Dr. Francis Kilkenny

USDA hasn’t announced its reorganization or RIF plans yet, and those could severely impact USFS R&D and ARS (likely coming in the next few weeks). Also, the president’s FY 2026 budget proposal cuts USFS R&D by 95%, leaving only Forest Inventory and Analysis. In other words, more shoes to drop.

Note that US federal scientists are likely to be severely retaliated against if they speak out, including via weaponized legal procedures and not just job loss. Academic colleagues have much more freedom to act.

One thing to be aware of is that Federal employees are subject to various laws and regulations regarding communications, such as the Hatch Act, which can be weaponized against them. Speaking out is very dangerous for them. People in non-federal positions that have information need to be their voice.

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Did California Policies Make the LA Fires Worse? - Legal Planet No, California’s environmental and climate regulations did not make the climate-fueled Palisades and Eaton fires more destructive.

If you read one longform explainer on California policy and LA fires, make it this one by my UCLA Law colleagues: legal-planet.org/2025/01/17/d...

An oval yellow cone, with the right side being seen in cross section. There is a callout circle in the top right which shows the scale's detail.

A fer fiddlehead with the older outer pinnules obscuring rhe centre of the spiral.

A cockroach walking across some moss.

Asteroxylon. A green thick stemmed plant covered in small scale like leaves.

A day late for #PortfolioDay, but here're 4 images from publications last year.
Anyway, Hi, I'm a palaeobotanical artist and scientific illustrator who does pen and digital mixed illustrations of mostly extinct plants. #paleobotany #paleoart #plants #sciart

A bichon frise sleeping on a carpet, using plushy dog toy as a pillow.

The other pup, tuckered out and sleeping with his new favorite Christmas toy.

A bichon frise on a girl’s lap with a blue bow on it’s head. The girl is sitting on a tan couch, her head is not visible. The dog is looking directly at the camera. There are presents on the couch beside the girl.

One of the pups getting into the Christmas spirit.

Cover for “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Oriental Adventures” (lol)

Norman Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech painting/meme

If I may speak. I would like to see a complete revamp of D&D’s Kara-Tur region/campaign

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
20/20

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#Books

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
19/20

#BookSky
#BookChallenge
#Books

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
18/20

#BookSky
#BookChallenge
#Books

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing this.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
17/20

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Cover of ‘Empire of Cotton: A Global History’ by Sven Becker.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
16/20

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Cover of ‘Island of the Colorblind’ by Oliver Sacks.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
15/20

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Cover of ‘The Great Derangement’ by Amitav Ghosh. Cover image is of a river delta from a satellite or high altitude aircraft looking directly down.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
14/20

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Cover of ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ by Guy Debord.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
13/20

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Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
12/20

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Cover of ‘Against Method’ by Paul Feyerabend. Dark blue background, white lettering, title at top, author name at bottom. An image in the center is of scientific instrumentation done abstractly.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
11/20

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📌

Cover of ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ by Thomas S. Kuhn. Background is black. Title is in the top left corner, covering a little over half of the width and about a third of the height of the cover. The title is right justified and each word is on a separate line. The author’s name is printed on the bottom left. Taking up much of the bottom two-thirds of the cover but adjusted slightly to the right is an image. The image is blue and white over black and is difficult to identify specifically and may be abstract. It looks like something cosmic, a phenomenon in space perhaps, that is viewed through a fish eye lens.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
10/20

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Cover of ‘The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea’ by Jack E. Davis. Background color is tan to off white, much like the color of old parchment. The author and title are printed across the cover midway up. The type face is similar to newspaper print from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. ‘Gulf’ is printed much larger than the rest of the words and stretches across cover on its own. Above and below title are two etchings or drawings that date from early exploration and/or colonization of the American Gulf coast. On the top is an image of storks congregating among reeds. On the bottom is the image of a beach and near shore vegetation. The vegetation is on the right and includes palm trees standing above the vegetation. The beach itself is on the left side of the image. Some of sea is visible, it is calm without waves.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
9/20

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Cover of ‘How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human’ by Eduardo Kohn. The cover has a white background with a photograph in the top third, the title in the center, and author at the bottom. The photograph is a front view of an indigenous Amazonian man in a rainforest. His face is in focus directly in the center of the photograph and he is looking up and to his left. The rest of the photograph blurs away from this central point. The man’s arms are stretched out from his sides. His right arm appears to be holding onto a small tree, and his left arm appears to be in the process of gesturing.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
8/20

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Cover of ‘Hope in the Dark’ by Rebecca Solnit.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
7/20

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Image of the cover of ‘Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media’ by Edward S, Herman and Noam Chomsky. Cover is off-white. Main title is don large letters all in caps at the top. The ‘S’ in Consent has a cut out ‘T’ overlayed on top. The subtitle is below the main title sandwiched between two lines. Authors names are below that in all caps. Below authors names it reads “with a new introduction by the authors.” As part of the cover design there are words to the beginning of a newspaper article on the bottom that are partially cut off by a fountain pen on the right side and an exacto knife on the left side.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
6/20

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Image of book cover of ‘Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires’ by Tim Mackintosh-Smith. Title and author name are at the bottom of the cover in gold lettering, surrounded by a dark blue background. Above the title, moving up from the bottom to the top, there is a woven diamond pattern done in gold over the blue. The shapes in the gold pattern thicken moving up the cover, until there is very little blue left at the top, just thin lines.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
5/20

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Very cool! I haven’t trad ‘The Telling’. I’ll have to check it out.

TWFWIF came into my life at a pivotal point and is one of the reasons I followed the career path that I did.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
4/20

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