In the century leading up to 1975, nearly 6000 freighters went down in the Great Lakes. The Edmund Fitzgerald was the last. The last. In 50 years, not a single commercial freighter has been lost in the Great Lakes. Why? It's NOAA. Of course it's NOAA.

Fascinating read about Arctic art history and the panoramic paintings popular in empires and settler societies trying to comprehend newly acquired or coveted territory, and the long fascination with the Arctic, like the Arctic expedition in Frankenstein, published a year before this painting.

The climate disasters have arrived, & “as Octavia Butler believed, America’s past is a good place to start when trying to predict how climate change will reconfigure its society in the future.” We’ve “already seen large, sudden movements of people driven by disaster and local changes in climate.”

Now that people can see the new Frankenstein film at home, I thought I’d repost this thread and gift article. The Year Without a Summer and Mary Shelley‘s brilliance and creativity gave us a story that more than two centuries later, we keep returning to.

“What we know is that 31 people died, 16,000 structures were destroyed, and an untold number of people may never recover financially or psychically. And we know, thanks to dogged reporting throughout the year, that mistakes were made and the cost is incalculable.” www.latimes.com/california/s...

Unchanged since 1818, its “formula” of sunspots, tides, and planets is a dubious but fascinating relic of weather prediction, and it remains a record for weather history, and the history of how people tried to understand & predict weather & climate. Gift article. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/u...

“In recent months, a small army of historians, librarians, scientists and other volunteers has fanned out across America’s national parks and museums to photograph and painstakingly archive cultural and intellectual treasures they fear are under threat.” www.latimes.com/california/s...

Part of a longer thread I posted after I was back in Altadena last month, these posts show trees that survived a fire that destroyed houses, how their survival is proof they were not primary vectors for fire spread, and the efforts now underway to save them.

Dense vegetation surrounding houses in fire zones is dubious, but forcing residents to cut down trees that survived fires and were not primary modes of fire transmission is even more dubious, especially if wooden decks and other flammable materials can remain. (1/3) www.latimes.com/lifestyle/st...

All the good passwords must’ve been stolen by the British Museum

David Lynch altar for the Día de Muertos celebration at Hollywood Forever.

Most public grade schools in California are paved-over “nature deserts” sorely lacking in trees or shade — leaving the state’s 5.8 million school-age children to bake in the sun during classroom breaks as rising global temperatures usher in more dangerous heat waves. www.latimes.com/environment/...

On DHS’s unauthorized use of Norman Rockwell’s paintings across social media, an op-ed from our family today in @usatoday.com www.usatoday.com/story/opinio...

Firefighters on the ground urged evacuation warnings. Why didn’t they happen? “It could have been a technical issue. It could have been somebody got busy and didn’t push the right button. Who knows?” Not a satisfying answer for something that cost 18 lives. www.latimes.com/california/s...

Gift article—and happy Halloween!🎃 Frankenstein is sci-fi, cli-fi, and a document of climate history. It’s also a Gothic fever dream—part Enlightenment, part Romantic Era, written by an incredibly well-read teenager from an infamous family in a turbulent affair with a volatile romantic poet. (1/4)

Sooooo random!🙄

Gift article, and a nice reminder that nature is more resilient than we think:“Demolition on the last dam was completed in Oct. of 2024. Just days later, salmon were swimming upstream…One year after salmon are spreading throughout the uppermost reaches of the river. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/c...

A thoughtful response to the Bill Gates climate memo: “The choice we are faced with is not between "good for us" & "the end of the world," but instead how much harm we are willing to tolerate, and endure, in the years to come.”

Gift article. OBAA joins a short list of the best films ever made about California—its past, and where it might be headed. This article includes several of the locations in the film, all far from Hollywood, but Californian to their core. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/m...

“More and more people are hitting the wall. There’s less and less help now.” “No law firm is going to be able to compensate a long‑term renter like me.” “70% of severely fire-damaged homes in Altadena have not filed permits to rebuild or have been sold.” www.latimes.com/california/s...

Following Hurricane Melissa's devastation, Jamaica’s decade-long effort to build financial resilience will be tested. Its $150 million catastrophe bond, triggered by a storm’s low pressure and path, will provide quick relief. Jamaica’s model may serve as a guide for other climate-vulnerable nations.

Gift article. Do you take a settlement, or hope for more? Can you afford to wait? “It was like a second grief.” Zella Knight…”feared that no amount of compensation would preserve a once thriving Black community whose vulnerable elders were displaced by the fire.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/u...

In the long term, this is the only thing anyone will ever remember about any of us. Not the narcissist billionaires, techbros, or tyrant wannabes who dominate our present. Either we did something about it, and salvaged a better future, or we condemned future generations to disaster and chaos.

Gift article. “The Caribbean is the world’s most exposed region to climate-fueled disasters, according to the International Monetary Fund, which has said the region requires about $100 billion in economic investment to build resilience.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/c...

“The storm has been feeding on warm ocean temperatures made up to 800 times more likely by global heating. . . The seas have absorbed 90 percent of the extra heat that humans have pumped into the atmosphere.” grist.org/extreme-weat...

Originally a nature club for Austrian and German factory workers, it celebrated everything from ecological awareness to Oktoberfest to Persian New Year, testament to the eclectic, diverse community who enjoyed recreation in the San Gabriel Mts. before the Eaton Fire. www.latimes.com/lifestyle/st...

A repost. It’s long, and Bluesky was wonky when I posted it. If you scroll down and get a prompt to “read one more reply,” just click and you’ll see the next set of posts. If you care about LA, or Altadena, or the fires, or disaster history, or where we’re all headed, I hope you’ll take a look.

A repost. It’s long, and Bluesky was wonky when I posted it. If you scroll down and get a prompt to “read one more reply,” just click and you’ll see the next set of posts. If you care about LA, or Altadena, or the fires, or disaster history, or where we’re all headed, I hope you’ll take a look.

NOAA stopped collecting this data, but the toll of climate disaster keeps rising regardless: “At $61bn in damages, the LA fires are one of the most expensive climate-related disasters on record in the US, and the only top 10 event that is not a hurricane.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

The Eaton/Altadena Fire, nine months later: a personal and historical thread: Nine months after it was devastated by fire, I went back to my old neighborhood. I once lived immediately south of the mouth of Eaton Canyon, where the Altadena fire ignited on the evening of January 7th 2025.

The Inuit knew the final resting places of the doomed Franklin expedition’s ships—one lay at “Umiaqtalik,” “There is a boat there.” Now cruise ships visit, and competing empires try to claim the fabled, and fast melting, Northwest Passage once more. Gift article. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/w...

Sometimes one image says it all. The USA, 2025.

“A significant number of residents in Altadena and Pacific Palisades remain displaced and continue to struggle with housing support amid ongoing battles with insurance…spending much of their time and dwindling finances to fight for a sliver of what they lost.” www.latimes.com/california/s...

FEMA cuts affect disaster planning and relief: “They’re making good on their promise to shift the burden onto states without giving the states any runway to prepare for that.” . . . “We should not have to count on recovery like it’s raffle money.” Gift article. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/c...

I’ll post more LA, climate, and disaster history, but here’s a different kind of LA history. I had coffee & a chocolate shake at Bob’s Big Boy. (If you know, you know.) Thankfully I didn’t see the Thing behind Winkie’s, but I did have beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine, all along the way.

Before disastrous floods swept through the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk on Sunday, the EPA canceled a $20 million grant “essential to prevent environmental and cultural catastrophe.” Kipnuk flooded at least 30 times between 1979 and 2022. Gift article. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/14/c...

Chinampas, Aztec island farms, were some of the world’s most distinctive and productive urban agricultural landscapes and waterscapes. Now women are trying to restore them in Xochimilco, preserving a remnant of Tenochtitlan and habitat for the endangered Axolotl. www.latimes.com/environment/...

I just wanted to share some more photos from the great beach history tour led by @elsadevienne.bsky.social and alisonrosejefferson.com in Santa Monica today as part of the Urban History Association’s conference! #UHA2025LA

“[T]here remains much more work to be done to decipher and expose how the workscapes and necroscapes borne from the production of artificial light affected people, animals, cities, and environments together, in tandem.”

Echoing that thanks! A terrific tour + chance to talk more about race, recreation + landscape history not only with @elsadevienne.bsky.social, learning from her new pub * #SandRush *, but also @lawrencecphd.bsky.social, whose first book *The Frontier of Leisure* examines these themes, too! #envhist

US urban heat deaths are likely woefully undercounted: ”In many developed countries, epidemiologists estimate heat fatalities by calculating excess or unexpected deaths during a severe hot spell. . . . The US, for some reason, chooses not to know.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

This morning we're featuring the *Summer in the City: Urban Heat in the Past, Present & Future* panel Head to the Roman rm from 8-9:30pm to learn about how urban historians are addressing hot topics like— #climatechange —& the interconnected histories of the body, health & leisure & climate control

I’m delighted to be on the program for the Urban History Association’s first ever conference in Los Angeles! My panel, “Summer in the City: Urban Heat in the Past, Present, and Future,” will be on Saturday. The program listing and abstract are below. #UHA #urbanhist #envirohist

Genevieve Carpio’s work is a great example of how insurance data can be an illuminating means to understand the past, from urban planning to historical discrimination, and all the different ways insurers assess and imagine “risk.”

Politicians can erase data and defund research, but we are still careening towards a climate disaster-triggered economic, insurance, and housing crisis nevertheless.

Lack of progress—particularly the inability to develop clear policies and protocol—points to what some experts describe as a larger failure to learn from major fire disasters. “We have to work really hard to continue ignoring the patterns here.” www.latimes.com/california/s...

Delighted to be included in this new book, Natural Disasters in the United States: Making Sense of Risks and Vulnerability. It began as a conference at the Center for American Studies at the University of Heidelberg, and I'm happy it’s now in print. (1/3) link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Sierra glaciers dwindle, changing environments, threatening water supplies, and erasing cultural history: “Ultimately, it’s telling us that we’ve left the bounds of so-called normal. We’re crossing the line in the sand from what glaciers have done, for basically all of human recorded history.”

“Climate change is creating more opportunities for a catastrophic fire.” These “were largely clustered in the western part of North America, southern Europe and southern Australia, and mostly in affluent areas with high property values”—but the tropics & Arctic too. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/c...

What’s the value of the only national forest in Ohio, its large outdoor rec visitation, its threatened hellbender salamanders, and it preventing erosion, flooding, and mass release of toxic mining waste next to some timber company making a little money once? www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...