Book Review - Extinctions: How Life Survives, Adapts and Evolves

Title: Extinctions: How Life Survives, Adapts and Evolves
Author: Michael J. Benton
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: I loved this book. My main reason for reading it was to better understand how life has evolved on Earth. Scientists have determined Earth has experienced at least five major mass extinctions - 

1. End-Ordovician (444 million years ago) - Caused by rapid global cooling and glaciation, which caused sea levels to drop drastically and destroyed shallow marine habitats, followed by quick warming and oxygen loss.
2. Late Devonian (360 million years ago) - Caused by massive ocean anoxia (oxygen depletion) and nutrient overloads (eutrophication), partly linked to early land plants weathering soil and altering atmospheric carbon dioxide
3. End-Permian / "The Great Dying" (250 million years ago) - Triggered by colossal flood basalt volcanic eruptions (the Siberian Traps) that released massive greenhouse gases, causing extreme global warming, ocean acidification, and sulfidic, oxygen-starved oceans. This was the worst event, wiping out 96% of species.
4. End-Triassic (200 million years ago) - Caused by intense volcanic activity tied to the breakup of Pangea, which rapidly pumped carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and drove severe climate change and ocean acidification
5. End-Cretaceous (66 million years ago) - Caused by a huge asteroid impact resulting in the Chicxulub crater in modern-day Mexico, which triggered a prolonged "impact winter," blocking sunlight, halting photosynthesis, and collapsing global food chains. The fifth extinction wiped out about 80 percent of all species, including the dinosaurs.

While extinction events are not common, it appears they are a natural part of how life evolved on Earth. Many scientists believe that Earth is now experiencing a human caused "sixth extinction" event (Holocene or Anthropocene extinction) due to habitat destruction, climate change, pollution and over exploitation of natural resources. On a geologic time scale, humans are just a blip and at the rate we're going, I truly believe humans could end up going extinct just like the billions of other species before us. 

Description (Audible): Cutting-edge techniques across biology, chemistry, physics, and geology have transformed our understanding of the deep past, including the discovery of a previously unknown mass extinction. This compelling evidence, revealing a series of environmental crises resulting in the near collapse of life on Earth, illuminates our current dilemmas in exquisite detail.

Beginning with the oldest, Professor Michael J. Benton takes us through the "big five" die outs: the Late Ordovician, which set the evolution of the first animals on an entirely new course; the Late Devonian, apparently brought on by global warming; the cataclysmic End-Permian, also known as the Great Dying, which wiped out over 90 percent of all life on Earth; the newly discovered Carnian Pluvial Event; and the End-Cretaceous asteroid. He examines how global warming, acid rain, ocean acidification, erupting volcanoes, and meteorite impact have affected conditions on Earth, and how life survived, adapted, and evolved.

In Extinctions, listeners will learn about revolutionary new tools used to uncover ancient extinction events and processes in forensic detail, and how scientists are improving our understanding of the deep past. New research allows us to link long-ago upheavals to crises in our current age, the Anthropocene, with important consequences for us all.

Review: Paleontolgical Society

Book Review - The Twilight Forest: An Elegy for Ponderosa in a Changing West

Title: The Twilight Forest: An Elegy for Ponderosa in a Changing West
Author: Gary Ferguson

My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: I have many fond memories of hiking and camping in the Sierra Nevada mountains and Southern California mountains where Ponderosa Pine forests are common. I love their rugged beauty and sweet vanilla smell. This book has been an revelation to me on how human caused climate change, fire, insects, disease, habitat destruction and over harvesting are contributing to the loss of not only Ponderosa Pines but also many other tree species in the United States. According to the author, only a small percent of Ponderosa Pines will remain by mid century. Sadly, considering the current administrations stance on the environment, I would say that's a conservative estimate. 

Description (Audible): With their towering, cinnamon-colored trunks and dusky green canopies, ponderosa pine has long been a charismatic icon of the American West. Yet a quiet unraveling has begun: in the past decade, in a vast area from Santa Fe to the Sierras, more than two hundred million ponderosa have died. While some trees will survive in cooler places, scientists estimate that by mid-century less than five percent of the ponderosa in the American Southwest may remain. As the very character of this vast region shifts, what will be left behind? And how can we come to terms with such profound loss?

In The Twilight Forest, Gary Ferguson brings listeners on an expansive journey through the ponderosa forests of the Southwest both to mourn—and to celebrate—the forests that nurtured him. In warm and luminous storytelling, Ferguson weaves together the human and natural history of ponderosa, from its march across the West more than 10,000 years ago, to centuries of artists inspired by its dazzling stature and shady passageways. Both wildfire and climate change are constant presences on this journey. Fire is necessary for healthy forests but has turned deadly, while climate change stresses even the hardiest beings of the natural world. Yet the story of ponderosa reminds us that loss can be a gateway to connection—to nature and each other.

Gary Ferguson - The Eight Master Lessons of Nature: What Nature Teaches Us About Living Well

Book Review - The Overstory

Title: The Overstory
Author: Richard Powers
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍
My Review: I liked this book but I found it a little hard to follow the different stories and characters. The book jumps around somewhat haphazardly between stories and requires the reader to pay close attention. I love the way it incorporated trees into each story and the way it shows how intertwined trees are to our existence. If you love trees, like I do, then this book is for you. 

Description (Audible): The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.

These and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. There is a world alongside ours - vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

Book Review - A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters

Title: A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters

Author: Andrew H. Knoll
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍

My Review: I like science and I really appreciate books like this that distill information and make science more accessible. This book definately does that. However, it did feel a bit like a firehose of information. My favorite chapter was the last one that discussed the impacts humans are having on the planet. Needless to say, humans are not good stewards and our time on earth may end up being less than a blink of the eye.  

Description (Audible): Odds are, where you’re standing was once cooking under a roiling sea of lava, crushed by a towering sheet of ice, rocked by a nearby meteor strike, or perhaps choked by poison gases, drowned beneath ocean, perched atop a mountain range, or roamed by fearsome monsters. Probably most or even all of the above.

The story of our home planet and the organisms spread across its surface is far more spectacular than any Hollywood blockbuster, filled with enough plot twists to rival a bestselling thriller. But only recently have we begun to piece together the whole mystery into a coherent narrative. Drawing on his decades of field research and up-to-the-minute understanding of the latest science, renowned geologist Andrew H. Knoll delivers a rigorous yet accessible biography of Earth, charting our home planet's epic 4.6 billion-year story. Placing twenty first-century climate change in deep context, A Brief History of Earth is an indispensable look at where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Book Review - The Worst Hard Time The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Title: The Worst Hard Time The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Author: Timothy Egan
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: Timothy Egan is one of my favorite authors. I've read several of his books and they're all great. This book is one of his best. It tells the tragic story of the 1930s dust bowl and the people who lived through it. This book is especially prescient and shows how easy it is for humans to destroy our environment and how we need to be more aware of how our actions affect the planet. I loved this book. 

Description (Audible): In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows.

The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, he does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, “the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect” (New York Times). In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, The Worst Hard Time is “arguably the best nonfiction book yet” (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatest environmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and a powerful reminder about the dangers of trifling with nature.

KU Common Books - Timothy Egan speaks at The University of Kansas about his book "The Worst Hard Time The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl"  (1:14:00)

Oklahoma Horizon TV - Timothy Egan discusses his book and the sense of urgency behind capturing these stories before they are lost to history (6:40)

Book Review - This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West

Title: This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West 
Author: Christopher Ketcham
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: Outside magazine described this book as “A big, bold book about public lands . . . The Desert Solitaire of our time.” Based on that review and the fact that Desert Solitaire is one of my all time favorite books, I decided to give it a read. I loved this book but I have to say, it's depressing. It's hard to understand why people are so bad at protecting America's public lands. Public lands and the flora, fauna and things that depend on it are finite and once they're gone, they're gone.  

Description (Audible): The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains. It's an American commons, and it is under assault as never before.

Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the reader on a journey across these last wild places, to see how capitalism is killing our great commons. Ketcham begins in Utah, revealing the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public lands livestock grazing, and exposing rampant malfeasance in the federal land management agencies, who have been compromised by the profit-driven livestock and energy interests they are supposed to regulate. He then turns to the broad effects of those corrupt politics on wildlife. He tracks the Department of Interior's failure to implement and enforce the Endangered Species Act--including its stark betrayal of protections for the grizzly bear and the sage grouse--and investigates the destructive behavior of U.S. Wildlife Services in their shocking mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry. Along the way, Ketcham talks with ecologists, biologists, botanists, former government employees, whistleblowers, grassroots environmentalists and other citizens who are fighting to protect the public domain for future generations.

This Land is a colorful muckraking journey--part Edward Abbey, part Upton Sinclair--exposing the rot in American politics that is rapidly leading to the sell-out of our national heritage. The book ends with Ketcham's vision of ecological restoration for the American West: freeing the trampled, denuded ecosystems from the effects of grazing, enforcing the laws already in place to defend biodiversity, allowing the native species of the West to recover under a fully implemented Endangered Species Act, and establishing vast stretches of public land where there will be no development at all, not even for recreation.

Description (Smithsonian): Christopher Ketcham’s This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption Are Ruining the American West is a powerful and provocative examination of the forces shaping public lands in the American West. Drawing on years of investigative reporting, Ketcham argues that a combination of political influence, corporate interests, government mismanagement, and entrenched myths about the cowboy lifestyle have contributed to the degradation of some of America’s most treasured landscapes. 

Book Review - Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization

Title: Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization

Author: Bill McKibben
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: I can't believe I'm saying this but, Bill McKibben and this book give me a SMALL BIT of hope that humanity could potentially mitigate a human-caused climate crisis by replacing fossil fuels with solar, wind and battery power.  I was a little dismayed to learn that China is light-years ahead of the US in the development of solar, wind and battery power and is actually able to daily deploy the equivalent power of one coal-fire power-plant with solar energy. China is also rapidly improving solar, wind and battery technology and becoming the dominant source for alternative energy. By contrast, the Trump administration is doing the exact opposite and even going out its way to prevent development of solar, wind and battery technology. Time is running out and humans need to break their addiction to fossil fuels as soon as possible. Thankfully there is a solution and, according to this book, that solution is solar, wind and battery power. This book is a must read for anyone who cares about climate change. 

      

Description (Audible): Every eighteen hours, the world puts up a nuclear power plant's–worth of solar panels. At the same time, combustion continues to melt our poles, poison our bodies, and drive our global inequality. And it is no longer necessary: For the first time in 700,000 years, we know how to catch the sun’s rays and convert them into energy.

In Here Comes the Sun, world-renowned author Bill McKibben tells the story of our sudden spike in power from the sun and wind. McKibben traces the arrival of plentiful, inexpensive solar energy, which, if it accelerates, gives us a chance not just to limit climate change’s damage, but to reorder the world on saner and more humane grounds. Getting there means overcoming obstacles like Big Oil, but McKibben sees a chance for a new civilization: one that looks up to the sun, every day, as the star that fuels our world.

Democracy Now -Bill McKibben talks about Renewable Energy, “Sun Day” & the “Last Chance” for Climate

Media Santuary Book Club - Bill McKibben talks about the power of solar energy and his book "Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization"

 

Description (ChatGPT): Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben is an urgent yet surprisingly hopeful look at the climate crisis and the rapid rise of renewable energy. McKibben argues that while global warming can no longer be fully stopped, the explosive growth of solar and wind power offers humanity a real chance to prevent the worst outcomes and build a fairer, more sustainable civilization. Blending science, politics, and personal storytelling, he makes complex climate issues accessible without losing their seriousness.

What sets the book apart is its balance of realism and optimism. McKibben does not minimize the dangers posed by fossil fuels and political resistance, but he also refuses to accept climate doom as inevitable. The result is an inspiring and thought-provoking call to action that encourages readers to see clean energy not just as a technological shift, but as an opportunity to reshape society for the better.

Rally - Banners Over I-5 - Apr 24, 2026

 Friday April 24, 2026 - Banners Over I-5 Resistance Rally on Evergreen Street Bridge overlooking I-5 Freeway. Wake up America. If you’re not outraged with what’s happening in America, you’re not paying attention

SOUND ON🎧

Click Here ☝

Poem - Happy Earth Day!

Click for video ☝

Wake up people

It's past the time

To protect the planet

And save humankind

We've gotten spoiled

With all our stuff

Let's take a stand

Enough is enough!

Book Review - Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet

Title: Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet
Author: Kate Marvel
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: I think I may be a wee bit masochistic because I enjoy reading books like this that explain how humans are destroying the planet. It's hard to understand how there are still people who do not believe that humans are the primary cause of climate change. I just wish they would read a book like this that explains in simple, clear language and with scientific evidence how, within just the last 100 years, humans have managed to change the planet so much that even if we were to stop now, it will take thousands of years to reverse the damage.  I loved this book and am grateful for scientists like Kate Marvel who are studying climate change and hopefully waking people up to the reality of climate change before it's too late.  

Kate Marvel interview: Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet - July 2025

Kate Marvel TED Talk - Can clouds buy us more time to solve climate change? - April 2017

Kate Marvel speech: Inner Climate 2025

Kate Marvel & Friends - Feeling Climate Change - June 2025

Description (Audible): A captivating exploration of climate change that uses nine different emotions to better understand the science, history, and future of our evolving planet

Scientist Kate Marvel has seen the world end before, sometimes several times a day. In the computer models she uses to study climate change, it’s easy to simulate rising temperatures, catastrophic outcomes, and bleak futures. But climate change isn’t just happening in those models. It’s happening here, to the only good planet in the universe. It’s happening to us. And she has feelings about that.

Human Nature is a deeply felt inquiry into our rapidly changing Earth. In each chapter, Marvel uses a different emotion to explore the science and stories behind climate change. As expected, there is anger, fear, and grief—but also wonder, hope, and love. With her singular voice, Marvel takes us on a soaring journey, one filled with mythology, physics, witchcraft, bad movies, volcanoes, Roman emperors, sequoia groves, and the many small miracles of nature we usually take for granted.

Hopeful, heartbreaking, and surprisingly funny, Human Nature is a vital, wondrous exploration of how it feels to live in a changing world.

Description (ChatGPT): Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet by Kate Marvel is a thoughtful, emotionally intelligent exploration of climate change that goes beyond science into the realm of human feeling. Marvel organizes the book around nine emotions—like wonder, anger, and hope—using each as a lens to better understand our relationship with the planet.

What makes this book stand out is its balance: it’s grounded in clear scientific insight, yet deeply personal and reflective. Marvel doesn’t preach or overwhelm; instead, she invites readers to sit with the complexity of climate change without losing sight of possibility.

Concise, humane, and quietly powerful, Human Nature is a refreshing take on a heavy subject—one that leaves you not just informed, but more connected to both the Earth and your own emotional response to it.

Book Review - A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

Title: A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

Authors: David Attenborough, Jonnie Hughes
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: I loved this book and highly recommend it. It's hard to not be cynical these days. Every day it seems like there's something new to worry about. This book follows David Attenborough's life from his early years to present, providing an amazing perspective on how humans have changed the planet to the point of potentially causing a "sixth extinction", which incidently, could include humans. The book does try to provide ways that humans could prevent our demise which I found to be reassuring. However, considering the book was written prior to Trump's second administration, I'm tending to favor a more cynical view for human survival.  

Description (Audible): In this scientifically informed account of the changes occurring in the world over the last century, award-winning broadcaster and natural historian, David Attenborough shares a lifetime of wisdom and a hopeful vision for the future.See the world. Then make it better.

Description (ChatGPT): This powerful and deeply personal book reads like both a memoir and a warning. Drawing on decades of firsthand observation, Attenborough traces the dramatic decline of Earth’s biodiversity alongside the rise of human impact, making the environmental crisis feel immediate and undeniable. What sets the book apart is its tone: while the middle sections paint a stark picture of climate change, habitat loss, and a possible “sixth mass extinction,” Attenborough never settles into despair. Instead, he offers a clear, science-based vision for restoring the planet—through renewable energy, rewilding, and changes in how we live and consume (SuperSummary)

Concise, accessible, and quietly urgent, A Life on Our Planet is less about guilt and more about responsibility. It leaves readers not just informed, but motivated—reminding us that while the damage is real, so is the possibility of recovery if action is taken now.

Winter Solstice - Haiku

This Winter Solstice

Celebrating longer days &

Shorter nights with friends

Celebrating Winter Solstice with friends (ChatGPT image)

Book Review - A Place Called Yellowstone: The Epic History of the World’s First National Park

Title: A Place Called Yellowstone: The Epic History of the World’s First National Park

Author: Randall K. Wilson
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: Pending...

Description (Audible): Discover the epic history of the first US national park in this historical adventure for fans of American history, the Wild West, and the hit show. 

It has been called Wonderland, America's Serengeti, the crown jewel of the National Park System, and America's best idea. But how did this faraway landscape evolve into one of the most recognizable places in the world? As the birthplace of the national park system, Yellowstone witnessed the first-ever attempt to protect wildlife, to restore endangered species, and to develop a new industry centered on nature tourism. 

Yellowstone remains a national icon, one of the few entities capable of bridging ideological divides in the United States. Yet the park's history is also filled with episodes of conflict and exclusion, setting precedents for Native American land dispossession, land rights disputes, and prolonged tensions between commercialism and environmental conservation. Yellowstone's legacies are both celebratory and problematic. A Place Called Yellowstone tells the comprehensive story of Yellowstone National Park as the story of the nation itself.

Description (ChatGPT): Randall K. Wilson’s A Place Called Yellowstone is a sweeping, richly told history that brings to life the geological, political, and cultural evolution of America’s first national park. Wilson masterfully weaves together the deep time of Yellowstone’s volcanic origins, the dramatic stories of early explorers and conservationists, and the fraught, ongoing debates around land use, Indigenous rights, and wildlife management. 

One of the book’s greatest strengths is its narrative drive: bureaucratic wrangling, frontier personalities, and the clash between exploitation and preservation become vivid and engaging rather than dry. Wilson doesn’t shy away from the park’s darker legacies, including dispossession of Native American lands and ecological missteps like predator removal—and he shows how these tensions have shaped modern policies and identities. 

Other Reviews - Los Angeles Times 

Book Review - Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World

Title: Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World

Author: Michael E. Mann, Peter J. Hotez
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: Pending...

Description (Audible): Two of the world’s most respected scientists reveal the forces behind the dangerous anti-science movement—and show us how to fight back. 

From pandemics to the climate crisis, humanity faces tougher challenges than ever. Whether it’s the health of our people or the health of our planet, we know we are on an unsustainable path. But our efforts to effectively tackle these existential crises are now hampered by a common threat: politically and ideologically motivated opposition to science.

Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez are two of the most respected and well-known scientists in the world and have spent the last twenty years on the front lines of the battle to convey accurate, reliable, and trustworthy information about science in the face of determined and nihilistic opposition.

In this powerful manifesto, they reveal the five main forces threatening science: plutocrats, pros, petrostates, phonies, and the press. It is a call to arms and a road map for dismantling the forces of anti-science. Armed with the information in this book, we can be empowered to promote scientific truths, shine light on channels of dark money, dismantle the corporations poisoning the planet, and ultimately avert disaster.

Description (ChatGPT): “Science Under Siege” is an essential read — particularly for those who care about climate, public health, science communication, or democracy. It confronts a real crisis: not just that we may lack scientific knowledge, but that our ability to accept and act on that knowledge is under systemic threat. Mann and Hotez succeed at both diagnosing the problem and offering reasons for hope. If the book has a mission, it is to push us from helplessness into action. It may feel like a rallying cry, but it’s a rallying cry grounded in science.

If you're looking for something inspirational and deeply informed, this will meet (or exceed) expectations. If you're hoping for a blueprint with all obstacles already overcome, you might find some parts frustrating. But perhaps that’s the point: the work is not done, and this book insists we become part of it.

TILOTD - Autumn Equinox

TILOTD -- Things I Learned On This Day

Autumn Equnox - Sept 22, 2025

• The autumn equinox marks the first day of fall in the Northern Hemisphere and the first day of spring in the Southern Hemisphere. 
• It occurs when Earth's axis is not tilted toward or away from the sun, resulting in nearly equal day and night lengths.
• The exact date of the equinox can vary between Sept. 21 and Sept. 24 due to the Gregorian calendar's approximation of the Earth's orbit around the sun.
• Cultural celebrations take place worldwide on the equinox. That day is also a key period for observing natural phenomena like the Northern Lights due to increased geomagnetic activity
• The autumn equinox is really just a moment in time -- to be exact it's when the sun crosses the celestial equator, an imaginary line in the sky above Earth's equator.
• Normally, Earth orbits tilted on its axis by 23.5 degrees. But at the precise instant of the Autumnal equinox, its rotational axis is neither tilting toward nor away from the sun.
• The word "equinox" comes from the Latin aequus (meaning "equal") and nox (meaning "night") but day and night are not exactly 12 hours each on the day of the equinox.
• Earth takes 365.25 days to go around the sun. So, this means that the September equinox will be six hours later than it was the year before. Every four years there is a "leap year" that resets the discrepancy. 
• The equinoxes can result in auroras being more visible through to the March spring equinox.
• Auroras are caused by the interaction of solar winds with Earth's magnetic field. The solar winds are particles of plasma escaping from the sun into space. Due to Earth's axial tilt, the solar wind from the sun is better able to reach Earth's atmosphere through our geomagnetic field. These disturbances in Earth's magnetic field (called geomagnetic storms) are therefore at their strongest in the spring and fall, compared to summer and winter.
• The particles that slam into Earth's magnetic field collide with atoms of oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements in the air. These particles eventually release photons of different wavelengths and therefore the different colors of aurora you can see in the sky.
• There are several celebrations associated with the fall equinox. For instance, there's the neopagan festival of Mabon a harvest festival to celebrate the gathering of crops and the bounty of the earth.
• China and other Asian countries celebrate the moon festival which is always held in mid-September, around the time of the harvest moon. The harvest moon is the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox.

Sources -

• 5 Things You Didn't Know About the Autumnal Equinox
• Wikipedia - September equinox 

Hike - Falls Creek Falls

Falls Creek Falls

The hike to Falls Creek Falls is one of my favorite waterfall hikes in the Pacific Northwest. The falls and Falls Creek are spectacular, especially in late winter or spring when the water flow is high. The falls are made up of three tiers starting with an upper tier at 109 feet, a second tier at 135 feet and a final tier at 91 feet that plunges into a narrow amphitheater gorge. At high-water levels, the falls are pretty loud and surrounded by a refreshing cloud of spray.

Falls Creek

The trail to the falls is a relatively easy 1.7-mile hike that parallels Falls Creek and includes two bridges, one of which is a cable suspension bridge that spans a spectacular rock gorge. 

Cable suspension bridge

The road to the falls had a lot of pot holes but was passable. The pit toilet at the trail head was one of the worst I’ve ever experienced. 

Falls Creek from suspension bridge

Falls Creek cable suspension bridge

Happy Summer Solstice

 HAPPY SUMMER SOLSTICE!!

Summer Solstice (AKA Midsummer), is a day I look forward to because it's the official start of summer and nicer weather in the Pacific Northwest where I live. The down side however, is days are getting shorter and it won't be long until cold, gloomy, gray, rainy weather returns. The Pacific Northwest has beautiful mountains, forests, waterfalls and nature and I realize that would not be possible without the rain. So, I accept the cold, gloomy, gray rainy days and as philosopher Marcus Aurelius once said, "There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control."  

 

Book Review -- The Birds That Audubon Missed

Title: The Birds That Audubon Missed - Discovery and Desire in the American Wilderness
Author: Kenn Kaufmann
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍

My Review: Pending...

Description (Audible): Renowned naturalist Kenn Kaufman examines the scientific discoveries of John James Audubon and his artistic and ornithologist peers to show how what they saw (and what they missed) reflects how we perceive and understand the natural world.

Description (ChatGPT): The Birds That Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in the American Wilderness is a flight through the margins of natural history, where the birds are elusive, the explorers obsessive, and the wilderness wilder than anyone bargained for. It's a tale of what happens when science meets longing—and not all feathers are catalogued.

Hike - Wahclella Falls

Wahclella Falls

Wahclella Falls is one of my all-time favorite hikes in the Columbia River Gorge. It’s a very popular hike and the parking area fills up fast, especially when the weather is nice (Note: overflow parking is available). The hike is relatively easy and follows a 1.8-mile (2.9 km) loop trail that parallels Tanner Creek. The beginning of the trail passes within a couple feet of Munra Falls on a short footbridge. 

Munra Falls

Further along, the trail crosses over Tanner creek on two wooden footbridges. The first footbridge provides a great view of the steep canyon walls. The last footbridge is just below Wahclella Falls and crosses above a huge logjam which is the result of the 2017 Eagle Creek fire.

Logjam

Wahclella Falls are split into an upper and lower segment. The upper falls are somewhat hidden however the lower falls are quite spectacular with water gushing through a narrow basalt gorge into a beautiful plunge pool.

Munra Falls

Wahclella Falls

Footbridge over Tanner Creek

Happy Earth Day! - Limerick

Happy Earth Day!

The Earth is an amazing planet

A home for all life that's on it

But if we abuse it

We will certainly loose it

So protect the planet damn it!