"YOU DECIDE. Republican gubernatorial candidates triumphed in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday -- two states where President Obama had campaigned hard for the Democratic candidates. Are Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia a referendum on President Obama and his administration?"

-FoxNews.com Poll, 11/03/2009

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We were encouraged when we started reading Thomas Friedman’s op-ed piece in the New York Times this Sunday. We’ve used this blog to agitate about how little attention politicians and newspeople pay to biodiversity loss, relative to the (admittedly sobering) challenges of minimizing climate change and its impacts....

In the car the other day, we caught a bit of Marketplace on NPR. We like Marketplace -- it puts economic news in social and political context, making it the perfect business show for people like us, who don't know much about business.

But we do know a bit about...

Head to your nearest airport and board a flight to Lima, Peru. From Lima, catch a smaller plane to Cuzco, where you can catch an even smaller plane to Boca Manu. From the airstrip in Boca Manu, head to the river; you'll find a local man waiting for you in...

We're not sure how much time you spend perusing the New York Times' Science section. With the Times Co. reporting a first-quarter loss of $74 million this week, chances are you're one of the hundreds of millions of Americans not relying on the Gray Lady for your science news...

When we think about conserving biodiversity, killing trees isn't a strategy that immediately leaps to mind. Yet, according to research that one of us (RMP) has been involved with over the past seven years, making habitats a little less green might sometimes be necessary to save species on the...

Dogs are just domesticated wolves, brought in from the wild somewhere in Asia back in the Pleistocene. Dogs and wolves can and do interbreed, and scientists consider them the same species. Given the lack of biological difference between the two, it's interesting how differently we perceive them. Whereas dogs are...

There are a couple of ways to think about a monkey turd. You can look at it as a packet of undigested monkey food, which has passed through a monkey gut and collected a bunch of bacteria in the process. Alternatively, you can look at it, to borrow the phrasing...

Today, one of us (RMP) is writing from Ecuador.

This post is being typed on the rear deck of the schooner Diamante, which is at this moment sailing across the equator. In front of the laptop, the sun is setting and two sea lions are cavorting. Behind it, a jagged...

In our last post, we vented our frustration with the decision of voters in California, Florida, and Arizona to write anti-gay discrimination into their state constitutions. Clearly, many readers share our sentiments--there is a great deal of anger out there on what is otherwise an exultant day in progressive...

We live in two states, Florida and California, that on Tuesday voted to write vulgar discrimination into their constitutions. In Florida, voters passed Amendment 2; that measure, with its Orwellian alias "The Marriage Protection Amendment," prevents homosexual people from entering any "legal union that is treated as marriage or...

Today, we introduce a new feature, "Nobody Reads Nature," in which we try to convince you that ecology is really interesting, and that you should send us some money so that we can keep studying it.

The aphorism goes that you shouldn't miss the forest for the trees. But ecologists...

Today, we are blogging from Durham, North Carolina, where we are trying to do our humble bit to help elect Barack Obama. On Friday, Sarah Palin gave us yet another reason to feel good about what we're doing here.

We are far from the first people to comment on this...

Environmentalists often wonder, with some justification, why they have so little political clout and so much difficulty making headway. In polls, Americans overwhelmingly evince concern for the environment, while a majority of us also favor stricter gun-control legislation. Why, then, do most politicians essentially ignore environmentalists while genuflecting to the...

A short while ago, we mailed 100 dead spiders to Belgium. We didn't just do it for kicks, although it was funny to see the FedEx guy's reaction when he asked about the contents of the package. We did it because we needed to know, for a study we're conducting,...

In the 2004 Presidential election, environmental issues were essentially absent from the political discourse. Not so this year, with both parties' candidates vowing to treat our national petroleum addiction and shrink our bloated carbon footprint.

These promises are a refreshing breeze after eight years of stagnation and obfuscation (stagfuscation?)...