Molly & Island Biogeography

Our daughter Molly, a freelance radio producer & reporter in San Francisco, has been named a recipient of a Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism:  


http://www.middlebury.edu/administration/enviro/fellowship/ 
"The Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism each year take 10 journalists near the start of their careers and help them work through an ambitious reporting project in print, web-based, or radio journalism, from the beginning through publication or broadcast."  The fellows will be working independently under the guidance of Middlebury Scholar-in-Residence and author Bill McKibben.

Molly Samuel

We are thrilled for Molly as it allows her to combine her three great loves--radio, science journalism, and the environment--into a single year-long project.  Of the ten international 2009-2010 fellows, Molly's submission was the only winner in radio journalism.

Her project is "island biogeography in California, and how climate change, urban development, and agriculture affect endangered and endemic species around the state, from the Sierra Nevada to Davidson Seamount."

Her guiding light is the modern classic, SONG OF THE DODO, by David Quammen; like Quammen, Molly will be focusing not just on islands in the sea, but islands among us--islands created by development (like butterflies in two parks in San Francisco) or landlocked natural islands--like mountain peaks inhabited by pikas. 

Here's the introduction to Molly's proposal: 

       "Islands are, biogeographically speaking, a little weird.  Hobbits, the 17,000-year-old big-footed, short-statured Indonesian hominids that have been in the news lately, lived on an island.  So did tiny elephants.  And colossal reptiles.  But islands are more than spots of dry land surrounded by ocean.  Desert oases are also islands: habitable places surrounded by an inhospitable environment.  Isolated shallow areas in the ocean are islands, as are mountaintops and wildlife preserves.  

       "Islands are incubators for evolution.  It’s no coincidence that Charles Darwin first observed evolution (though he didn’t know it yet) on an island.  But islands are also incubators for extinction.  Animals on islands can’t migrate north when the climate heats up, or head off in search of a new reef when the coral dies off, or just propagate somewhere else when the temperature rises.   

        "California’s unique island habitats stretch from the Pacific islands that provide havens for sea birds and ocean-going mammals; to the Sierra Nevada Mountains that are home to the most massive trees on the planet and to small, cute, heat-intolerant pikas; to the landlocked urban islands of San Francisco where native butterflies eke out a living between highways and housing developments and where concerned citizens plant flowers to guide the butterflies to safe haven.
California’s Islands will tell the stories of species on the edge, forced either to adapt or to disappear.  Of course, habitat destruction and climate change are happening everywhere.  But the unusual spectrum of breathtakingly beautiful, delicate, and unique islands in California offers the chance to tell stories unknown elsewhere and to peer into the future of our mainland.  As always, islands lead the way."