may think that studying molluscs instead of whales, dolphins or wolves is boring. But did you know that Arctica islandica, the longest-living animal on record (507 years) spends basically five full centuries, buried in sediment, doing nothing but filtering seawater ? Now that is boring. 🦑🧪🌊🌿

Oh man, this is guaranteed to be a great talk by @birdfiddler.bsky.social plainsconservation.org/the-amazing-...

To sweeten the deal, I managed to finagle a friends & family discount code out of Bookshop.org (And yes, I consider everyone who follows me on here a friend. Unless you use it to yell at me for taking so long to write the book...in which case I consider you family!) For 15% off, use code INTREES15

I have been hiding in the desert, clamoring on rocks while taking tips from lizards on the best way to collect seeds from the Death Valley Sage. @npr.org came along for the ride and it was amazing. www.npr.org/sections/the...

Tree Swallow gathering nesting material this morning, on the Puget Sound prairie.

Thinking about Tall Gongor, the 8 foot tall guy in the last theocratic ruler of Mongolia's court who was either the Bogd Khan's accountant or guy who took care of the Khan's elephant and for some reason no one is sure which one it was

Happy spring! It may be gross and rainy out and too cold for bees, but the spring ephemerals of Eastern North America all seem to be out east of the Mississippi! Come meet some friends in the woods near you! 7c140796.flowpaper.com/ephemerals/#...

We deal with nonnative plants in the US; Kenya struggles with mesquite, native to the Americas. As a Peace Corps Vol. in Senegal people asked me for miracle tree seeds-mesquite. It was a problem in Kenyan by 1990; 12 years later, I documented mesquite spreading in Senegal. tinyurl.com/PRJUinKenya

Even as someone who posts occasional less-than-critical of LLM stuff, this is a wild quote! I’d also say that if an author can use an LLM they are probably doing pretty uninteresting stuff to begin with. Content marketing or marvel movies sure but it’s just not v good next to really good writing.

I feel like it’s underrated how much of pickup culture is really clearance culture. You could sell a lot of Priuses on monster truck tires I bet.

I feel like “the world passed peak gas-powered car sales in 2017” is not a widely known fact

Did you know that a majority of what we know about how to reduce structure loss in wildfires came from Forest Service research that was at the time pretty controversial and not being done elsewhere?

This looks like a complicated chart, but in fact it's some of the simplest and best news imaginable: batteries are quickly turning night into noon. Worth a read if I say so myself open.substack.com/pub/billmcki...

Dude I flagged and tagged like seven gopher tortoise dens today. Including one where I got out of my truck and looked down to see a Gopher tortoise scuttling into a den *literally under my truck* Btw, Gopher Tortoises have only one reaction when anyone shows up: "Oh shit, it's the cops!!"

Livestock grazing boosts plant biodiversity in the Greater Serengeti–Mara Ecosystem 🌍 @esajournals.bsky.social esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Almost anything about Mongolia at all. That it exists, that it's its own country, that they speak their own language there. The idea that the Mongol Empire was a secular state, Asian History 101 stuff as far as I'm concerned, was treated as Crank Take by scholars(!) on this website like last month

To add something about this, I think it’s interesting how “deep prairie roots” as celebrated thing says as much about people as it does about prairies. As the article mentions, the 1st people to study prairie roots focused as much on the shallow system, but it was the deep part became a meme.

The grasses are some of Earth’s most powerful ecosystem engineers

Deep roots are not why prairie grasses are resilient to drought (and much of grass success is really about dominating the shallow root zone) Explained here: prairieecologist.com/2019/09/17/a....

Warming temperatures in Nepal’s alpine rangelands are drying wetlands and reducing grazing areas. Both wild and domestic yaks face habitat shrinkage and altered water cycles, threatening the survival of these high-altitude species. Story by Sonam Lama Hyolmo for #Mongabay.

Ciabatta is an elder millennial.

This is such a cool story

I tried to do what we call, if I may be so bold, a "conceptual scoop"!! Pls read my story on the most overlooked form of extreme confinement of farmed animals—the routine caging of millions of dairy calves in tiny crates less than 1/10 the size of a parking spot. It's not about veal! (🧵)

Here is what I think about White Sands: elpalacio.org/2023/05/hist... I'll have a follow up article out late this year or early next.