Book Review: Vanishing World, the Endangered Arctic by Mireille De La Lez and Fredrik Granath

I'm going to a more formal review of this book along with another one tonight or tomorrow over at Futurist.com, but I wanted to post my experience of reading it here.

Vanishing World is a picture book. As far as I can tell, it's goal is to show us what we are in grave danger of losing in the Arctic.

I was sitting on the couch this morning finishing the last half of it with our golden retriever, Nixie, curled up next to me and the sun just beginning to paint almost-frozen garden outside green and gold. I'd turn a page, and then exclaim about the bear or the arctic fox or the sunshine on the ice. Primarily a picture book, Vanishing World kept pulling visceral, emotional reactions from me. I'd show particular pictures to Nixie, and she'd dutifully look, and then put her head back on her paws. Every once in a while, I'd have to go show a picture to Toni in her office.

I really enjoyed this. I think you might, too - whoever you are.

After I get the formal review done, I'll add a link to it in a post here.

Doesn't Feel Like Global Warming

today. It's pretty cold all over the Northwest, reportedly from a La Nina year. Implies the ocean currents have a more immediate affect than the warming trend.

On Friday morning, as I was leaving for a weekend workshop on the Oregon coast, the front page of the Seattle Times had an article about how much snow we've had this year. All the east-west routes across the Cascades were closed that morning, and at least I90 was closed today on my way home. We've certainly had more snow than usual in Bellevue, even though we don't have any accumulation to speak of. So the front page is an article on the heavy snowpack. Three pages in, there's an article about how global warming is threatening our snowpack on the west coast.

Not this year.

Climate is complex.