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PG&E’s bankruptcy will slow California’s climate efforts

by LesleeStinson Posted on January 15, 2019

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What happens when a state’s major partner in its green makeover suddenly goes bankrupt? California is about to find out because Pacific Gas & Electric Company, the largest power utility in the state, has said it will file for Chapter 11 by the end of the month.

Some environmentalists said that a collapse of PG&E will impede California’s pioneering climate efforts. Without PG&E, the state’s energy efficiency programs, renewable power investments, and rooftop solar initiatives are all at risk, according to Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of Natural Resources Defense Council’s energy program. In a blog post, he pointed out that the company is investing over $1 billion a year in clean energy infrastructure and warned against reflexively punishing the company.

“Climate change is the real villain here,” Cavanagh told Grist.

The recent run of wildfires are part of the story. Electrical wires owned by the utility are a primary suspect in several wildfires that killed more than 90 people and destroyed some 20,000 homes over the past two years. PG&E faces an estimated $30 billion liability for the fires.

A former PG&E employee told the Wall Street Journal that it was blindsided by California’s historic drought, which turned much of the state into tinder. “It’s hard to believe that anybody would have predicted that it would have been like this,” Stephen Tankersley, who oversaw PG&E’s vegetation-management program between 1999 and 2015, told the Journal. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The landscape was so unusually parched that electrical equipment sparked one fire a day, according to the Journal’s analysis.

This isn’t the first trip through bankruptcy court for PG&E. The first time came in 2001, after Enron-era electricity price spikes drove it into the ground. Cavanaugh and other NRDC lawyers went to court back then to protect the utility’s clean energy investments.

Still, bankruptcy is sure to slow down the state’s initiatives and draw attention away from programs that might slash emissions further.

Cavanagh thinks California needs to change things if it wants to meet its climate goals. The state is unusual in that it holds utilities liable for fires regardless of whether they did a good job of maintaining lines and clearing nearby trees. The state should reform its liability rules, he said, while also doubling down on efforts to stem climate change.

“The clean energy transition well underway remains our best long-term defense,” Cavanagh told Grist. “But that transition is in danger of going up in smoke if the state persists in making electricity providers bear the costs of ever-more-destructive wildfires.”

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PG&E’s bankruptcy will slow California’s climate efforts

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Historically black community could face a toxic facility for Atlantic Coast Pipeline

by OlivaKrimper Posted on January 9, 2019

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The saga continues for the embattled Atlantic Coast Pipeline. On Tuesday, a Virginia board approved a controversial plan to build a natural gas compressor station in Union Hill, a historically black community in Buckingham County. The decision was met with uproar from opponents, who vowed to keep fighting in protests and in court.

“It’s a real tragedy that the board that has been appointed to protect our air makes a decision that seals the fate and disregards the ongoing health and welfare of an entire community,” said Chad Oba, chair of the Friends of Buckingham, an organization of Buckingham citizens, and a local resident that will be impacted by the decision.

“This is just another example of institutionalized racial discrimination,” she told Grist.

The state Air Pollution Control Board voted 4-0 in favor of a station permit for the approximately 600-mile underground pipeline that would carry fracked natural gas from West Virginia into Virginia and North Carolina. The development is a joint venture from several energy companies, but Richmond-based Dominion Energy is leading the pack in building the $7 billion pipeline.

AP Photo / Steve Helber

“Today’s unanimous approval is a significant step forward for this transformational project and the final state approval needed in Virginia,” wrote Dominion spokesman Karl Neddenien in an email to the Washington Post. “We have a profound respect for this community and its history, and we will continue working together to build a better future.”

Here’s the rub: Pipeline opponents are concerned that exhaust from the compressor station will hurt the surrounding community, putting them at risk of a range of ailments including asthma. Rebecca Rubin, an air board member, was dismissed by Virginia Governor Ralph Northam less than a week after she raised concerns about the disproportionate impact of the pipeline compressor station on Union Hill (ahem, Dominion energy is the state’s biggest corporate political donor).

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Rubin writes that the compressor station’s designated location “would disproportionately affect a minority community, a classic environmental justice issue.”

Dominion Energy presented survey data based on broad Census Bureau information they say indicates the area surrounding the site is sparsely populated and made up of no more than 39 percent minority residents based on race. Company representatives argued that, based on those demographics, the neighborhood was“not an environmental justice community.”

An anthropologist working with Friends of Buckingham, however, submitted the results of door-to-door research, finding that of the approximately 200 people who live within a one-mile radius of the site, 83 percent are racial minorities.

Supporters of the station say it will boost development in the rural area. In an effort to help build local support for the project, Dominion offered community improvement package valued at $5.1 million. The offer won over some residents but was not enough of an incentive for many residents of the Union Hill community, which was settled after the Civil War by free blacks and former slaves.

“The legacy of placing toxic facilities in places where they disproportionately affect poor communities of color is unjust and unacceptable and needs acute examination,” wrote stakeholders in an open letter calling for the permit’s denial. “It is not right to look the other way while this continues.”

One thing is clear: the battle is still a long ways from over. The project’s opponents will likely challenge the decision in state court, adding to the pipeline’s hodgepodge of setbacks. Notably, the plan was stalled after the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that the U.S. Forest Service did not have proper permissions for the pipeline to cut across the Appalachian Trail. (Dominion plans to appeal the decision.)

Despite the board’s approval of the natural gas compression station, members of the Friends of Buckingham County say they too plan to keep fighting. “We have not given up,” Oba added. “If anything, it’s given us more resolve.”

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Historically black community could face a toxic facility for Atlantic Coast Pipeline

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PG&E could face murder charges for California’s wildfires

by JackiGifford Posted on January 1, 2019

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It’s been nearly two months since the massive Camp Fire laid waste to the town of Paradise in northern California. It destroyed nearly 14,000 homes and claimed at least 86 lives, making it the deadliest fire in the state’s history. And now the state’s largest public utility provider, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. could face murder or manslaughter charges related to the blazes.

PG&E is already under investigation for criminal wrongdoing related to California’s deadly wildfires. Though investigators have not determined what officially sparked the fire, PG&E reported “an outage” on a transmission line in the area where the blaze began around the time the blazes started.

If district prosecutors find that “reckless operation” of its power equipment caused any of the state’s deadly wildfires in the past two years, the company could be held responsible for not just the resulting property damages but the loss of life as well.

“PG&E’s most important responsibility is public and workforce safety,” the utility, which provides electricity to about 16 million Californians, said in a statement. “Our focus continues to be on assessing our infrastructure to further enhance safety and helping our customers continue to recover and rebuild.”

On Friday, California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra submitted a legal brief to a federal judge who is considering how the wildfires could affect PG&E’s probation from a criminal case born out a 2010 explosion at a natural gas pipeline operated by PG&E. The judge will have to gauge PG&E’s “mental state” — meaning, its employees’ degree of negligence and recklessness — before determining which charges to bring, if any.

Potential charges range from minor misdemeanors related to poor maintenance of trees along power lines to involuntary manslaughter or murder if the company is found to be the cause of the wildfires.

In addition to possible criminal charges, PG&E could be found liable for billions of dollars in civil damages. But it’s not just the company that will bear the burden of any resulting settlements. In September 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill which permitted PG&E to pass on some of the costs related to utility’s role in the 2017 wildfires on to their customers.

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PG&E could face murder charges for California’s wildfires

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Report: Climate change could flush your savings

by StephanWph Posted on December 10, 2018

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Businesses say risks to their bottom line from climate climate add up to tens of billions of dollars. That may seem like a lot, but their actual risks to business are at least 100 times higher, according to a study just published in Nature Climate Change. Trillions, instead of billions.

The mismatch between those numbers could liquify the money you’ve been saving for retirement. Company climate plans “give little inkling that up to 30 percent of manageable assets globally may be at risk,” researchers wrote.

Climate change could soon be “the defining issue for financial stability” according to Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England and former head of the Financial Stability Board, the international body established to make recommendations to prevent financial collapse. To take that out of econo-speak: Failure to fully comprehend climate risks — droughts, floods, heat waves — could lead to an economic crisis that makes the Great Recession look like a joyride.

The researchers had access to a treasure trove of data, environmental disclosures from 1,630 companies worth more than more than two-thirds of the world’s stock markets added together. It’s the biggest and most comprehensive study of this kind ever done. Some 83 percent of businesses said that they faced real risks from climate change, but only 21 percent had quantified those risks.

It’s fascinating to see how the one in five companies that have crunched the numbers anticipate climate change will affect their business. For example, Samsung estimated that if a cyclone shut down one of their semiconductor factories for a single day it would cost $110 million. And when monsoon floods stopped Hewlett-Packard’s hard drive manufacturing in Thailand, back in 2011, it cost the company $4 billion.

“It was just endlessly surprising, as I did the data analysis, to see all the ways that companies were being affected, and how they were adapting,” said Allie Goldstein a scientist at Conservation International and lead author on the paper.

Airlines are preparing plans to carry fewer passengers and cargo on extreme heat days, because warmer air temperature generate less lift for their planes. Rubber companies, concerned about droughts killing rubber trees, are investing in synthetic alternatives. The Colombian utility Celsia SA is planting thousands of trees upstream from its hydroelectric dams to improve the watershed and hedge against declining rainfall. The Japanese conglomerate Hitachi is installing anti-flood bulkheads in its factories.

“There’s a real thought and creativity going into this, and coming up with an amazing diversity of solutions,” said Will Turner, an executive at Conservation International who also worked on the study. “That’s the positive. The negative is that it’s all incremental progress — it represents just a nascent understanding of the risks.”

You might give less credence to a study like this, because it suggests a need for more action on climate change and comes from an environmental organization that pushes for more action on climate change. But the estimates of investor risk come from the Economist Intelligence Unit, academic research, and the World Economic Forum, not Conservation International. In this paper, the researchers simply tallied up all the adaptations companies are making.

“I always encourage people to be smart consumers of science and look at the methods and also who is doing it,” Goldstein said. “They will find that these findings are based on real data, and real results, not preconceived notions.”

It’s easy to think that average people have little influence over major companies But we have to think differently, if we want to prevent a financial meltdown as climate disasters begin to pile up, Goldstein said. “There’s a tendency to think that this is someone else’s problem, but if you are an employee, or a customer, or an investor, I’d encourage people to think of this as something they can influence themselves, by making a call or asking a question.”

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Deadly Camp Fire sparks new lawsuit against California utility

by LNNMelcuqdrxx Posted on November 15, 2018

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On Tuesday, about two dozen victims from the Northern California town of Paradise, which was destroyed in last week’s deadly Camp Fire, filed suit against Pacific Gas and Electric Co (PG&E) alleging that the company’s lax maintenance and “inexcusable behavior” contributed to the cause of the blaze.

“Most of [the victims] are aware of PG&E’s history of starting wildfires and trying to get away with it,” Mike Danko, a lawyer from one of the three law firms representing the wildfire victims, told Grist. “They want their voice to be heard.”

The victims of the fire who are now suing PG&E lost their homes and possessions, many barely escaping with their lives. The Camp Fire — the deadliest wildfire in California’s history — has already claimed the lives of at least 56 people, with 130 still missing as of Thursday morning.

PG&E and another major utility, Southern California Edison, reported to regulators they experienced problems with transmission lines around the time the blazes started On top of that, just prior to the Camp Fire, PG&E began warning customers it might turn off power because of the high risk of wildfires. But the company ultimately decided to cancel the anti-fire measure, according to a press release:

“Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) has determined that it will not proceed with plans today for a Public Safety Power Shutoff in portions of eight Northern California counties, as weather conditions did not warrant this safety measure,” reads the statement published November 8 — the same day the Camp Fire began.

The cause of the Camp Fire has yet to be determined — something PG&E officials are quick to point out. “Right now, our primary focus is on the communities, supporting first responders and getting our crews positioned and ready to respond when we get access so that we can safely restore gas and electricity to our customers,” the company said in a statement.

Danko calls PG&E’s comment “empty words.” This is not the first time the utility has been accused of being responsible for a major wildfire. In 2017, Cal Fire concluded that PG&E broke safety laws — namely, poor maintenance of trees along power lines — which led to a wildfire that took the lives of 22 people.

The new suit cites 18 separate fires and explosions caused by PG&E infrastructure since 1991, including a 2010 explosion at a PG&E natural gas pipeline that killed eight people and led to a fine to the tune of $1.6 billion from state regulators and a felony conviction issued by a jury in federal court.

If PG&E is found liable for the Camp Fire, the company’s payout could exceed its insurance coverage. This could spell financial trouble, not only for PG&E but for California customers. In September, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill designed to help PG&E cope with the fire-related costs of 2017’s wildfires by allowing the utility to pass on some of those costs on to their customers — including those who lost their homes to the wildfires.

The bill was met with swift opposition by consumer advocates who saw the bill as a bailout for a company with a damming record of lax safety oversights. “We don’t think this is safety for Main Street — we think this is safety for Wall Street,” said Mindy Spatt, a spokesperson for The Utility Reform Network consumer group. “We urged the Legislature to do something that would protect consumers and residents, but this wasn’t it.”

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Deadly Camp Fire sparks new lawsuit against California utility

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5 Animal-Free Food Breakthroughs (Including Foie Gras!)

by SFGJrg Posted on October 25, 2018

Earlier this month, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a landmark report underscoring a stark warning to the world: To avoid disastrous levels of global warming, we must take “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

One of the urgent changes recommended by the global authority on climate change? People need to consume 30 percent less animal products. ASAP. After all, raising animals for food has a serious and consequential environmental footprint. For instance, the livestock sector alone is estimated to account for 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally, more than from the entire transport industry. And with a rapidly growing global human population, if we don’t shift our eating habits now, we’ll only be making the situation exponentially worse.

The good news is that a small, but rising, group of food trailblazers is on the case to shift the tide in big ways. Here are some future food inventions they’ve come up with, which eliminate the animal from the equation (i.e. pollution). And, they could soon be coming to a supermarket or restaurant near you:

1. Lab-Grown Gelatin

Gelatin is a translucent, flavorless food ingredient. It’s derived from collagen, which is extracted from the body parts of animals, including their bones and hides. Gelatin isn’t the main reason cows and pigs are farmed, but it monetizes animal parts that would otherwise have been discarded as useless.

Enter: lab-grown gelatin. This is gelatin that is grown in a laboratory, without animals, by the companies like California biotech startup Geltor. Geltor scientists take carbon, nitrogen and oxygen and convert them into collagen via a microbial fermentation process. The final product has exactly the same properties and characteristics as animal gelatin. Pretty incredible, huh?

Animal gelatin is currently used in a wide variety of foods including candy, desserts and condiments. If cultured gelatin can eliminate the need for animal versions of these products, the results will be game changing.

2.?“Clean“?Pet Food

A Berkeley-based biotech startup called Wild Earth recently unveiled its debut market-ready product: an animal-ingredient free, healthy, eco-friendly dog snack made from koji. (Koji is a type of fungus Japanese foodsmiths use, to ferment some of their country’s most popular cultural delicacies, like miso and sake.) But “clean protein” dog snacks are just the start of Wild Earth’s ambitious plans. Next up on the roster is a dry dog food, also made with koji?then a cultured meat for cats, using the cells of mice. Whoa. Now that’s forward thinking.

In the US alone, the pet food market will reportedly be worth a whopping $30 billion by 2022. But on the flip side, the environmental impact of this growth is also consequential. A recent study found, for instance, that companion cats and dogs in America are already responsible for 25 to 30 percent of the environmental impact of meat consumption in the country.

We’ll never stop loving and nourishing our beloved pets, so for the sake of the planet, we’ll have to root for companies like Wild Earth. Moving forward, we really do need a more sustainable pet food industry.

3. Cruelty-Free Foie Gras

Without a doubt, foie gras is one of the most cruelly produced food products out there. The French “delicacy” is made by force-feeding ducks and geese until their livers balloon up to 10 times their natural volume. This, of course, causes the animals great, prolonged pain and suffering. A number of countries have already banned the production, import or sale of foie gras due to animal welfare concerns. We applaud them.

For those of us opposed to this torturous and unethical practice, there’s still more hope around the corner. Some remarkable companies, like Integriculture and JUST, Inc. (formerly known as Hampton Creek), are working diligently on bringing a lab-grown foie gras to market. This type of gourmet product will allow fans of foie gras to continue consuming their favorite treat, with all of the same rich taste and texture?but none of the cruelty.

Another big player in the cultured meat space is Memphis Meats, which has received funding from the likes of Bill Gates and even the American meat industry giant Tyson Foods. Memphis Meats is focusing on culturing many different kinds of meat, including duck.

4. Hen-less Eggs

Humans consume a staggering trillion eggs for food worldwide?each year. The negative environmental and welfare effects of having to produce eggs from billions of live hens, at scale, are serious, far-reaching and well documented.

Clara Foods is a San Francisco-based cellular agriculture company working on a solution to this global issue. Starting with only two of the simplest ingredients out there?sugar and yeast?the company is making hen-less egg whites, from cell culture. Their low-fat, high-protein product is slated to hit the market by the end of 2019. For egg aficionados, cultured eggs will be the real thing, and not a substitute, that can be used for pasta, omelettes, meringues ? and a whole lot more. In the meantime, food tech company JUST has already debuted its mung bean-based egg replacer JUST Egg, which can be scrambled and eaten as is. Recently, the company reported that it outsold conventional chicken eggs in select grocery stores, which is certainly promising news.

5. Cultured Fish

Earlier this year, a “flesh-like,” plant-based alternative to raw tuna, made from tomato, went national. Fishless Ahimi tuna is available at 40 Whole Foods Market locations in 10 states across America. The company behind Ahimi, Ocean Hugger Foods, says its plant-based seafood is one step toward alleviating the increasing pressure on our precious oceans, caused by the global overconsumption of fish.

The next step towards this effort is as cutting edge as it gets. Seafood startups, including Finless Foods, Blue Nalu, Wild Type and Seafuture are striving to get their up-and-coming cultured seafood products to break into the $120 billion seafood market.

A more sustainable seafood industry can’t come soon enough. According to a recent government report, Americans are consuming 15.5 pounds of fish and shellfish per person, up nearly a pound from the previous year, making it the biggest leap in seafood consumption in 20 years.

Let’s face it. It’s highly unlikely billions of people around the world are going eat less meat ?or stop altogether?any time soon. Luckily for us, a whole new wave of animal-free products are about to hit the food marketplace. And they could actually be the miracle we need in time to save the planet.

If this cutting-edge field of food interests you, check out the upcoming Cultured Meat Symposium conference, taking place in San Francisco November 1. Some of the innovative brands we‘ve mentioned here will be there?including Memphis Meats and JUST?as well as many of the top pioneers and leaders in the space.

Contributed by Ulara Nakagawa and?Sharanya Krishna Prasad

Credit: Larry Hoffman via Flickr

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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5 Animal-Free Food Breakthroughs (Including Foie Gras!)

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New York just filed a big ol’ lawsuit against ExxonMobil

by HenrietBernard Posted on October 24, 2018

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Donald Trump has said time and time again that he only hires “the best people.” He sure ends up firing them a lot, too. That may have been a wise decision with his former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who was implicated in a major lawsuit filed on Wednesday. The issue at hand? Climate change.

In a blistering series of tweets, New York Interim Attorney General Barbara Underwood laid out the basic tenets of her office’s lawsuit against ExxonMobil. The suit alleges that Exxon — formerly run by Tillerson — tricked investors with a “longstanding fraudulent scheme” that downplayed the financial risks climate change regulation posed to the company.

Unlike other climate change lawsuits, like those launched by California or Colorado in recent months, this one doesn’t seek to hold Exxon responsible for its role in creating climate change. In a nutshell, this case is about fraud: lying to someone to get their money.

Underwood’s lawsuit argues that Exxon overstated how prepared the company was for the tough regulations that are necessary to combat climate change. She hopes to prove that Exxon told investors one thing while doing another. Climate change regulations can take a toll on fossil fuel businesses. Exxon said it was (and still currently is) taking steps to make sure that toll doesn’t hurt its interests, but the receipts say otherwise.

Will Exxon wiggle out of this suit like it wiggled out of lawsuits by the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, and even a previous lawsuit launched by New York City? It’s already argued that these lawsuits a) limit its right to free speech and b) are a big conspiracy. And the company has even counter-sued the people taking it to court!

But, again, this new lawsuit takes a different tack. In the event that it succeeds, it would require the oil company to cough up all the money it made from investors through climate fraud, and then pay back its investors. That’s a lot of dough, but we don’t yet know exactly how much — Underwood’s lawsuit doesn’t include a final sum.

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New York just filed a big ol’ lawsuit against ExxonMobil

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Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time – Dean Buonomano

by Myrna Posted on October 9, 2018

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Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time
Dean Buonomano

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: April 4, 2017

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


“Beautifully written, eloquently reasoned…Mr. Buonomano takes us off and running on an edifying scientific journey.” —Carol Tavris, Wall Street Journal In Your Brain Is a Time Machine, leading neuroscientist Dean Buonomano embarks on an “immensely engaging” exploration of how time works inside the brain (Barbara Kiser, Nature). The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time, but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological movement and enables “mental time travel”—simulations of future and past events. These functions are essential not only to our daily lives but to the evolution of the human race: without the ability to anticipate the future, mankind would never have crafted tools or invented agriculture. This virtuosic work of popular science will lead you to a revelation as strange as it is true: your brain is, at its core, a time machine.

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Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time – Dean Buonomano

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The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty – Robert P. Crease & Alfred Scharff Goldhaber

by Myrna Posted on October 3, 2018

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The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty

Robert P. Crease & Alfred Scharff Goldhaber

Genre: Physics

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: October 13, 2014

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


"A very fun way to learn about where quantum physics comes from and the strange, even astonishing places it has gone." —Peter Galison, Harvard University, author of Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps From multiverses and quantum leaps to Schrödinger’s cat and time travel, quantum mechanics has irreversibly shaped the popular imagination. Entertainers and writers from Lady Gaga to David Foster Wallace take advantage of its associations and nuances. In The Quantum Moment, philosopher Robert P. Crease and physicist Alfred Scharff Goldhaber recount the fascinating story of how the quantum jumped from physics into popular culture, with brief explorations of the underlying math and physics concepts and descriptions of the fiery disputes among figures including Einstein, Schrödinger, and Niels Bohr. Understanding and appreciating quantum imagery, its uses and abuses, is part of what it means to be an educated person in the twenty-first century. The Quantum Moment serves as an indispensable guide.

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The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty – Robert P. Crease & Alfred Scharff Goldhaber

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How to Be a Good Creature – Sy Montgomery & Rebecca Green

by Myrna Posted on September 30, 2018

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How to Be a Good Creature
A Memoir in Thirteen Animals
Sy Montgomery & Rebecca Green

Genre: Nature

Price: $9.99

Publish Date: September 25, 2018

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Seller: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company


National Book Award finalist Sy Montgomery reflects on the personalities and quirks of 13 animals—her friends—who have profoundly affected her in this stunning, poetic, and life-affirming memoir featuring illustrations by Rebecca Green. Understanding someone who belongs to another species can be transformative. No one knows this better than author, naturalist, and adventurer Sy Montgomery. To research her books, Sy has traveled the world and encountered some of the planet’s rarest and most beautiful animals. From tarantulas to tigers, Sy’s life continually intersects with and is informed by the creatures she meets. This restorative memoir reflects on the personalities and quirks of thirteen animals—Sy’s friends—and the truths revealed by their grace. It also explores vast themes: the otherness and sameness of people and animals; the various ways we learn to love and become empathetic; how we find our passion; how we create our families; coping with loss and despair; gratitude; forgiveness; and most of all, how to be a good creature in the world.

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How to Be a Good Creature – Sy Montgomery & Rebecca Green

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