I’m a few days away, riding through the west Texas desert on my motorcycle, but soon enough I’ll be chasing the rains north through country ravaged by cycles of drought and flood and drought and flood. Maybe that will give us something to talk about wh… Read More

BUSHKILL, Pa. — Even now, when I conjure him and he deigns to come, I always see him the same way. He’s encircled in sweet blue smoke, standing on the cool stone of the walkway around midnight. A little man, ancient, almost swallowed by the vivid artic… Read More

“Seamus McGraw takes us on a trip along America’s culturally fractured back roads and listens to farmers and ranchers and fishermen, many of them people who are not ideologically, politically, or in some cases even religiously inclined to believe in man-made global climate change”. “He shows us how they are already being affected and the risks they are already taking on a personal level to deal with extreme weather and its very real consequences for their livelihoods.”

The very last thing the old farmer wanted to do on that rainy Sunday morning in early spring was sit down and talk with me. And he had made it perfectly clear why. “I never met a liberal before,” he had told his daughter, who had volunteered to act as… Read More

I’m pleased that Betting the Farm has been reviewed by J. Scott Donahue for the Sierra Club. “More Americans believe in angels than in climate change, writes journalist Seamus McGraw in his new book, Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories From the Fron… Read More

I’ll never really know where it came from, but just as Sundance and I rounded the barn, something inside me snapped, and I let out a blood-curdling yell from somewhere deep inside me that I had never heard from myself before or since.

You almost have to be lost to find it. And even then, if you don’t know in your bones what you’re looking at, you might not realize what you’ve found. The first time I saw the place, half a dozen years ago, it was hidden by scrub pines. I caught a glim… Read More

It wasn’t until weeks later–long after the half-gallon of Carlo Rossi red I had swilled and the painkillers that came later in the night wore off–that I actually felt the impact. Sure, I had some vague recollection of the fall, of trying to hop up on the banister in the atrium of my college dorm, three floors above a flagstone foyer, and of missing it by a good six inches.

Seamus will speak about his latest book, Betting the Farm on a Drought, during the panel discussion. McGraw will be joined by Kenna Lang Archer, author of Unruly Waters: A Social and Environmental History of the Brazos River, and Robert L. Gulley, author of Heads Above Water: The Inside Story of the Edwards Aquifer Recovery Implementation Program. The authors will discuss the ongoing drought that has scorched its way across the country in recent years.

I’m doing some back of the envelope calculations, and it’s starting to dawn on me that California almonds are kind of like crunchy coal when it comes to the challenges we’re facing. A lot is being made – with good reason — of the fact that about 2 mil… Read More