Radical Earth

We are teetering on the edge, you and me. We are living well on the very skin of a planetary beast that is never really at rest. And this world we live on resides in a celestial neighborhood that is filthy with everything from dust particles to sand grains, from gigantic wispy comets the consistency of Styrofoam to chunks of rock that range from the size of marbles to mountains. Far more often than we smug humans understand, Earth shakes our species to the foundations with geological spasms, and wayward wanders from space blindside us by triggering continent-size firestorms, month-long catastrophic rainfall, and tsunami waves as tall as skyscrapers. To make matters worse, our species has become a global space heater so efficient that we will, by early in the next century, bring about an atmosphere that would have made the magnificent dinosaurs content but forced furball mammals underground for 140 million years. We are turning our resident planet back in time, back to a climate regimen that was extant during the Cretaceous or the first days of the Eocene when crocodiles and palm trees thrived in the high arctic. This eclectic collection of blog essays will open a window onto a planet that you thought was your trusted companion but one that has been anything but civil from time to time to the millions of life forms that travel along with us.