Sublime

Across the road from where she’s parked, aspens tumble down the basin toward Fish Lake, where five years earlier a Chinese refugee engineer took his three daughters camping on the way to visiting Yellowstone. The oldest girl, named for a Puccini opera heroine, will soon be wanted by the feds for fifty million dollars of arson. Two thousand miles to

Reefs in the Caribbean were dying. Some were being done in by development, others by overfishing and pollution. Two of the region’s dominant reef-builders—staghorn coral and elkhorn coral—were being devastated by an ailment that became known as white-band disease. (Both are now classified as critically endangered.) Over the course of the 1980s, som

Augean

Already in Paleolithic times, people had driven plenty of species—woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, mastodons, glyptodons, and North American camels—into oblivion. Later, as the Polynesians settled the islands of the Pacific, they wiped out creatures like the moa and the moa-nalo. (The latter were goose-like ducks that lived in Hawaii.) When the Euro

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or the publication of Limits to Growth marked quantum leaps in understanding our ecological impact on Earth.

Over the next four decades, five more cores were extracted from different parts of the ice sheet. Each time, the wild swings showed up. Meanwhile, other climate records, including pollen deposits from a lake in Italy, ocean sediments from the Arabian Sea, and stalagmites from a cave in China, revealed the same pattern. The temperature swings became

This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place—a fire planet we have made, with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years.

The last wolves believed to have been born in Yellowstone—a pair of pups discovered near Soda Butte Creek, about fifteen miles east of where Rick was now standing—were shot in 1926. They were killed not by poachers, but by park rangers. Almost from the time the park was created, in 1872, early superintendents had pursued a rigorous predator-control

How were two million people going to live in a region that was sinking into oblivion? The losses were particularly acute, he noted, in their own backyard. The area around Plaquemines had already shrunk by some seven hundred square miles. “We’re in an uphill battle against sea-level rise and subsidence,” Barth said. CPRA would continue to drill and