On Wednesday, the sky over the Bay Area turned orange. The visual was alien, yet the cause—rampant wildfires, accelerated by climate change—was very much a this-world problem. “Some folks said it felt like living on the next planet over, the red one,” Steve Rubenstein and Michael Cabanatuan wrote on the front page of yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle. “Others said it was like a solar eclipse, but longer, or the apocalypse, but less biblical.” Their story appeared under a banner headline, “SURREAL SKY, SURREAL YEAR.” A photo, spanning the width of A1, showed a passerby, clad in shorts, sneakers, and a medical mask, staring upward; behind him, the lights that typically illuminate the Bay Bridge at night were still glowing, because their sensors had been unable to detect the sunrise. Catherine Geeslin, a Bay Area resident, told the Chronicle, “It feels like the end of the world, or like Mordor.” The fires are not only in California—swathes of land are ablaze along the length of the West Coast. The flames have torched entire towns and killed at least fifteen people, seven of whom were found dead yesterday. In Washington state, more than 500,000 acres have burned; in Oregon, the figure is nearly double that. In California, more than three million acres are charred, including a patch of the Mendocino National Forest that now constitutes the biggest fire in the state’s history. Hundreds of thousands of people have had to evacuate their homes. As I wrote recently, that’s a... Continue reading at 'Columbia Journalism Review'
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2020-09-11 12:16:42 UTC ]
There are few things more heartbreaking for an editor than turning the lights off on a publication. Unfortunately, today marks the second time I've had to perform that unrewarding task. And while I plan to make good on my promise to take what we've learned here at Distro and transfer it to... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2013-09-28 00:00:00 UTC ]
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