Nature coming back at ex-parking lot

I found this relic from the happy motoring age just off Cornelia Street in Plattsburgh, N.Y., yesterday. It'll take another decade, at least, but nature is slowly pushing the asphalt off the land at this spot. Best wishes on fighting sprawl

No this, no that, and . . .

It is very much a country of "no" these days, as this sign indicates. I found this one on the edge of the entrance street to a Mallwart complex in suburban Plattsburgh, N.Y., yesterday. If there was more room on the signboard, this is what it should say: Don't even try walking here because this town cares only about cars, trucks, SUVs and climate-change pollution.

How to waste water without really trying

That's what business boosters have been up to in Lake Placid, N.Y., twice home to the Winter Olympic Games. On the day last week I took this photo, the air temp was 93. Back at my hotel, the Hampton Inn, the automatic lawn sprinklers were trying their best to water non-existent plants trying to get a foothold in sidewalks. Amazing the level of di

mmess there is out there. And the money for resort advertising is apparently a bottomless pit.

Dr. James Hansen presses the climate case for nuclear energy

Good video with some transcribed remarks here. I still wonder why we find it so damn hard, for starters, to simply turn off the lights.

What killed invasive Asian carp In Missouri River?

That's the big question these days for fisheries professionals in Iowa, Nebraska and elsewhere, both so they know what works to rid the river and its tribs of the invasive Asian carp and what impact it's all having on native fish. Read about it all.

Ongoing drought prompts fish harvesting from Nebraska's Platte River

The Platte, as you'll see in the photo accompanying this article, is now a mere series of muddy puddles. The river I remember from early spring visits to it in 1990-92 is pretty damn sad to see.

Here's a new way to cater to our cars

And that would be this: Rip rap the parking lagoons (a k a parking lots), just like this one I found in Lake Placid, N.Y. After all, Americans do love their cars.