Another short, blurry, busy week at journalism school--nothing huge to report. Just the usual temporary highs (I might get a piece published where???) and lows (she wants me to write that stupid thing again???). In truth, I can't wait for the semester to be over. There's lots that I totally love-- the events, the connections, the opportunity to work on all sorts of multi-media projects--radio, video, web, and countless combinations thereof--but J200, my main class, is a total bust. Aside from the fact that I'm constantly running all over the place reporting on god knows what--crime, courts, culture, capitalism--I'm not learning nearly as much as I would be given a more "together" teacher. My instructor is incredibly experienced--she was once Washington bureau chief for the New York Times-- and she really cares about her students-- but she's disorganized and has the attention span of a gnat. For most of my days, I feel like I'm following a 3-year old around in a foreign country. Except that a 3-year old might be willing to admit he doesn't know where we're going.

Anyway. I'll be 27 this Sunday. When did time start moving that quickly? It's really freaking me out. That's all for now.

Oh yeah, and here are a few photos from recent articles I've done.

A former auto garage being transformed into an edgy new Oakland cafe

Are all of these bans on children's toys hurting small toy businesses?

UC Berkeley hosts local SWAT teams as they train for emergencies such as school shootings.

Disaster at Hand

Bad news for us young folks. I've been reading this morning about a few recent revelations about climate change and it's downright terrifying. As in, it actually makes me feel scared. The first thing that got me was the fact that the U.S. Geological Survey just reported that 2/3 of the entire population of polar bears will likely be gone by 2050. I'll be 70 years old.

The second item I came across was about an island off the coast of Greenland that's being called "Warming Island." It was previously thought to be part of mainland Greeland, but now that the glaciers have retreated, it's apparent that it's a freestanding island. Here's an excerpt from the article in the New York Times, about how melting ice could change the shape of continents as we know them.

Until recently, the consensus of climate scientists was that the impact of melting polar ice sheets would be negligible over the next 100 years. Ice sheets were thought to be extremely slow in reacting to atmospheric warming. The 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely considered to be an authoritative scientific statement on the potential impacts of global warming, based its conclusions about sea-level rise on a computer model that predicted a slow onset of melting in Greenland.

“When you look at the ice sheet, the models didn’t work, which puts us on shaky ground,” said Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University.

There is no consensus on how much Greenland’s ice will melt in the near future, Dr. Alley said, and no computer model that can accurately predict the future of the ice sheet. Yet given the acceleration of tidewater-glacier melting, a sea-level rise of a foot or two in the coming decades is entirely possible, he said. That bodes ill for island nations and those who live near the coast.

“Even a foot rise is a pretty horrible scenario,” said Stephen P. Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University in Miami.

On low-lying and gently sloping land like coastal river deltas, a sea-level rise of just one foot would send water thousands of feet inland. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide make their homes in such deltas; virtually all of coastal Bangladesh lies in the delta of the Ganges River. Over the long term, much larger sea-level rises would render the world’s coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.

Is that freaky or what?

And while I was reading that article, I glanced over to the "Most Emailed Articles" column on the Times page, and saw that today's #1 story was about how despite reports that sea level rise should be our biggest global warming concern, the evaporation of freshwater could have even more severe consequences. http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”

Sheesh. It's inconceivable really--that the same planet that is responsible for the beautiful northern California day I'm experiencing--birds tweeting, cat stretched out in the sunshine--might self-destruct in my lifetime. Or, in a slightly less extreme scenario, that it might destroy a good number of us humans.

You thought it was over

Little did you know. That navigating the wilds of muggy, beautiful Ecuador was the least of the challenges, I mean adventures, that have come my way in the last year. Turns out it's much easier to navigate public transportation in a Third World country than it is to find an apartment in Berkeley, California. Which, by the way, we're about to do for the third--count 'em, third--time since we moved out here from Minnesota.

More on that in a moment. But first, an explanation of why I'm undertaking this blog again. I miss you all. And I'm so busy with journalism school and all that goes with it that I don't get nearly enough time to check in with each of you as thoroughly as I'd like. Also, I have to write somewhat soulless articles for school all the time, and I'm finding I need an outlet for the quirky, bewildered me that doesn't get to express itself in my "general assignment newspaper reporting," which is the focus of this first semester. Anyway, hope you'll read.

Back to our adventures in real estate. Remember that adorable 2 BR apartment, with a huge, magical garden, that I raved about only months ago? Well, it's just as adorable as ever. And thanks to the 20 plus hours I've spent hacking through the thorns and overgrown weeds that were strangling the backyard, the garden is no longer threatening to take over the world.

But--and this is a very small capsule of what we've been deliberating over for months now--the neighborhood we're living in is sketchy at best. Which we knew moving here, of course, because we did our research. We looked up crime statistics, and we checked the place out at different times of day. We asked all the right questions.

But sometimes a block just goes sour, and although if we OWNED this place, we'd be attending community meetings, and nagging our councilmember, and bringing pineapple upside-down cakes to all the neighbors, it's just too much for right now. I'm really, really, busy, and I don't have time to bake pineapple upside-down cakes. Or rather, to learn how to bake pineapple upside-down cakes and then to bake them.

In short, here's what has happened our neighborhood in the last 2 months: Several burglaries, one homicide, unknown bouts of dog-fighting, a few drug busts, weekly cop visits, countless domestic violence incidents, and one hit-and-run of our neighbor's puppy. And a partridge in a pear tree.

But enough about why we're moving. It's also, by the way, so we can be closer to campus--it's a 40 minute bike ride now. We'll be emphasizing that point during the Open House being held at our current apartment today. "Great place-- how's the neighborhood?" they'll ask. And I'll have to defer to Eric because for some reason he's much better at answering honestly without going into every last dramatic, heart-wrenching detail.

Anyway, so goodbye to our radiant heat concrete floors, our secret garden, our open-floor-plan kitchen, beautiful master's bedroom, second bedroom, and hard-won paint job (four coats in the office to make it "plum" and we might have to paint it back). And hello to whatever plain, functional place in a good neighborhood close to campus that we can find. We looked at a few yesterday that would work. The one we really liked was cheap, simple, and located right smack dab in the middle of a neighborhood where the only sounds you hear at night are children begging their parents to stay out and play hopscotch for one more hour.

As for how journalism school is going, stay tuned for some crazy anecdotes. I won't disappoint.