Public Lands Are Under Pressure. This Newsroom Is Paying Attention.
Hello! I'm back :)
Over the last nine (!!!) years that I’ve written Sticks and Stones, I’ve taken several breaks from creating it. I’ve gotten new jobs, moved, had babies, gotten married, and just generally had to prioritize other parts of my life from time to time. This last break was longer than the others have been.
My husband and I spent the last 18+ months renovating a historic adobe in our neighborhood. We worked incredibly hard on it, patching mud, redoing finishes, overhauling the septic and electric systems—I even got my real estate license so that I could be the one to sell it in the end. Then we listed promptly as Trump began to play with tariffs and the housing market began to turn. impeccable timing. Luckily, we were still able to sell it and give someone else the chance to live in a charming mud house, not all that different from our own, but that project has largely consumed my free time over the last year or two.
During all of this, we also decided to go for another kid. Ruby, named after my mom’s mom, joined our family in March. I also returned to Outside full-time, and have since become the brand director, where I oversee the editorial sides of the magazine and website.
Sometimes our priorities have to shift, but I’m happy to be back, writing this newsletter for all of you.
What I’m Reading
Public Lands Are Under Pressure. This Newsroom Is Paying Attention.
In case you missed the news, my friend and former editor-in-chief of Outside, Chris Keyes, launched his new endeavor. RE:PUBLIC is a nonprofit news organization covering public lands with investigative, bipartisan reporting.
It’s a response to a couple of things. I’ve been in media for 25 years, and I’ve seen so much contraction across the industry. I’ve seen some analysis that said we have 75 percent fewer journalists than we had two decades ago. So I think what we’re seeing is a media industry that is overwhelmed by all of the news and doesn’t know what to cover first. From a national media perspective, public lands issues are just not at the top of the list. They’re maybe number 17 on the list of things that journalists feel the need to be covering right now. I see a real vacuum that needs to be filled, and that’s what RE:PUBLIC is attempting to fill.
The Messy Reality of Feeding Alaska
Eva Holland for High Country News
No railroad connects Alaska and the Lower 48, and air freight is financially viable for only a few high-end commodities — non-Alaskan seafood, say, and time-sensitive produce like cherries. It takes around 40 hours of nonstop driving to cover the more than 2,200 highway miles from Seattle to Fairbanks via the AlCan. Even factoring in some halfway-decent rest time for the driver, that’s still a lot quicker than the several-days-long container-ship-to-port-to-truck relay that moves goods to Fairbanks from the Port of Tacoma through Anchorage. But I wanted to confirm that assumption, and to know how much food actually came up the highway every year. I had visions of digging up delightful trivia: How many thousands of gallons of milk bounced over potholes to Alaska each year? How many loaves of bread?
The Cold-Plunge Fallacy: Why Some Fads May Never Work for You
Jonny Thompson for Big Think
There’s something I’ve noticed, and I’ve been calling it the cold-plunge fallacy. I know that there are some people who enjoy cold baths and that kind of stuff, and so great, go ahead and enjoy it. But for the rest of us mere mortals, the idea of stepping into an ice bath for 10 minutes a day is awful. And the amount of self-persuasion that goes into convincing yourself to do something like that might be a problem. Yes, cold plunging is evidence-based, but it might be such a small yield that you get out of it, and you hate it.
I have to wonder if that constant self-persuasion and hatred of the task doesn’t then outweigh the small, tiny benefit that you’d get from it.”
Last but Not Least
