Brenda Cooper's Blog, page 15

Backing into Eden: Chapter 2 – The Beasts of the Field

Occasionally during meetings one of my staff – an avid birder – will elbow me and I’ll look up and glimpse a bald eagle.  Each time, I am in awe.  I live in Washington State, which is home to a plethora of eagles, where pods of Orca ply the waters near the San Juan Islands, and where roads are sometimes blocked by herds of elk.  A mating pair of eagles lived on the river outside the home my son grew up in, and we would see them almost every day. During salmon season he and I splashed up the Coweeman river with fish slapping our ankles and calves and the eagles flying overhead.

The last Backing into Eden chapter was about how humans have taken responsibility for most of the land on Earth.  We have asserted “ownership” and done both harm and good.  We’ve chosen to carve the land up with roads and houses and cities and to directly manage between 25 and 50% of productive land for farms and grazing.  We have also protected whole ecosystems on the land and in the water. In this entry, I’ll talk about the ways in which we have accepted responsibility for specific species.

Before we talk about specific species protection tactics, two pieces of groundwork are necessary.

First, there is a river of extinction happening now, and all positive action is swimming upstream against it.  It’s been called the Anthropocene extinction, which means it is occurring during the age of man – the time we are living in now – and that is largely caused by our choices.  In some cases (think elephants, sharks, and tuna) we appear to be trying to directly remove whole species.  In others, we are destroying habitat by choosing to use land for our own purposes, by infecting the water with prescription drugs and pesticides, or through changing the climate faster than species can move their homes.   Keep this background in mind as I go on to talk about some of the ways we are making conscious and positive choices about the life we share the Earth with.

Second, species are seldom saved in a vacuum.  They are intrinsically linked to the ecosystems they live in, and those to neighboring ecosystems, and ultimately, we are all linked.

Species are saved when we protect ecosystems, police human behavior regarding wild animals, and when we tell compelling stories about those animals.

Let’s start with ecosystem protection, and specifically with fisheries.  Not only are more and more reefs being protected, but other ocean ecosystems as well.  The State of California has, for example, set aside numerous Marine Protection Areas near the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara.  Commercial fishermen have historically fought with conservationists who want to set aside whole areas of the ocean as preserves.  Sometimes the conservationists win, and generally, the fishermen also win when that happens.  According to Karen Garrison of the Natural Resources Defense Council, “Despite sport fishing industry predictions that a network of marine reserves around the northern Channel Islands would cause $50 to $100 million dollars in economic losses, scientific monitoring has shown that sport fishing actually increased in the five years after reserves were established, as did commercial landings of squid, sea urchin, and lobster.”  In other words, creating projected areas in the oceans increases fish inside and outside of the protected areas.

What about just plain policing?  There are times it doesn’t feel effective at all.  In trying save elephants from being slaughtered for their ivory, the good guys seem to be losing.  But they keep right on fighting and building preserves and educating and trying to stop the trade from being lucrative.  In the case of elephants, it’s too early to tell if the poachers or the police will prevail in the long run, but the good news is that elephants are beloved all over the world, and their plight is well publicized.  They have a chance.   Policing has more clearly worked in other situations.  There is a fascinating woman named Suwanna Gauntlett who has almost completely stopped the wildlife trade in Cambodia, primarily through creating a network of people called the Wildlife Rapid Rescue Team to enforce existing laws in the country.  I was floored by all that this one individual has done, and I recommend reading the article that I’ve linked to about her below.  Suwanna is the founder and CEO of the Wildlife Alliance.

Humans react to stories.  One example is the recent story of a dozen killer whales trapped in ice in Hudson Bay.  While they may have been trapped by climate change, they did not need our help to get free.  But people all over the world paid close attention to their story and watched Internet videos of the whales sharing a single small breathing hole. A few years ago, I was at Mark Anderson’s Future in Review Conference.  The audience was treated to an early screen of the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove and a visit from its director, Louise Psihoyos.   The film illuminates the purposeful destruction of dolphins, and also points out the dangers of our increasingly-toxic seas.  Since the film, there has been much international outcry about the events it captured for us.  The problem isn’t solved yet, but the film and the activists it inspired have made it harder for the wholesale slaughter of dolphins to go on outside of the public eye. There are many other examples of powerful stories that made a difference:  Michael Fay’s megatransect journey, Dian Fossey’s Gorillas in the Mist, and from my own childhood, Marguerite Henry’s recounting of how Wild Horse Annie fought to save mustangs in the YA book Mustang:  Wild Spirit of the West.

We have banded together or acted as individual heroes over and over in order to save the big species we know and love.  I found many more examples, but this is enough to illustrate that we’ve taken responsibility for both the land and the animals of the Earth.  Unlike land – which we’ve chosen to own – wild animals belong to both no one and to all of us.  It will take continued work on our part to save any or all of the species I mentioned here, or to save the microscopic krill that the whales depend on, or to save the coral reefs from ocean acidification, or to really save any of it.  I think we can, and that we already have a lot of successful models to follow, some wildly successful, such as Suwanna Gauntlet’s Wildlife Alliance and the clear resolve of the California government to expand safe places along one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world.

This is the week to think about protecting animals, and maybe to donate a bit to them some how.  Oh, and get your pencils out and sharp.  Next entry will be the rant blog – the one where we get to trash ourselves and point out all of the awful things we’ve done.  Because after that one allowed catharsis, everything else in this set of postings is going to be about strategies to thrive, and canted toward the future rather than laying groundwork for a common understanding of the present situation.

I have a special treat to go with this entry.  One of my favorite flash fiction pieces was inspired by a talk that Michael Fay at an international conference of geographer’s in San Diego one year.  The story first appeared in Nature Magazine.  Here’s a link:  http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7104/full/442846a.html

Once more, thanks for reading.  Comments welcome!

 

Some of the resources I used developing this article:

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: http://www.iucnredlist.org/about/red-list-overview
ConservationBytes.com: Not so ‘looming’ Anthropocene extinctions, CJA Bradshaw, 2009;  http://conservationbytes.com/2009/11/04/not-so-looming-anthropocene-extinctions
US Fish and Wildlife Service, Endangered Species Program:  http://www.fws.gov/endangered/map/index.html (A nice, interactive map)
Mongabay.com, Cambodia’s wildlife pioneer: saving species and places in Southeast Asia’s last forest, Laurel Neme, May 11, 2011:

http://news.mongabay.com/2011/0511-neme_gauntlett.html

Nature News, Reserves ‘win-win’ for fish and fishermen, Rex Dalton, 2/23/2010: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100223/full/4631007a.html
Switchboard, Natural Resources Defense Council Staff Blog, Karen Garrison’s Blog, 8/31/2010:    http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kgarrison/marine_protected_areas_hold_pr.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1636100
NBCnews, 11 killer whales free after being ‘locked’ in ice, mayor says, Miranda Leitsinger, Januuary, 2013: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/10/16437371-11-killer-whales-free-after-being-locked-in-ice-mayor-says
National Geographic, Blood Ivory, by Brian Christy, October 2012: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/10/ivory/christy-text
NBCNews, Orphaned elephants find sanctuary in Kenya amid rampant poaching, Roan Allen, January 2012:  http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/25/16699075-orphaned-elephants-find-sanctuary-in-kenya-amid-rampant-poaching#comments
The Cove movie, The Cove Effect, and More, July 26th, 2010:  http://thecovemovie.com/_blog/Blog/post/The_Cove_Effect,_And_More
Outside, How the nomad found home, Michael Mcrea, October 21, 2011:  http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/nature/How-the-Nomad-Found-Home.html?page=all
PBS Video, Saving the Ocean | The Sacred Island: http://video.pbs.org/video/1874606186

Backing into Eden: Chapter 1 – We are Responsible

When I drive from home to work, none of the land I pass is wild.  It’s lawns, or parks, or part of the city.  On my drive in, I can see the Olympic Mountains as I crest the hill and head down toward the Kirkland waterfront.  They are a mash up of native lands, national parks, and beach cities.  Forks, the city of the Twilight books, is over there.  The Olympics are largely wild, but they are managed carefully.  I suspect there is no land in the whole mountain range that is not owned. Someone – a person, a government, a tribe, a company – someone manages everything I can see.  Even the water between the mountains and me is managed by a series of laws and contains a lot of protected spaces and reserves– whether the deep and beautiful lake Washington that is used primarily for recreation or the troubled Puget Sound.

The primary premise of this set of blogs is that we are on our way to managing the Earth, to turning the whole thing into a garden.  I am not even going to try to make a case that I view this as optimum – I don’t.  But I believe it is happening. The short version is that we are already working large amounts of the Earth as farmland, setting aside other areas to protect and preserve, and closely controlling specific ecological niches.  We plant, we water, and we harvest.

In this entry, I’ll talk about full ecosystems.  In the next entry, there will be examples of how we care for specific species.

First, we farm.  According to multiple articles that I found, we use something between 37 and 50 percent of the Earth’s arable landmass for farming (animals and crops).  By definition, farmland is managed: farms are crops, and humans intervene over most of that acreage.  Actual crops are planted, cared for, and harvested.  Pests are discouraged via pesticides, genetic modifications to plants, or organically.  Rangeland is fenced and patrolled. It is no longer wild.

Second, we set aside large areas of the Earth and the Oceans.  We call them reserves, protected areas, and parks.  In many cases, we limit uses.  This is still management.  It takes a combination of laws and rangers and myriad government or NGO entities. The cost of protection is significant.  Rangers who work to save elephants from the ivory trade die for their troubles. Much of the Amazon basin is “protected” but deforestation occurs even inside the protected areas.  Each year, we (the global community) are adding to the number of protected areas, which means we are taking responsibility for more portions of the land and the sea.

Third, we are working in microcosm to protect countless local natural resources.  While humans generally do more policing than actively managing of protected areas, there are herculean efforts all over the globe to protect beloved local ecosystems.  One of those programs is in my town:  the Green Kirkland Partnership.  Members of the community gather frequently to “weed” the park of invasive plants, to plant or re-plant or protect native plants, and to save urban forests.  All the way across the country, Florida is working to save the Okeechobee through a federally adopted Everglades restoration plan.  Transportation planners are increasingly planning and building wildlife corridors.  These already exist in Banff, in the Netherlands, and here in Washington State.  They vary from wide bridges designed for migrating wildlife to simple re-designs of ways that water already flowed under roads to allow for wildlife to pass through with the water (terrestrial and aquatic).  Wildlife corridors are being designed into cities as well as built into rural areas. These stories are happening all over the world.  Success varies, but the heart and energy and care that go into these projects does not.

Yes, we are still lucky enough that portions of the Earth remain largely wild (some of those, only through active preservation).  Some will stay that way.  But which areas, and how wild, will be our choice.   Let’s hope that we can make good choices.

Today, we farm, protect, and work to restore our land.  Yes, we are also destroying land, habitat, and animals, and that tension is not going to go away.  We are already making conscious and unconscious choices about which ecosystems and species to save.  I’ll talk about that in the next post.  In the meantime, you might look around for conservation projects near you, and notice how the nearby land is used.  Who is responsible for it?  What do you see on your commute?  On your favorite trips?

Some of the resources I used developing this article:

Farming Claims almost half of earth’s land, new maps show, National Geographic News,  December 9th, 2005, James Owen: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1209_051209_crops_map.html
World Bank, Agricultural Land (% of land area): http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.ZS
The Guardian, UN warns of looming worldwide food crisis in 2013, John Vidal:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/oct/14/un-global-food-crisis-warning
New York Times, Rangers in Isolated Central Africa Uncover Grim Cost of Protecting Wildlife,  December 31, 2012, Jeffrey Gettleman: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/world/africa/central-africas-wildlife-rangers-face-deadly-risks.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Mongabay.com, Protected areas cover 44% of the Brazilian Amazon, April 20th, 2011: http://news.mongabay.com/2011/0420-protected_amazon.html
National Geographic.com, The Ocean, Marine Protected Areas:  http://ocean.nationalgeographic.com/ocean/take-action/marine-protected-areas  (This is a nifty interactive map)
 City of Kirkland, Green Kirkland Partnership page: http://www.kirklandwa.gov/depart/parks/Green_Kirkland_Partnership.htm
Everglades Foundation website:  http://www.evergladesfoundation.org/the-everglades/saving-the-everglades
City of Portland, Parks and Recreation, Westside Wildlife Corridor: http://www.portlandoregon.gov/parks/article/204516

Reading Recommendation: The Emperor’s Soul, by Brandon Sanderson

Just finished “The Emperor’s Soul,” a really lovely novella by Brandon Sanderson. It came to me as a freebie somewhere – maybe at World Fantasy – and I almost left it behind.  I’m glad I didn’t. The beautiful cover convinced me to add yet another book to the load I was already carrying.  Not that I don’t like Brandon’s work – I do.  But I don’t have enough time to read everything I want to, and SF usually draws me more than fantasy.

I started it at the gym, and then read it every spare moment until finished.  It’s really a very enjoyable puzzle of a work.  I loved his character, and also the world (It is apparently set in the same place as Elantris, but I haven’t read that yet).  It is one of those engagingly well-written fantasies that fascinated me without a lot of overt action or obvious threat.  I highly recommend it, and I suspect it will go on my award ballots this year.  I might best sum up my enjoyment of this novella by saying the work itself has soul – I felt satisfied when it was done, and maybe the tiniest bit bigger.

The art, which has made it onto at least one “best covers” list for 2012, is by Alexander Ninitchkov.

 

Reading Recommendation: The God Species, by Mark Lynas

I always read non-fiction, and this year I’m reading more of it than usual in preparation for my “Backing into Eden” blog series. I just finished Mark Lynas’s “The God Species: How the Planet can Survive in the Age of Humans.”  I read his Six Degrees late last year and recommended it highly.  Six Degrees is specifically a well-done survey of climate change research.  The God Species is a broader look at challenges to the planet, and it follows the planetary boundaries research, which I found a useful way to look at the current and future stresses we must confront. It is a reminder that we are both challenged by more than we may think, and capable of more than we might imagine.  It’s good work.

Lynas pulls no punches and he is no PC green.  I didn’t agree with him on everything, but that’s not the point.  To me, this is the most important conversation of our time, and it is up to us to have it.  This book should be read by everyone.

Reading Recommendation: The Sigil Trilogy by Henry Gee

I spent most of the weekend finishing The Sigil Trilogy, by Henry Gee.

This is a complex and brave set of books.  Classic SF in every sense of the word.  Henry follows multiple time lines, with the primary story set in our near future.  He takes archaeology and astronomy, far-flung space travel, and an alien race and uses them to create a true sense-of-wonder world.

I found it really hard to put down.  The Sigil Trilogy asks and offers answers for big questions, contains gosh-wow ideas, and gosh-wow science.

I fell in love with his main characters in the near future time frame.  We first meet them as young archaeologists, and follow them through major discoveries.  I truly loved every main character in this group, and found them to be larger-than-life and yet subtly human all at once. Endearing.  Henry is an editor at Nature Magazine, and his knowledge of the scientific community comes through really well.

The book also flips through some far-past time frames.  If there was any fault for me with the book, it was that the far-past time frames were less interesting to me than the main story, and so I often grew impatient while reading those chapters.  It was also a bit tough to enter – the opening confused me (at first), and a few other scenes seemed unnecessary  (I can’t chat about them without spoilers).  But entirely in spite of those (rather small) problems, I found myself stuck to my iPad screen much longer than I planned to be more than once, and on both weekend days I woke up and dove right back into the trilogy instead of my usual routine of reading the New York Times with my coffee.

I really admire the reach of these books, and the many subtle and excellent nuances in the writing.  It’s classic-SF award-worthy.

New Research Series: Backing into Eden

The childhood mythos that I grew up describes a humanity driven from a great garden by the weight of our sins.  As an adult, I have come to believe the opposite:  our sins are driving us to become gardeners.  While I far prefer to imagine a world where humans are simply a harmonious part of a beautiful and mysterious ecosystem, we have left that future far behind.  The pressures of population, energy, politics, and progress have pushed us to a point in history where we must take responsibility and become active guardians of the place we call home.  Whether we were born in a garden or not, we must now learn how to manage the critical resources of our world, or perish.

There is no acceptable path to the future that includes going backwards.  Humanity as a whole is not going to stop innovating, growing, interacting, and consuming.  Any successful path forward must allow human prosperity to increase.

In this series of writings, I intend to explore what this means.  Not all of it will sound, seem, or even be pleasant.  Nor will every step be painful.

We are going to have to make some hard choices about species, about geo-engineering, about food and water and other fundamentals.  We must make these choices with an eye on a future most of us will not live in, but which we can design to be rich, productive, and perhaps more important, possible.

This journey is sparked by the need to prepare for a talk I’ll be giving at the World Futurist Society meeting in Chicago in July of 2013, but it is work I started years ago, and work I expect to continue for years.  I am a futurist and a writer and a technology professional.  I work for the government, and believe there is a vital role the role for the government in this journey.  There are also critical roles for individuals, corporations, NGO’s, foundations, and other organizations.  We’re all in this together.

Comments, discussion, and dissent are all welcome.  Purely political rhetoric is not.  It’s important to reach beyond the simplistic slogans of the green or liberal parties and of the conservative and libertarian wings of the world.  We do need to forge a future that includes the fondest dreams of all of these groups – clean air and skies, growing economies, hope, entrepreneurship, and public discourse.

I often hear from people who seem to have lost all hope, and perhaps all faith in humanity.  I have not.  Join me on this journey…

I intend to post at least once every two weeks.  I’ll share my reading and draft essays.  By mid-spring, I’ll have all of this happening on a separate website (backingintoeden.com).  In the meantime, it will be here.  I think this will be an interesting bit of work, so if anyone wants to see this mirrored elsewhere, send me an email and we can talk about it.

In  the meantime, let me know what you think of the idea!

2013: Five ideas for all of us

As I was doing my 2012 predictions analysis, I decided I was bored with that game.   I suppose because I have neither won big or truly lost for a few years.  So on to a new game, and one I hope will yield more results even though I’ll never be able to measure them.

Here’s the game.  Come up with five important things to do and do them.  I’ve always believed that we create the future.  Not that we have 100% control, of course.  But each choice we make changes an outcome, and good outcomes add up.   If I choose to be greedy or depressed, then certain other things ensue.  If I choose to be happy or to donate to a particular cause, other things happen.

So what are five things that it would be good for everyone to consider this year?

Get serious about alternative energy.  Man-made climate change is happening. We still don’t understand the impacts or the costs, but we are starting to understand that they are huge.  We must shift away from fossil fuel.  We need to do this to be safe (geopolitical and climate and environmental safety all need this change). Fossil fuel is a finite resource and we know how to use infinite resources now.   Fossil fuel is dirty and we know how to be cleaner.  The shift will cost us.  The good stuff costs more.  We’ll pay for fancy lattes but we want dirt-cheap sludge for energy?  Time to buck up.  It will pay off handily.

There is at least something each of us can do individually.  Conserve.  Drive less. Buy an electric car.  Ride our bikes to work.  Put up solar panels.  Just do something, and then something else, and then something else again.

Question our own beliefs. Read the other side.  Talk civilly to someone who holds the opposite view and listen to him or her.  Change itself is not actually as important as being more open.  Staying ossified inside political slogans that are probably lies or exaggeration is not very helpful for anyone.   The bigger world needs enough compromise to get things done, and empathy is a great step towards compromise.

Learn.  Pick up a few good non-fiction books or follow blogs or read good newspapers.  There’s so much happening in the world that it’s hard for even voracious readers to keep up.  The casual consumer of the morning newscast is falling behind.  So is the FaceBook addict.  See the idea above about questioning beliefs. I did decide to read more nonfiction in 2012.   I read a few sections of the e-version of the New York Times every day. Non-fiction books I read included 6 Degrees, Imagine: How Creativity Works, Made to Stick, and Thinking, Fast and Slow.  They weren’t quite as entertaining as fiction.  But I learned a lot.

Be healthier.  What that means for each of us is different.  But if we’re healthy, we’re more likely to have the energy to follow our dreams, keep up with our families, and do something for the world.

Do something for someone else.  Pick a charity or a cause or decide to do a random act of kindness once a week or once a month.  I read an article today about how some people who lost their homes because of Sandy are now feeling grateful.  It could have been worse – they could have lost a child in Newtown.  Helping others is the best way to stop being grumpy about our own problems.   It loops all the way back to the empathy that we might get if we listen to others.

Wishing everyone a good 2013!

2012 Predictions Round-up

Every year I play a predictions game.  It’s not really good futuring (after all, there remain no jetpacks).  But I still like the game.  So here goes an analysis of my results for 2012:

Publishing and Creativity:

There will be more attempts to make good franchises with rich multimedia (like Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson’s Mongolaid, like Al Gore’s Our Choice iPad App).  I’m expecting more of this to come out in 2012 than 2011.  One major success could drive this market – Twilight or Harry Potter like sales of something interactive and multimedia but that is not a movie or a mash up of marketing with a book.

I didn’t see as much of this as I’d hoped.  David Farland did a nice enhanced version of his YA novel Nightingale that seems to be doing well.  There are a few others out there.  But no big change.  Still, I will re-predict this for next year.  Love to hear from any of you that have good examples of new format books that are for adults. 

In the book biz, the end of 2012 will see:

Most publishers doing better than the end of 2011, with some winners in the big companies and a few rising stars that keep rising in the mid-pack (Nightshade, for example, or Prime).  Which ones succeed at this size depends on individuals rather than corporate culture. This is an ever-changing industry, but I couldn’t find a clear upward trend.  This suggests the changing business models haven’t yet been really absorbed.
Barnes and Noble will still exist.Yep. Although a few flagship stores have closed. Stock prices are just above what they were last year, and still a lot lower than five years ago.  But they don’t appear to be in much trouble or poised for a big gain, either.
Authors will gain a bit more leverage on things like e-royalties because self-publishing will remain viable, and smaller publishers with less overhead will be able to compete better against the big boys. Not sure about this one.  Authors at the top have more leverage, but they would have had that anyway.  E-book royalty rates don’t seem to be increasing as fast as I hoped they would.  There’s some success for the self-published, but also a lot of slow sales and false starts.  Kickstarter has allowed for a few good things to happen.

America:

I expect a dismal political year.  So far, as an election year, it’s already boring and bad. Mostly right.  The most dismal political season I’ve ever seen.  The good news? For me, the election came out right.  More good news on same-sex marriage, Obama a better bet than Romney, and we’ve landed a Governor in Washington State who cares about the beautiful environment we have here.  But the scary schism between us all is getting worse rather than better.  And that’s not good news.  We need centrists on both sides and we haven’t got them.  The Republican party continues to implode and intelligent conservatism is coming through the Blue Dogs, so the whole thing is more an argument within the Democratic party that doesn’t change much as the far right stops most progress.
The economy is a heck of a wild card, and its global underpants are showing as the Eurozone and China affect us. My prediction, with a whopping barely over 50% feeling of a half-full glass?  Our economy will keep struggling up.  Outliers?  Continued Eurozone problems are at worst a drag, but if China sees big change downward, we could teeter all over again.  This is a time when every single strong economy helps the whole:  We should root for everyone.  This is not a zero-sum game. Yes.  Struggling remains the right word.  The US and world economy remains a house of cards.  But we are trending up.  At least as of the moment (the fiscal cliff remains undecided as I wrote this, and is overblown anyway.  But economies are creatures of expectations and mood, shaped by news and spin as much as real action).
We’ll keep having climate disasters and for the most part, the America public will keep (illogically) believing it’s not caused by us.  Those of us who are NOT skeptics remain frustrated as hell and write brilliant essays that are ignored.  Mostly right. The best news is that I’m sensing a shift in climate understanding after Sandy.  Maybe that will play out next year, which would be great.  If I had to be a little wrong on any of these, that was the prediction to be a little wrong on.

Governance

Regardless of the fact that it won’t impact America as much as it should, governance will be a topic for thinkers everywhere.   The Arab Spring and Occupy are all about tearing down existing structures.  The conversation of what to do after that will play out at least in actions (e.g. continued struggle like what is happening in Egypt today).  I am sure this is a conversation happening behind the closed doors of the powerful.  Hopefully it will also play out in the blogosphere and elsewhere is a truly meaningful way. Consider this a prediction of the conversation, but not of conclusions.

I don’t see much sign of this.  We need a better form of governance and a more international one, since we have international problems to solve.  But it’s not happening.  The Arab Spring countries are seeing a thin spring at best, the cost of Syria is scary, and there hasn’t been a lot of settling.  Let’s hope it’s just a matter of time.  

Summary?  More right than not, and not flat-wrong on anything.  I’m a little disappointed that I’m not seeing the changes I was hoping for in publishing or better governance.  At any rate, that wraps 2012.  On to think about 2013.

Mayan December now available in audio

I’m very pleased that Mayan December is now available in at Audible.com.  I like the narrator, too.  I’m only through about a chapter, but she sounds really good and easy to listen to, like a nice match of voice to book.

The release tickles me.  Mayan December is one of my favorite books, and it’s set in the Yucatan Peninsula, which is a favorite place of mine.  It’s also set right now – in December, 2012.  And no, it’s not about the end of the world.  It is about magic and mystery, about family and fear, and a bit about a jaguar.

Partly historical fantasy and partly contemporary family fiction, it is different than my usual science fiction.  But sometimes a girl needs to play in new sandboxes….

Release day Interview with Ramez Naam about Nexus

Happy debut fiction novel release day to Ramez Naam, for Nexus.  I had the great pleasure of interviewing Ramez.  Our conversation can be found over at SF Signal this morning. I expect this book to please a lot of readers, and to start many interesting conversations.