@lawrencecphd.bsky.social
Historian of environment/climate/disaster/cities/culture. SLC via AL and LA; UCLA Bruin. Book: The Frontier of Leisure: SoCal and the Shaping of Modern America; currently writing a book about climate and history in the US and North America.
In the US the official estimate, of about 1,200 a year, “is probably at least a tenfold undercount”. The great majority are recorded as heart attacks, kidney failure or other conditions. But epidemiological data show how deaths spike during heatwaves.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
“It was one of the spots in the park where the trees are supposed to be able to live, even 100 years from now…when most places in the park will not be suitable for Joshua trees…
In the era of climate change, Joshua trees won’t survive in Joshua Tree National Park absent active management.”
Gift article. Climate disasters & rising insurance rates may be the death knell for some US housing markets: “Homeowners don’t appreciate or don’t understand that we are living in a much riskier world than we were 25 years ago. And that risk? They have to pay for it.”
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
He started at FEMA by threatening staff, and ended by skipping out to pursue more lucrative private sector gigs. In the interim he skipped work, didn’t answer his phone during the Texas floods, and let his security password expire so he couldn’t log into any FEMA systems.
Heckuva job, Richie!
It’s the Southern Reach / Area X Christmas special!
@jeffvandermeer.bsky.social
Every time I open this app right now
18.11.2025 03:59 — 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0And she’s the new “West Coast Editor” for Vanity Fair! (This presumably because she tragically went into what she’s called her “self imposed exile” . . . in MALIBU.)
If anyone still needs proof that beyond a certain point some people only fail upwards, I’d say this is it.
Who wants to abolish all humanities departments, and possibly the humanities entirely?
“People who truly ‘visioned’ the potential synergies and multipliers in opportunities.”
Once your university administrators start talking like people who’ve just had a stroke, you know your school is in trouble.
The FEMA director so well qualified that he was apparently surprised to learn that hurricanes have a season.
Maybe next time they could appoint somebody who understands disasters, instead of somebody who is one.
“There had been no plan for how to evacuate campers…the evacuation was improvised, as the water level rose more rapidly than they had ever seen.”
No evacuation plan at a camp for children by a river in a region with a history of flood tragedies. A terrible—but hardly unexpected—disaster.
Gift article. Terrifying, devastating reporting on the Texas flood tragedy.
“In our minds, the cabins were built on high ground”…”even after a 2011 FEMA map placed most of the cabins within a 100-year flood zone”—a map the camp’s owners successfully contested.
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
Seeing humans “not as commanders of the natural world but as kin”?
“Even the idea of granting the Great Salt Lake the right not to be sucked dry by irrigators was so threatening to Utah legislators that they passed a law preventing personhood from being granted to any plant, animal or ecosystem.”
Escapees intended for the pet market, now flourishing wild in transplanted ornamental vegetation, they are loudly insistent reminders of the tenacity and adaptability of social animals—like us. LA is semiarid city that nevertheless sometimes feels like the northernmost metropolis of the tropics.
16.11.2025 20:29 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Once I was in Exposition Park when a big flock of these parrots flew in to roost in the trees above me. Their colors were so bright, and their chatter absolutely deafening. I’ve never forgotten it.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
“Something always goes wrong in a fire.”
A vast understatement after two catastrophic fires, both featuring failures of communication within & between agencies, lethal public warnings failures, and a disastrous choice to leave a fire site while it was still hot.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
After disasters, investors benefit & residents lose: “Altadena has been flooded by investors…of the 289 properties that have been sold, 168 were bought by limited liability investors and private equity firms, as opposed to 93 purchased by individuals.”
www.latimes.com/california/s...
“The storm hit rural Jamaica hardest – people who are poorest, least protected, and historically marginalised. The same communities shaped by slavery, colonial extraction, and racialised policies are now on the frontline of climate disaster.”
www.theguardian.com/news/2025/no...
Americans think this desk is named for the ideal: “resolute.” Nope. The HMS Resolute went north to find the Erebus and Terror, the lost ships of the Arctic Franklin Expedition. American whalers found it, and Victoria gifted us a desk scavenged from a rescue ship lost seeking a doomed expedition.
14.11.2025 19:28 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0The American elite only fails upwards, part a trillion
14.11.2025 17:59 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
“By combining…their concerns with our flood and wind predictions, we can create maps and reports that show where the big risks are in real time…All of that work stopped overnight.”
Vital research canceled so aspiring trillionaires get tax cuts instead. Gift article.
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/c...
This remains a great introduction to how places can be keys to personal & collective memory & historical narratives in Indigenous societies. It focuses on the Western Apache, but illuminates ways cultures can trace historical change & continuity in both time & place.
www.unmpress.com/978082631724...
For a state obsessed with the new, the incredible depth of time of Indigenous peoples and places in California can seem astounding. Cultures like these tribes have had deep relationships with places, sometimes for thousands of years, despite wrenching, massive changes in both natural & human worlds.
12.11.2025 22:47 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
“When an ecosystem is so ingrained in your psyche, so essential to your culture and so central to the stories you tell about your reason for being, you have no choice but to safeguard it.”
www.latimes.com/environment/...
When the ships were found in the 2010s, it was in part because authorities and archaeologists *finally* asked the Inuit, people who knew the Arctic & had oral traditions about the expedition and its ships.
One was found by a tiny island the Inuit even called “Umiaqtalik,” “There is a boat there.”
And also the “economic genius” who lost $1.8 billion from Harvard’s endowment.
A sterling example of how, beyond a certain point, the American elite only fails upward.
And on a related note:
www.cpr.org/2025/07/12/i...
It’s upper basin states Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico against the lower basin – California, Arizona, and Nevada. “They had to reach an agreement that almost by definition is going to result in hardship to some of those water users.”
Thus no agreement.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
The whole thing is like a live action Simpsons episode. It’s glorious.
12.11.2025 17:26 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0In 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.
11.11.2025 00:04 — 👍 15 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 1
