Welcome

I’ve spent 39 years as a Ph. D. ecologist trying to understand nature, environment, life on the Earth. I’ve studied moose in the far north, elephants in Africa, bowhead whales in northern oceans, forests in North and Central America. I’ve helped with the conservation of the California condor, salmon in the Pacific Northwest, the whooping crane in Texas, the ecosystem of Mono Lake California. I’ve helped analyze the effects of a mining road on natural ecosystems and traditional ways of life on Native American lands; ecological effects of toxin materials at a major California toxic depository; effects of radioactivity on a natural forests. I helped plan the use of vegetation in Los Angles as a typical city in a dry climate.

My work has involved developing computer models of forests and life in lakes, and of populations of endangered species. These models have been used to forecast effects of global warming on life on Earth.

Whenever possible, I’ve traveled through wilderness, sometimes following the trails of Lewis and Clark and Henry David Thoreau (which I’ve written about in several books).

As a result, friends and colleagues often ask me for an objective analysis of what’s going on about the environment and people’s connection with it. And they’ve asked me to set up a Web site that will help them. This is that site. It has several goals.

• Objective analysis of environmental issues.
• Investigative reporting about nature, ecology, the environment, and people’s connection with the environment, including some of the big issues, like energy policy and endangered species.
• Some professional opinions — sometimes mine, sometimes from a guest. Use the Article Categories and Search Box at right to browse the collection of articles written over the last eight years.
• A listing of my recent speeches and other activities.
• I hope you find this Web site useful. Please let me know your thoughts. Ask questions. Leave comments. You may contact me at 917-747-3068 or email dan@danielbbotkin.com.
• And related material can be found at www.naturestudy.org, the website of the Center for the Study of the Environment.

-Daniel B. Botkin
April, 2007 New York, NY

Headlines

Forecasting Global Warming and Its Effects With all the focus on possible effects of global warming, one would think that we would be interested in checking whether what we forecast does come true. But, as I show in a new opinion piece published in the International Herald Tribune, this is often not the case.

Scientific Opinion and the Opinion of Scientists We hear a lot these days about what scientists are saying, what they believe, and what they have discovered. But there is a difference between scientific findings and the opinion of scientists, as I explain in People and Nature.

39 Years Work on Global Warming. Having done research on global warming since 1968, I am surprised and impressed about how this has gone from a rather obscure and arcane subject to one that seems to be at the forefront of public, media, and political concerns, both nationally and internationally. My concern is that we may be moving from an irrational lack of care about global warming to an equally irrational panic about it, so that we make decisions quickly out of fear rather than based on clear thinking and scientific fundamentals. (For more about this, see entry in Biological Diversity and recent speeches).

Global Warming and Buying Insurance. How to decide what to do about global warming. (See Global Warming and Life.)

Can Nuclear Energy Solve Our Energy Crisis? In the United States, 104 nuclear power reactors at 65 sites provide 8% of our energy, while fossil fuels provide 85%. For nuclear power to completely replace fossil fuels, we would need more than 1,000 new nuclear power plants of the same designs and efficiencies as existing plants. This would mean an average of 20 new plants per state. (See Energy and Environment)

Today, fossil fuels provide 71.4% of the electricity produced in the United States, while nuclear power plants provide 19.4%. Just to replace the electrical generation by fossil fuels with nuclear energy would require 285 new nuclear power plants of the kind, size, and efficiency of those in use now, and to counteract global warming these would have to be built and put online within a few years. This is just not practical. (See Energy and Environment)

How Many Grizzly Bears? Surprisingly, the best estimate of the number of grizzly bears ever made may be the one based on what Lewis and Clark recorded in 1805 — even though the grizzly is a listed endangered species and a recovery plan for it is required by law. Maybe we need to improve our monitoring and counting of the nature around us. (see Books by Daniel B. Botkin. Beyond the Stony Mountains ).

What Did Thoreau Wish For? One of Henry David Thoreau’s most famous quotes is “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” This is often misinterpreted — by both pro- and anti-environmentalists — to think that Thoreau meant that most of the world should be turned back into wilderness. Not at all. For Thoreau, wildness was a state of mind, while wilderness was a place. He sought the sense of wildness — of nature — and he could obtain that with an afternoon’s walk in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts. Once Thoreau wrote “I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness he represented.” He didn’t mean this literally; he meant that he wanted to achieve that sense of the wild within himself. (see Books by Botkin, No Man’s Garden.)