The Ferris Files

At the southernmost tip of India lies the Muppandal Wind Farm, the biggest source of wind energy in India and one of the largest in Asia. I drove through it by accident a few days ago and and can report that Muppandal is as curious and multilayered as India itself.

On a recent trip to India, I came to understand one reason why India’s per-capita electricity consumption is 15 times less than that in the United States.

The piece, “Wilderness Calling,” is part of KQED’s Perspectives series, where regular people make their best case on a topic of the day. While some might question if I’m a regular person, I have formed an emphatic opinion about the growing use of cellphones in the great outdoors, based on a jarring experience I had in Yosemite National Park last summer. Listen to the whole thing below.

Today I visited Washington, D.C. to cover the Blue Vision Summit, a gathering of ocean scientists and ocean activists, and rarely have I been so depressed and inspired in the space of a single speech.
That speech was the keynote by Roger Payne, the biologist who discovered in the 1970s that humpback whales have songs, and [...]

What does it smell like in a wastewater treatment plant? Not as bad as you might think. A powerful chemical-detergent smell pervades, masking something the nose can’t quite identify.

Once through the door and into the innards of the Oceanside Water Pollution Control plant, our guide Catania showed us the “influent gates” where the first big [...]