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Savanna Blog

Tall Grass Biodiversity Depression Part I

I need to practice what I preach. This week I am going to take a deeper dive into some of the themes discussed last week, “taller vegetation” and the biodiversity depression that goes along with it. I got some pushback on Facebook around this issue and it will take a series of blog […]

Why Native Biodiversity is Good (for other people. But not for me.).

Savanna. It's official. Last episode, I left you with a real cliff-hanger. Is the water too high? With cattle coming in twelve hours, will Nate have a wreck? Sorry to have kept you in suspense for so long but here goes with the conclusion: yes the water was very high, but the grass […]

Why Biodiversity?

You and I and every living organism on this planet possess an unbroken legacy that stretches back 3.9 Billion years. Not once during that entire period was our genetic chain broken. Never did our ancestors fail. Not once did they receive a bailout. Genes are the universe's only serious repository of survival ‘knowledge.' That is […]

Carbon Taxes (Including Oregon’s HB 4001) are Another Good Way to Not Lower CO2 Emissions

Both the left and the right get it wrong on this issue. No surprise there. The left thinks that a tax can fix this whole global warming thing. No problem. However, ninety-five percent of the people in the world are housed, fed, transported, etc., by a market system. If we want to successfully slurp up […]

Cloning a Mammoth (or CRISPR and GMOs for Nature Part IV)

Hell yes! is the two-word answer. But the important thing is the question, which is what I will deal with most in this post. There have been many think pieces in the past few years about whether we should take tissue from extinct animals and use genetic technology to clone a living, breathing animals out […]

Beef Tax My Ass

For some reason, Richard Coniff's March 17 opinion in the New York Times made me think of a story my wife tells. She once put two goats in the back of her Subaru wagon to bring them to a friend in San Francisco who didn’t want to mow her lawn. Amazingly, my wife made it […]